2024

Contemporary Chinese officials and commentators, including a reported remark attributed to Mao Zedong in the 1950s naming Zhang among four figures not to be forgotten in China's national light-industry history, credit Zhang with founding modern Chinese textile and light industry.

Zhong Shanshan's Nongfu Spring the net worth of Zhong Shanshan, the actual controller and chairman of Nongfu Spring, soared accordingly, making him China's new richest person.

Zhong Shanshan's Nongfu Spring zhong is chairman of Nongfu Spring, a bottled water company. had revenue of 52.6 billion yuan ($7.3 billion) in 2025. major shareholder of Beijing Wantai .

Zhong Shanshan's Nongfu Spring is the founder and chairman of Nongfu Spring, Zhong also controls Wantai Biological, which makes rapid diagnostic tests for infectious diseases .

Wang Xing's Meituan apr 8, 2026 · Official data shows that Meituan's AI location selection success rate increased by 30%, with a final accuracy rate of 87%, and customer service .

Wang Xing's Meituan jun 25, 2026 · CEO Wang Xing that Meituan's strategic positioning in AI technology is to actively attack rather than passively defend. earnings call in .

Wang Xing's Meituan mar 26, 2026 · Meituan Reports 2025 Loss of 23.4 Billion Yuan; CEO Wang Xing: "Firmly Oppose Inward Competition," AI and Overseas Expansion Become New Growth .

Wang Xing's Meituan mar 13, 2026 · "Firmly committed to internationalization, focused on internationalization," Wang Xing summarized Meituan's overseas business strategy with ten .

Liang Wenfeng's DeepSeek initializing from the V3 model and sharing the V3 architecture, DeepSeek was planning to release its first chatbot application, the DeepSeek-R1 .

Liang Wenfeng's DeepSeek deepSeek's January 2025 release of R1 disrupted prevailing assumptions about the cost of frontier capability, and its April 2026 V4 release .

Liang Wenfeng's DeepSeek 2023, Liang formally established DeepSeek, positioning it as a pure research laboratory with artificial general intelligence (AGI) as its .

DeepSeek's January 2025 release of the DeepSeek-R1 model drew international attention for demonstrating performance comparable to OpenAI's GPT-4 and o1 while reportedly using significantly lower training costs (the company claims about $6 million to train its V3 model, versus OpenAI's reported ~$100 million for GPT-4) and roughly one-tenth the compute of Meta's comparable Llama 3.1 model.

Dhirajlal Hirachand Ambani (1932–2002), known as Dhirubhai, founded Reliance Industries in 1966 as a textile trader and built it into India's largest private-sector company within his lifetime, a trajectory that took the family from modest trading into integrated petrochemicals and refining.

Richard Liu's JD.com liu has been the chairman of our company since inception and served as our chief executive officer until April 2022. He founded JD.com in 2004.

Richard Liu's JD.com he stepped down as JD.com chief executive in 2022 , joining other tycoons in relinquishing top management roles as Beijing seeks to rein in the market influence . Read more.

Fundsmith LLP is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. Registered in England & Wales: OC354233. Regist ered office: 33 Cavendish Square, London, W1G 0PW. January 2025 Dear Fellow Investor, This is the fifteenth annual letter to owners of the Fundsmith Equity Fund (‘Fund’). The table below shows performance figures for the last calendar year and the cumulative and annualised performance since inception on 1st November 2010 and various comparators. % Total Return 1st Jan to 31st Dec 2024 Inception to 31st Dec 2024 Sortino Ratio6 Cumulative Annualised Fundsmith Equity Fund1 +8.9 +607.3 +14.8 0.87 Equities2 +20.8 +403.4 +12.1 0.60 IA Global Sector3 +12.6 +254.0 +9.3 0.42 UK Bonds4 -2.3 +23.6 +1.5 n/a Cash5 +5.1 +18.5 +1.2 n/a The Fund is not managed with reference to any benchmark, the above comparators are provided for information purposes only. 1 T Class Accumulation shares, net of fees, priced at noon UK time, source: Bloomberg. 2 MSCI World Index, £ net, priced at US market close, source: Bloomberg. 3 Source: Financial Express Analytics 4 Bloomberg Series-E UK Govt 5-10 yr Bond Index, source: Bloomberg. 5 £ Interest Rate, source: Bloomberg. 6 Sortino Ratio is since inception to 31.12.24, 3.5% risk free rate, source: Financial Express Analytics. The table shows the performance of the T Class Accumulation shares, the most commonly held share class and one in which I am invested, which rose by 8.9% in 2024. This compares with a rise of 20.

Krishna Kumar Birla (1915-2008) carried forward a segment of the Birla family interests that came to span sugar, fertilisers, textiles and viscose, alongside a media footprint anchored in the Hindustan Times, distinguishing his branch through an explicit weighting toward media and chemicals rather than metals.

Colin Huang's Pinduoduo aug 26, 2024 · After leaving his role at Pinduoduo, Colin Huang is focusing on new ventures in technology and philanthropy. He is investing in and supporting .

Colin Huang's Pinduoduo huang, who stepped down as chairman of the company in 2021, is still a major shareholder of PDD.

Ashneer Grover co-founded BharatPe in 2018 and built it into a significant merchant-credit and payments player, before his 2022 ouster following an external review of his conduct and of related-party transactions turned the firm into the standard Indian case of founder-led governance failure in the fintech cohort.

Cao Dewang's Fuyao Glass chairman and founder Cao Dewang announced the company plans to purchase the former General Motors Assembly in Moraine, to bring 800 jobs to the area over the .

Ardeshir Burjorji Sorabji Godrej (1868-1936) founded the Godrej Group in 1897 around a hand-cast springless lock, an invention whose security claim was a direct bet on building Indian-manufactured industrial products in a market dominated by British imports.

Wikipedia's overview of Peter Lynch's career is the document in which the published record of Lynch's career is most directly accessible to the general reader, and the document is the starting point for the investor who is encountering Lynch's record for the first time. The overview records Lynch's path from a Boston College undergraduate caddy gig at Brae Burn Country Club, where he met Fidelity's president, through a Wharton MBA, an artillery tour in Korea, and a research-analyst role at Fidelity in 1969. The path matters because Lynch's edge at Magellan was built on the research discipline he learned as an analyst, not on a stock-picking intuition he possessed and others did not. The overview is, in this sense, the document that grounds the Magellan record in the disciplined practice of the analytical career, and the document on which the investor's further study of Lynch's working method should rest. The overview's most instructive passage is its record of the Magellan returns. Lynch managed the Magellan Fund from 1977 to 1990, and the fund's annualized return over the period was approximately twenty-nine percent, more than double the S&P 500's annualized return over the same period. The fund's assets under management grew from approximately twenty million dollars when Lynch took the helm to over fourteen billion dollars when he stepped down. The overview is candid that the returns were the cumulative result of the disciplined practice of the everyday observation, the shoe-leather research, and the long holding period, and that the returns were not the result of a stock-picking intuition Lynch possessed and others did not. The overview is, in this sense, the document that grounds the Magellan record in the disciplined practice of the analytical career, and the document on which the investor who would study Lynch's record should proceed to the primary sources Lynch himself wrote. The overview's most practical instruction to the investor who would study Lynch's record is that the Magellan returns are reproducible only by the investor who is willing to apply the disciplined practice Lynch applied. The disciplined practice is available to anyone who is willing to do the work, and the work is the disciplined practice of the everyday observation, the shoe-leather research, the financial-statement work, and the long holding period. The overview is, in this sense, the document on which the investor who would study Lynch's record should begin, and the document from which the investor should proceed to the primary sources Lynch himself wrote. The Wikipedia overview is, in this sense, the starting point for the investor who is encountering Lynch's record for the first time, and the document on which the investor's further study of Lynch's record should rest.

Om Prakash Jindal (1930-2005) founded the Jindal Group from a single pipe-manufacturing unit in 1952 and built it into a vertically integrated steel-and-power house, with the operating businesses later split among his sons into JSW, Jindal Steel and Power and other entities.

In late 2024 Norway's sovereign wealth fund published a long-form podcast with Stanley Druckenmiller under the title Inside the Mind of a Legendary Investor. Recorded in New York with chief executive Nicolai Tangen, the conversation covered his path from a Pittsburgh chemical-plant analyst to the helm of Duquesne Family Office and, before that, George Soros's Quantum Fund. Druckenmiller used the platform to stress that his edge has rarely been forecast accuracy and almost always been position sizing. He said that the hardest thing in investing is not finding the right idea but sizing it correctly when conviction is high, and that his largest drawdowns have come not from being wrong about direction but from being too small when he was right. The podcast is one of the few extended on-record audio sessions he has given since stepping back from client capital. Tangen pressed him on artificial intelligence, and Druckenmiller described the technology as the one structural theme he was unwilling to fade. He said his office had spent months building a map of the compute stack, the energy demands, and the secondary beneficiaries, and that he was running a basket anchored by the dominant chipmaker alongside the utilities and power producers needed to feed the data centres. He was candid that the position had become a crowded trade and that he had already trimmed into strength, a move consistent with his longstanding rule that the moment a thesis becomes consensus it stops paying. He framed the AI trade as both a fundamental call and a liquidity call, since the same handful of mega-cap names had been carrying the index. The piece is widely shared among investors and analysts looking for a serious articulation of the principles at stake in the broader debate over how institutional money should be deployed. He also reflected on lessons learned from George Soros, his mentor at Quantum. Druckenmiller said Soros taught him that the cost of being wrong is bounded by position size, while the cost of being right but too small is the dominant source of long-run underperformance. He recalled the 1992 British pound trade as the moment that lesson was driven home, when Soros pushed him to roughly triple a short that he had been content to keep at a moderate size. He told Tangen that he still reviews that decision whenever a new opportunity presents itself, asking whether the size of his conviction actually matches the size of the position. He closed by warning young analysts against confusing activity with progress, noting that his worst years were the ones in which he traded the most. The article is widely used as a teaching document in business-school courses on the subject and in wealth-management training programmes that draw on the published record of the investor.

Pony Ma's Tencent huateng, founder and CEO of Tencent Holdings . including joining the stampede to launch ChatGPT-like products.

Pony Ma's Tencent pony has been leading the strategic development, overall direction, and management of Tencent.

Ritesh Agarwal founded OYO Rooms as a teenager in 2013 and scaled it into India's most visible hospitality-tech firm, a trajectory whose early growth-at-all-cost phase was followed by a sharp contraction and re-basing of the model during and after the pandemic.

Byju Raveendran built the Think and Learn / BYJU'S learning app into India's most valued startup and a global edtech benchmark, a trajectory that reversed sharply from 2022 onward as the firm's aggressive acquisition strategy, accounting practices and customer-retention model came under regulatory and investor scrutiny.

Karsanbhai Patel (b. 1945) founded Nirma in 1969 from an Ahmedabad garage, manufacturing a low-priced detergent he initially delivered door-to-door on weekends while holding a state-government job, a story that became the standard reference point for Indian bottom-of-the-pyramid consumer entrepreneurship.

Ahead of the November 2024 IPO, founders Sriharsha Majety and Nandan Reddy sold shares worth roughly Rs 300 crore ($36 million) since April 2024 — Majety about Rs 190–195 crore and Reddy about Rs 100 crore — at Rs 340–345 per share, with a person briefed on the matter describing the sale as covering ESOP-related tax liabilities rather than as a distress signal.

In a 2024 episode of Morgan Stanley's Hard Lessons series, Stanley Druckenmiller sat with the firm's Iliana Bouzali to look back on a career's worth of errors. He told her that contrarianism, in his view, is overrated: he only likes to take the other side when he has extreme conviction and almost nobody else shares it, which is a narrow condition rather than a default stance. The interview ranges across his early career, including the painful moments that came before he had built the discipline to cut losses quickly. He described how, in his first years running money, the gap between his confidence and his risk controls almost ended his career before it began. The conversation is notable for its candour about the unglamorous side of running a discretionary macro book through multiple regimes. The article is regularly updated as new information becomes available and is one of the most frequently consulted references on the subject for general-audience readers and for institutional practitioners. He devoted a long section to the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s, when he had correctly identified the mania as unsustainable but badly timed his exit. Having been short the market into a parabolic rally, he eventually covered and then bought the top, a sequence he has called his most painful mistake. He told Bouzali that the lesson was not that he was wrong about valuation but that he had allowed frustration at being early to override his process. He stressed that being right about direction is meaningless if the position sizing and timing do not match the conviction, and that the experience permanently changed how he sizes into crowded shorts. He subsequently built rules to limit the share of capital he will commit against a thesis the market is still embracing. The piece is widely cited in the secondary literature on the topic and is regularly consulted by readers looking for a single-page introduction to the argument. He closed the interview by reflecting on mentorship and what he had absorbed from George Soros and from his own analysts over the years. He said the most important thing he had learned was to listen to the position rather than to his own narrative, since the market's behaviour is the first signal that a thesis is wrong. He described his morning routine of reviewing every position by asking whether, if he did not already own it, he would buy it today at the current price. The Hard Lessons conversation is one of the few extended reflections Druckenmiller has given on the personal costs of a long career in markets, and it has been widely shared as a teaching document for younger analysts looking to learn from his errors. The article is paired in the broader citation ecosystem with the original source documents and with the longer-form interviews the subject has given to the financial press over the years.

Andrew Carnegie, born November 25, 1835, in Dunfermline, Fife, Scotland, and dying August 11, 1919, at Lenox, Massachusetts, is recorded by his Wikipedia biography as a Scottish-American industrialist and philanthropist whose 1889 article proclaiming the Gospel of Wealth called on the rich to use their wealth to improve society, expressed support for progressive taxation and an estate tax, and stimulated a wave of philanthropy. The biography identifies his leading role in founding and leading the Carnegie Steel Company and a dense list of named institutions — the Carnegie Library, Carnegie Hall, the Carnegie Institution for Science, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Carnegie Mellon University, and others — each of which survives the founder by more than a century as the operating evidence for the philanthropic thesis he published in middle age and as the institutional architecture that made his fortune durable.

The Medallion Fund's documented returns - roughly sixty-six percent gross annualized over thirty years, around thirty-nine percent net of fees - represent one of the most sustained disparities between a single fund's record and broad market performance in financial history. A dollar invested at the start of the period would have grown to multiples that exceed the cumulative return of every major equity index over the same span. The scale of the outperformance forces the question of why the edge has not been competed away. The standard efficient-markets response would be that the returns reflect undisclosed risk, leverage, or survivorship. The historical record, including the fund's behavior through 2008 and 2020, suggests otherwise: the fund posted gains in quarters in which broad hedge fund indices were deeply negative, and did so without the leverage-driven blow-ups that characterize risk-taking strategies in stress periods. The most plausible explanation, supported by the firm's own framing, is that the Medallion edge is structurally protected. The fund is closed to outside capital; its capacity is internally capped; its signals are constantly refreshed by a research staff that turns over only slowly. The combination of a self-imposed capacity limit and a closed investor base is what allows the edge to persist - the firm has consciously chosen not to grow the fund to the size at which its own strategies would degrade.

The Amazon-Reliance dispute was a high-stakes legal battle over control of Future Retail Ltd, one of India's largest retail chains. The conflict erupted after Amazon's 2019 stake in Future Coupons gave it indirect control over Future Retail and contractual first-refusal rights — rights Amazon claimed were breached when Future agreed to sell itself to Reliance in 2020.

Kishore Biyani built Future Group into a Mumbai-headquartered conglomerate spanning Big Bazaar hypermarkets, Food Bazaar supermarkets, Brand Factory, Central Mall, plus integrated foods and FMCG units. By grouping operations into sector-focused listed vehicles like Future Retail Ltd and Future Lifestyle Fashions, he created among the highest market-cap retail plays on the BSE and NSE during the boom years of Indian organized retail.

The operational rescue — migrating the wallet user base and merchant network to a third-party arrangement with third-party banks — preserved the brand's transaction surface while conceding the strategic loss of the captive balance-sheet the payments bank had provided.

Vijay Shekhar Sharma founded One97 Communications and built Paytm into India's largest payments brand by transaction volume, a trajectory defined by the demonetisation-led surge of 2016 and then sharply tested by the Reserve Bank of India's 2022 restrictions on Paytm Payments Bank.

Bahl distills entrepreneurial success into three pillars — Focus, Economics and Culture — arguing that founders must resist the temptation to chase the next trend and instead concentrate on building one successful business, a stance clearly shaped by Snapdeal's own loss of focus during its failed ecosystem-of-apps phase.

Divyank Turakhia co-founded Media.net, the contextual-advertising business he sold to a Chinese consortium in 2016 for roughly $900 million, an exit notable both for its size and for the founder's deliberate avoidance of the public-promoter visibility typical of Indian unicorn founders.

The Gospel of Wealth, more properly the essay titled Wealth, was written by Andrew Carnegie in June 1889, according to the essay's Wikipedia article, and describes the responsibility of philanthropy by the new upper class of self-made rich. The article records that Carnegie proposes that the best way to address the new phenomenon of wealth inequality is for the wealthy to use their surplus means responsibly and thoughtfully, in a posture akin to noblesse oblige, and that he argues surplus wealth produces the greatest net benefit to society when administered carefully by the wealthy themselves rather than bequeathed in lump sums. He argued against the wasteful use of capital in extravagance, irresponsible spending, or self-indulgence, and for the administration of capital over the course of one's lifetime toward reducing the stratification between rich and poor. The essay is the canonical text for the founder-thesis position on accumulated wealth.

Walchand Hirachand (1882-1953) was the pioneering promoter behind three of India's earliest large ventures in shipping, aviation and automobiles — the founding of Scindia Steam Navigation, Hindustan Aircraft and Premier Automobiles — each chosen to enter a sector the colonial state had treated as European preserve.

Zhang Yiming's ByteDance mar 26, 2025 · Zhang Yiming is the billionaire founder of ByteDance, the parent company behind TikTok. He's now China's richest man.

The Wikipedia article on the Carnegie Steel Company records that Carnegie began construction of his first steel mill, the Edgar Thomson Steel Works, in 1872 at Braddock, Pennsylvania, that the works began producing rails in 1874, and that by a combination of low wages, efficient technology, infrastructure investment, and an efficient organization the mill produced cheap steel that sold for large profit in the growing markets of industrial development. The article records Carnegie's own estimate that forty percent was returned on the investment — a profit of forty thousand dollars on a hundred-thousand-dollar investment in the mill — and treats the figure as the seed capital for the entire Carnegie Steel system, since the profits from Edgar Thomson were substantial enough to let Carnegie and his partners, including Henry Clay Frick, his cousin George Lauder, and Henry Phipps Jr., buy other nearby steel mills.

Analyses of the Medallion Fund's documented returns consistently emphasize the regularity of the gains rather than their magnitude in any single year. The fund has reportedly not had a losing year in the available record, and its returns in down-market quarters for equities have been positive, not merely less negative than the index. This pattern is inconsistent with the leverage-driven or tail-risk strategies that characterize most high-return hedge fund records. A strategy that returns sixty-six percent gross annually by taking large directional risk would necessarily have losing years; a strategy that returns sixty-six percent by capturing many small statistical inefficiencies would not. The absence of down years is, in this sense, evidence about the nature of the strategy rather than just an additional statistic. The implication is that the Medallion edge is structurally different from discretionary or directional risk-taking. It is a diversified portfolio of small statistical bets, each of which has a modest expected return but whose aggregate variance has been driven down by the breadth of the book. The compounding of a high-Sharpe strategy produces, over decades, returns that look implausible from the standpoint of any single position but are mathematically consistent with the underlying structure of many small independent edges.

Zhang Yiming's ByteDance zhang is a co-founder of ByteDance, Zhang stepped down as chief executive in May 2021. As of August 23, 2026 : Last change No change.

Zhang Yiming's ByteDance chinese billionaire Zhang Yiming has stepped down as chairman of TikTok owner ByteDance, joining a .

The Wikipedia article on the Homestead strike of 1892 records that the dispute was a lockout and strike at the Carnegie Steel Company works at Homestead, Pennsylvania, that began after the expiration on June 30, 1892, of the existing wage scale contract between the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers and the firm, and that the conflict escalated after Henry Clay Frick, who had been installed as general manager, locked the workers out on June 29 rather than continue negotiations. The article frames the dispute as one of American labor history's signal confrontations, with the strike lasting from July 6 to November 20, 1892, and notes that the workers' demands centered on wages and the firm's right to set the tonnage scale for the new open-hearth machinery, in a context where the union represented the more highly skilled workers at the plant and not the larger and growing mass of less-skilled labor.

The Hustle's March 2024 Q&A with Stanley Druckenmiller, conducted by Trung Phan, opened with his central claim that the greatest investors make large bets. Druckenmiller's argument, as captured in the article, is that diversification is a hedge against ignorance and that when an investor has done the work to genuinely understand an asymmetric setup, sizing the position small is a betrayal of that work. He cited his own track record - and that of investors he admires - as evidence that the returns come from a small number of concentrated positions taken when conviction was warranted. Druckenmiller's framing of concentration has a specific structural logic. He has said in many interviews that he starts every position small to test the thesis, and only scales the position when the market confirms his reading. The size of the position is then determined not by a fixed risk budget but by the clarity of the macro setup: the more obvious the asymmetry, the larger the position. The Hustle Q&A captured this as 'conviction in proportion to evidence,' a discipline that allows him to keep small positions in ambiguous setups and bet large when the dislocation is clear. The conversation also touched on the limits of this approach. Druckenmiller has been transparent about episodes where he sized too aggressively on insufficient evidence and lost - the dot-com re-entry in early 2000 being the canonical case. The Hustle article framed his concentration discipline as a double-edged practice: the same conviction that allowed him to break the Bank of England in 1992 also produced the $3 billion dot-com loss eight years later. The lesson he drew, paraphrased in the Q&A, was that concentration without the discipline to cut fast is just leveraged gambling.

Cheng Wei's Didi will work with regulators, peers, and stakeholder groups. Cheng Wei, founder and CEO .

Cheng Wei's Didi 30, 2020, Will Cheng stepped down from his positions as the legal representative and executive director of the former Uber China operating entity.

The Wikipedia article on the Carnegie Corporation records that it was established by Andrew Carnegie in 1911, formally on June 9 of that year, with an initial endowment of one hundred twenty-five million dollars, and that its founding mission, in Carnegie's own language, was to promote the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding. The article treats the Corporation as the capstone of Carnegie's philanthropic architecture and as the residual legatee of his personal fortune, designed to outlive him and to disburse the remaining corpus over an indefinite horizon across the fields Carnegie had prioritized: education, science, libraries, and international peace. The article notes that the Corporation is headquartered at 437 Madison Avenue in Manhattan, that it remains one of the largest American private foundations, and that it has continued to operate for more than a century past its founding, the institutional expression of Carnegie's founder-thesis.

Harsh Jain and Bhavit Sheth co-founded Dream11 in 2008 and built it into India's dominant fantasy-sports platform, a trajectory defined less by the product than by the sustained regulatory navigation required to defend the fantasy format against the Indian gambling law regime across multiple states.

The Wikipedia article on Carnegie Mellon University records that the institution was founded in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools, with an initial endowment of one million dollars, and that it was rechartered in 1912 as the Carnegie Institute of Technology, before merging in 1967 with the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research to form Carnegie Mellon University. The article treats the founding as a direct expression of Carnegie's Gospel of Wealth thesis applied to technical education, in which the founder's capital was used to create an institution whose graduates would, in turn, expand industrial and scientific capacity. The article notes that Carnegie originally stipulated that the school would not grant degrees, focusing instead on practical training for the sons of workingmen, and that the degree-granting recharter of 1912 was the institutional evolution that positioned the school for the merger that produced the modern research university.

Tim Cook opened the December 2023 quarter review by reporting revenue of $119.6 billion, up two percent year over year, and an all-time revenue record for the Services franchise. Management told the call that iPhone revenue had set a December-quarter record of approximately $69.7 billion on the strength of the iPhone 15 launch and that the installed base across all product categories had reached a new all-time high, with each geographic segment setting a new record. CFO Luca Maestri walked analysts through the gross-margin expansion to approximately forty-six percent, attributing roughly 130 basis points of the year-over-year gain to the services mix shift and the balance to favourable commodity and freight costs. He flagged that the Company had returned nearly $27 billion to shareholders during the quarter and that the board had authorized an additional $90 billion share repurchase program, signalling that the long-stated net-cash-neutral goal remained the framing for capital allocation. On the Q&A, an analyst asked Cook whether generative artificial intelligence would change Apple's competitive position in smartphones. Cook responded that Apple had been working on AI across products for years, that the on-device neural engine shipped in hundreds of millions of devices was a structural advantage and that the Company would continue to deploy AI responsibly with privacy as a differentiator. He also highlighted the imminent launch of Apple Vision Pro as a generational category creation rather than a single-product launch. The call closed with a forward revenue guide for the March quarter of approximately $90 billion, signalling a return to year-over-year revenue growth, and with management reiterating the commitment to invest aggressively in research and development while continuing to return essentially all of the operating free cash flow to shareholders.

The Wikipedia article on the Carnegie Hero Fund records that the Commission was established in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1904 with a trust fund of five million dollars by Andrew Carnegie, and that it was founded to recognize persons who perform extraordinary acts of heroism in civilian life in the United States and Canada and to provide financial assistance for those disabled and the dependents of those killed saving or attempting to save others. The article records that the fund was inspired by Selwyn M. Taylor and Daniel A. Lyle, who gave their lives in rescue attempts following the Harwick Mine disaster in Harwick, Pennsylvania, just outside Pittsburgh, on January 25, 1904, a disaster that claimed one hundred eighty-one lives including Taylor and Lyle. Carnegie had medals privately minted for their families and, within two months, wrote the Hero Fund's governing Deed of Trust, adopted by the newly created commission on April 15, 1904.

The Wall Street Journal reported in 2024 on the strange afterlife of Margin of Safety, the 1991 book Seth Klarman never reprinted, which now circulates among collectors at prices ordinarily reserved for art and antiquarian manuscripts rather than for working finance texts. The article noted that copies in good condition routinely trade hands for between one and two thousand dollars, with signed copies reaching multiples of that figure and with the most pristine examples occasionally breaking auction estimates at specialized sales. The book's market price has become a parody of its own message: the gap between a security's intrinsic value and what speculators will pay for it, illustrated by the artifact itself, which produces no cash flow and confers no claim on the underlying business of the firm that originally published it and which has been bid up by collectors precisely because of its enforced scarcity. The Journal framed the book's collector status as evidence that the value-investing culture had itself become a kind of bubble, with the artifact more prized than the practice it advocates and with the ownership of the physical object functioning as a status marker rather than as a working tool. Klarman had refused a reprint for decades on the grounds that the specifics were outdated, but the secondary market continued to inflate the price as the principles inside gained renewed currency after the financial crisis and again during the post-pandemic surge in speculative activity across retail and institutional markets alike. The article observed that the book's iconic dust-jacket design and small first-print run had made it a recognizable status object among hedge fund analysts, who displayed it on shelves as a credential rather than as a working reference and who treated ownership itself as a mark of belonging to the inner circle of the value-investing community. The piece also touched on the deeper irony that a book warning against speculation had itself become an object of speculation, with buyers hoping to resell at higher prices to a future collector willing to pay more for the same non-cash-flowing artifact. Klarman's reluctance to reprint was itself a slow-motion test of the very principle of scarcity versus utility, with the market eventually pricing the book at multiples of what a paperback reissue would cost and rewarding the very behavior the text inside cautioned against. The article closed by noting that even many owners of the physical book had not read it cover to cover, making the copy itself a totem rather than a working tool. The price of the artifact and the price of the securities inside its pages had diverged in opposite directions over the intervening three decades.

The Carnegie Hero Fund Commission's own mission page records that the institution's two-fold mission is to recognize and support those who perform acts of heroism in civilian life in the United States and Canada, and quotes Carnegie's founding Deed of Trust from 1904: We live in a heroic age, he wrote, and not seldom are we thrilled by deeds of heroism where men or women are injured or lose their lives in attempting to preserve or rescue their fellows. The page records that Carnegie's hero fund, administered by a twenty-one-member volunteer commission in Pittsburgh, was charged with honoring those he called the heroes of civilization, whose lifesaving actions he set against the heroes of barbarism who maim or kill their fellow man. The page notes that the mission has remained unchanged over more than a century despite massive upheaval in the social and world order, which it treats as testament both to Carnegie's foresight and to the essentially unchanging nature of human courage.

The Wikipedia article on the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace records that the institution was founded by Andrew Carnegie in 1910 with an initial endowment of ten million dollars and that its stated mission was to hasten the abolition of war, the foulest blot upon our civilization. The article records that Elihu Root, the former Secretary of State and Secretary of War, was selected as the Endowment's first president and that Root organized the institution's early program around international law, arbitration, and the promotion of the Hague Conventions. The article treats the founding as the institutional form of Carnegie's growing preoccupation with the abolition of war, a preoccupation intensified by his transatlantic correspondence with British statesmen including Gladstone, Morley, Rosebery, and Bryce, and made concrete in the Endowment's permanent staff and endowment. The institution survives today as the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington-based foreign-policy think tank.

The Wikipedia entry on Margin of Safety documents the unusual publishing history of the 1991 book, which Klarman wrote while still early in his career at Baupost and which he subsequently refused to authorize for reprint despite growing demand from the value-investing community. The book was published in a small print run by the firm itself, and Klarman refused to authorize a reprint even as demand grew over the subsequent decades and as the secondary market for the original copies expanded to include specialist auction houses and dedicated out-of-print book dealers. The entry notes that the book's scarcity transformed it into a cult object within value-investing circles, with copies changing hands at prices many multiples of the original cover price on the secondary market and with the price itself becoming part of the book's reputation as a foundational text that could not be obtained through the ordinary channels of the publishing industry. According to the entry, the book's central framework is built around the concept that an investor should demand a meaningful discount to intrinsic value before committing capital, and that the discount should be large enough to absorb the inevitable errors in estimation that even careful analysis will produce. This buffer, Klarman argued, is what protects the investor against the inevitable errors in estimation, the volatility of business cycles, and the unpredictability of human behavior in markets, and its absence is what distinguishes a speculation from an investment. The book argues that the absence of a margin of safety is what distinguishes speculation from investment, and that the discipline of demanding one is what allows compounding to work without being interrupted by catastrophic loss along the way and what allows the investor to remain in the game across multiple cycles rather than being forced out by a single adverse outcome. The Wikipedia article also traces the book's influence on a generation of value investors who cite it as a foundational text alongside the work of Benjamin Graham and the later editions of Security Analysis that Klarman himself would eventually edit. The entry notes that despite Klarman's reluctance to reprint, the book's principles were widely disseminated through summaries, lecture notes, and eventually an unauthorized digital edition that circulated among analysts who could not obtain the printed original. The book's status as an unobtainable artifact has, paradoxically, amplified its influence, since its concepts have been carried forward by readers who encountered it through secondary sources rather than through the original printed text itself, and the conceptual content has therefore reached a far larger audience than the print run ever did and has done so in a form that the author himself did not authorize and that he has periodically declined to formalize through an authorized reprint.

The Wikipedia article on the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching records that the institution was established by Andrew Carnegie in 1905 with an initial endowment of five million dollars, that Henry S. Pritchett was selected as its first president, and that the Foundation's original program was a system of pensions for retired college and university professors that subsequently evolved into the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association, today known as TIAA. The article records that the Foundation's broader mission was to do all things necessary to encourage, uphold, and dignify the profession of teaching, and that the institution subsequently undertook the standardization of American medical education through Abraham Flexner's 1910 report, the Carnegie Foundation Bulletin Number Four, which ranked and classified American medical schools and led to the closure of many substandard ones. The pensions-plus-standardization posture is the operating template for Carnegie's approach to institutional philanthropy.

The Wikipedia article on the Carnegie library records that two thousand five hundred nine Carnegie libraries were built worldwide between 1883 and 1929, that one thousand six hundred eighty-nine of those were built in the United States, and that the program was the largest single private library-building program in history. The article treats the program as the most visible and geographically distributed expression of Carnegie's Gospel of Wealth thesis, since a Carnegie library building stands in nearly every substantial American town and city that existed by 1920, and since the institutional form of the free public library was thereby made permanent across the country. The article notes that the libraries are today a recognizable architectural type — portico, stone construction, the words Carnegie Library carved into the cornice — and that they are studied as a coherent body of public architecture and as a category of philanthropic intervention in American civic life.

The Goodreads author page for Seth Klarman catalogs his published work and provides a public window into how his writing is received by general readers rather than by institutional peers, who typically encounter his ideas through private Baupost letters and through circulated lecture notes. The page lists Margin of Safety as his primary work, alongside his role editing later editions of Graham and Dodd's Security Analysis, which together constitute the bulk of his published authorship across a career that has otherwise been characterized by deliberate public reticence. Reader reviews on the platform frequently note that the book is difficult to obtain in physical form, which has paradoxically heightened its reputation as essential reading among serious value investors across multiple continents and across generations of practitioners who never had the chance to acquire the original printing and who have had to rely on summaries, excerpts, and the circulating unauthorized digital edition to encounter the text. The page's aggregated ratings reflect the unusual position the book occupies: it is rated highly by readers who have often only encountered summaries or excerpts, and reviewed in tones that mix admiration for the philosophy with frustration at the scarcity of the text and with the difficulty of putting the principles into practice inside industry structures that penalize patience. Many reviewers describe Margin of Safety as a moral document as much as a technical one, in which Klarman's voice is unmistakably that of an investor who treats capital preservation as a professional obligation rather than a stylistic preference, and who treats the avoidance of permanent loss as the central organizing principle of the entire enterprise. The platform's data suggests that the book's reputation has grown rather than faded in the absence of a reprint, and that the secondary market in summaries and excerpts has itself become a substitute for the original text. The page also serves as an indirect record of how Klarman's broader philosophy has been absorbed by readers beyond the institutional audience for which the book was originally written and for whom its specific case studies were originally chosen. Reviewers frequently cite specific concepts, including the rejection of efficient markets, the insistence on absolute rather than relative returns, and the refusal to be measured against an index as the benchmark of success, all of which have become recognizable markers of the value-investing tradition that the book helped to codify. The cumulative portrait is of an investor whose authority derives from a coherent worldview rather than from a single performance record, and whose patience in the absence of a reprint has itself reinforced the message that the discipline of saying no extends to the management of his own intellectual property and to the conditions under which his work is allowed to circulate.

The Wikipedia article on Carnegie Hall records that the concert venue at Seventh Avenue and Fifty-Seventh Street in Manhattan was built by Andrew Carnegie in 1891, that the architect was William Tuthill, and that Pyotr Tchaikovsky traveled to New York to conduct the opening-night concert on May 5, 1891, an event that established the venue's international musical standing from its first night. The article records that Carnegie funded the construction as a personal project and that the hall was initially called simply the Music Hall, with the founder's name attached within the first few years by popular usage. The article treats Carnegie Hall as the cultural-institutional counterpart to the library program, in which the founder's capital was used to create a permanent physical venue for high culture in the country's commercial capital, and notes that the hall has remained in continuous operation since 1891 and is today a National Historic Landmark.

The Wikipedia article on the Edgar Thomson Steel Works records that the works were built at Braddock, Pennsylvania, on the Monongahela River, beginning in 1872, and that they were named after J. Edgar Thomson, the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, who had been Carnegie's mentor and whose railroad ran adjacent to the site. The article records that the works began producing Bessemer-process steel rails in September 1875 and that they were the first major American installation of the Bessemer process for steel-rail production at industrial scale, displacing imported British steel rails in the American market within a few years. The article treats the choice of location — adjacent rail, river, and coke supplies — as the foundational vertical-integration bet of the Carnegie system, the operating decision that made the cheap-steel advantage reproducible and that turned the Edgar Thomson works into the seed plant of the entire Carnegie Steel Company.

The Blinkist summary of Margin of Safety condenses Klarman's framework into a structured digest aimed at readers seeking the book's core arguments without access to the rare original and without the years of patient study that the full text rewards. The summary opens with the assertion that the price of a security and its underlying value are two distinct things, and that the investor's primary task is to recognize the difference in real time rather than to rely on the market's own price as a sufficient signal of underlying worth. Klarman's framework treats this gap as the central object of analysis, with everything else, including timing, macroeconomics, and even business quality, subordinated to the question of discount to intrinsic value and to the discipline of demanding that the discount be wide enough to absorb the errors that even careful estimation will produce. The summary emphasizes Klarman's distinction between investment and speculation, which he frames not as a moral judgment but as a structural one rooted in the relationship between the price paid and the underlying value received. Investment is the purchase of an asset at a price that allows a margin for error, while speculation is the purchase of an asset whose return depends on someone else later paying more, with the speculator's position dependent on the willingness of future buyers to extend the same optimism rather than on the underlying business itself. Klarman argues that the speculative mode dominates during bull markets, because rising prices validate the speculator's logic until the cycle reverses, at which point the same logic that had been a source of profit becomes a source of catastrophic loss and the same participants who had been celebrated for their boldness find themselves exposed as overextended. Blinkist also highlights Klarman's view that valuation is a discipline of triangulation rather than a single formula, in which the investor cross-checks asset value, earnings power, and growth against one another and treats the resulting range of plausible values as the input to the decision rather than as a single point estimate. Each method is flawed individually, but together they bracket the range of plausible values and force the investor to confront their own assumptions rather than to lean on whichever method produces the most convenient answer in the moment. The summary closes with Klarman's warning that the discipline of valuation is most useful precisely when it is least fashionable, and that the analyst who abandons it during a bull market is the one who pays for that abandonment later when conditions turn and when the discipline of triangulation becomes the only protection against paying prices that cannot be justified by any reasonable reading of the underlying business.

The Wikipedia article on Henry Clay Frick records that he built the H. C. Frick & Company coke business in the Connellsville coal district of southwestern Pennsylvania in the 1870s, that Carnegie brought him into the Carnegie Steel partnership in 1882 to supply coke and to manage operations, and that Frick became chairman of Carnegie Steel in 1889, the operating executive who expanded the firm through the critical decade preceding the 1901 sale. The article records that Frick's Connellsville coke ovens were a decisive element of the Carnegie vertical-integration strategy, since cheap and reliable coke supply was the bottleneck variable in pig-iron production, and that the Carnegie-Frick combination integrated iron ore, coke, transport, and steel-making into a single controlled system. The article treats the partnership as the central operating alliance of the Carnegie Steel period, and the rupture between the two men after the Homestead strike as the central personal fracture of Carnegie's career.

Baupost Group's filings on the Securities and Exchange Commission's EDGAR system provide the only public window into the long equity holdings Seth Klarman manages on behalf of his clients, and even that window is partial and delayed relative to the firm's actual positions. The quarterly Form 13F submissions disclose positions in United States-listed equities above a defined threshold, with a delay that masks the firm's most recent actions but reveals the broad shape of the portfolio over time and allows analysts to infer the firm's sector tilts and its conviction in individual names. The filings are the closest thing to a transparent record of how Klarman allocates capital across sectors and how those allocations shift in response to changing market conditions, and they are studied closely by journalists and by competitors who otherwise have no visibility into the firm's portfolio. The EDGAR record shows that Baupost typically runs a concentrated book with meaningful exposure to a small number of themes, often centered on healthcare, technology, and energy, with the firm willing to take large positions in names where its research has produced a thesis that diverges from the consensus. The filings also reveal large cash positions in some quarters, which are not directly visible in the long-only disclosures but can be inferred from the relative size of the reported holdings against the firm's known assets and from the firm's own periodic letters that reference cash levels. Analysts who track the filings use them as a lagging indicator of where Klarman sees value, while acknowledging that the disclosures omit the firm's significant activities in private debt, distressed credit, and real estate, all of which constitute a substantial portion of the actual portfolio. The filings are also a study in capital allocation as a discipline of refusing to deploy capital when conditions do not justify it, and as a record of the moments at which the firm chose to deploy aggressively and the moments at which it chose to step back. Periods of market stress show Baupost adding to positions that had fallen sharply, while periods of euphoria show the firm trimming or exiting names that had run ahead of the underlying business and rotating the proceeds into cash or into freshly distressed areas. The pattern is consistent with Klarman's stated philosophy that capital should be deployed only when the price offers a meaningful margin of safety, and that the absence of such opportunities is itself information about the state of the broader market and about the discipline required to wait rather than to chase.

The Wikipedia article on the United States Steel Corporation records that the company was formed by J. P. Morgan on March 2, 1901, through the merger of the Carnegie Steel Company with the Federal Steel Company and the National Steel Company, that the consolidated entity was capitalized at one billion four hundred million dollars, equivalent to about fifty-four billion dollars in 2025, and that this capitalization made U. S. Steel the world's first billion-dollar corporation. The article records that the consolidated acquisition price was roughly four hundred ninety-two million dollars and that the new corporation was capitalized at a multiple of that acquisition cost through the issuance of preferred and common stock, and that U. S. Steel produced roughly two-thirds of the steel in the United States in its founding year. The article treats the formation of U. S. Steel as the founding transaction of the American supereconomy and as the institutional expression of the consolidation phase of American industry.

ValueSider's portfolio tracker aggregates Baupost Group's quarterly filings into a structured record of Seth Klarman's reported holdings across more than a decade of disclosure, allowing users to see how the portfolio has evolved across multiple market regimes and across multiple cycles of fear and greed. The tool allows users to filter by sector, by reporting period, and by the size of each position relative to the reported portfolio, which makes it possible to see how Klarman's risk posture has evolved across market regimes and to identify the names that have remained in the portfolio through multiple cycles of price volatility. The data shows a manager who is willing to take large positions when conviction is high and to step aside when conditions do not justify commitment, even at the cost of underperformance during speculative phases and even at the cost of the periodic client pressure that the underperformance inevitably produces. The tracker reveals a pattern of positions in companies that combine durable cash flows with periods of unpopularity, which is consistent with Klarman's stated preference for buying what others are selling and for accepting the temporary discomfort of holding names that the consensus has decided to avoid. It also shows occasional forays into sectors that have fallen out of favor with the broader market, including energy during the post-2020 reset and pharmaceuticals during periods of political pressure on drug pricing, with the firm taking positions that the consensus had decided to abandon. The data underscores that risk management at Baupost is not the avoidance of volatility but the refusal to pay prices that imply optimistic outcomes across long horizons, and the willingness to accept the mark-to-market volatility that comes with holding unpopular names through the period of their unpopularity and through the eventual recovery that the underlying fundamentals support. The platform's analysis highlights that Klarman's reported turnover is unusually low relative to peers, with positions often held for multiple years even through significant drawdowns and even through periods when the position has become a contributor to relative underperformance against benchmarks. The pattern reflects a conviction-based model in which the initial purchase is sized for the long-term thesis and is rarely trimmed for tactical reasons, and in which the firm's discipline is concentrated at the moment of commitment rather than in the daily management of existing positions held through multiple cycles. The tracker's record suggests that Baupost's risk management is rooted in the entry decision rather than in continuous portfolio adjustment, with the firm's discipline concentrated at the moment of commitment rather than in the daily management of existing positions held over time and through cycles of pessimism and recovery.

The Wikipedia article on J. P. Morgan records that the banker concluded negotiations with Andrew Carnegie on March 2, 1901, and formed the United States Steel Corporation as the largest business consolidation up to that time, that the letter agreeing to buy Carnegie's share was signed on February 26, 1901, and that the transaction was concluded with a famously short handshake rather than a detailed written contract, with Morgan reported to have said to Carnegie that he congratulated him on being the richest man in the world. The article records that Carnegie, in turn, refused to take common stock in the new corporation, accepting only preferred stock and gold bonds, and that Morgan later told Carnegie he could have obtained roughly one hundred million dollars more had he insisted. The article treats the 1901 transaction as the canonical Morgan consolidation, in which the banker brought order to a fragmented American industry by purchasing and combining the leading producers under a single corporate roof.

The Carnegie Mellon University history page records that Andrew Carnegie, the steel magnate and philanthropist, founded the institution in 1900 as the Carnegie Technical Schools with an initial gift, originally stipulating that the school would not grant degrees and would instead train the sons and daughters of working-class Pittsburgh families for practical industrial employment. The page records that the institution was rechartered as the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1912 to begin granting degrees, and that the founding phrase My heart is in the work, taken from Carnegie's founding letter to the city of Pittsburgh, remains the operating motto of the modern university. The page treats the founding as a direct product of Carnegie's Gospel of Wealth philosophy and as the institutional anchor of his broader educational philanthropy, alongside the Carnegie Corporation and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

What separates the Panic of 1907 from earlier panics, explains the Federal Reserve History essay by Jon Moen and Ellis Tallman, is the central part played by New York City's trust companies. Trust companies were state-chartered intermediaries that competed with banks for deposits but were not central to the payments system and cleared few checks, so they held cash reserves of roughly five percent against deposits, compared with twenty-five percent for national banks. Because their deposits were payable in cash on demand, trusts were just as susceptible to runs as banks. The trusts loaned large sums directly into New York equity markets, extending uncollateralized day loans to brokers, who then used the securities they purchased as collateral for call loans from nationally chartered banks. Runs on trust deposits short-circuited their role as the initial liquidity provider to the stock market. The essay draws the structural parallel to the shadow banks of 2007-09: both crises started outside the institutions at the center of the payments system.

The 13f.info aggregator maintains a longitudinal record of Baupost Group's quarterly filings, allowing users to track the history of Klarman's reported positions across more than a decade of disclosure and to see the patterns that emerge only across multiple cycles rather than in any single quarter. The platform's interface makes it possible to see when positions were initiated, increased, trimmed, or exited, providing a granular view of how capital allocation decisions have unfolded over time and of how the firm's posture has shifted in response to changes in the broader market environment. The historical record is a useful counterweight to the moment-to-moment coverage of Baupost in the financial press, which tends to focus on the largest current positions rather than on the long arc of the portfolio and which often mistakes tactical trimming for strategic retreat or interprets the absence of new commitments as a lack of conviction rather than as a deliberate posture. The data reveals that Baupost has periodically concentrated capital in sectors where the broader market has grown skeptical, including energy infrastructure, pharmaceuticals, and technology during periods of regulatory or political pressure that pushed prices of those businesses below what their underlying fundamentals justified. The pattern is consistent with Klarman's stated philosophy that capital should be allocated where fear has driven prices below the underlying value of the business, and that the firm should be willing to accept the temporary discomfort of holding names that the consensus has decided to avoid in exchange for the eventual recovery that the underlying fundamentals support. The historical record also shows that the firm has been willing to hold meaningful cash balances in periods when no such opportunities are apparent, which is itself a form of capital allocation even though it produces no immediate return and even though it has a measurable opportunity cost in rising markets. The aggregator's record underscores that capital allocation is as much about the refusal to deploy as it is about the act of deployment, and that the discipline of saying no is itself a competitive advantage when the broader industry is structured to penalize it. Klarman's reported filings show long stretches in which the firm made few new commitments, even as assets under management continued to grow and even as the pressure to deploy increased in proportion to the asset base. The pattern reflects a posture in which patience is treated as a form of risk management, and in which the cost of holding cash is measured against the historical frequency with which dislocations have eventually produced genuine opportunities rather than against the immediate opportunity cost of being out of the market during a rising period. The record is a working illustration of how discipline at the portfolio level compounds over the years.

Cheng Wei's Didi is the CEO of Didi Chuxing Technology Co – one of China's largest private car hailing, taxi hailing and bike sharing transportation services.

Lei Jun's Xiaomi apr 23, 2026 · Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun ⁠media … the company had received 60,000 locked orders as of April 23 for the new generation SU7 sedans.

Amazon Web Services was launched in the spring of 2006 with the introduction of Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), which solved what AWS's own history describes as a major problem: how to store data while keeping it highly secure and maintaining privacy and control. A few months later, the launch of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) gave customers instant access to compute capacity, ensuring that anything a customer could have done with a massive data center could be done remotely with practically the click of a button. The company framed the launch as a complete rethinking of IT infrastructure so that anyone — even a kid in a college dorm room — could access the same powerful technology as the world's largest and most sophisticated companies. The bet turned an internal retail infrastructure into a pay-as-you-go utility, quietly seeding what would become Amazon's highest-margin business.

Amazon's leadership principles, published on the company's own careers site, codify customer obsession as the first of the firm's operating tenets: leaders start with the customer and work backwards, and they work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. AWS's own culture blog emphasizes that the principle is meant to be proactive — Amazon leaders are expected to lower prices and increase value for customers before they have to, invent before they have to, and treat customer focus as the engine of long-term trust. The principle is operationalized through mechanisms like the working-backwards product document, which requires teams to write the press release and FAQ for a hypothetical finished product before any engineering begins. The codification, refined under Bezos across more than two decades, makes customer obsession an institutional practice rather than a slogan, with the goal of keeping Amazon permanently in Day 1 vitality.

Born on a Richford, New York farm on July 8, 1839, John Davison Rockefeller was the second of six children in a family that moved often before settling in Ohio in 1853. He attended Cleveland's Central High School and joined the Erie Street Baptist Church, where he became a trustee at twenty-one. After leaving high school in 1855 he completed a three-month commercial course at Folsom Mercantile College and took a job as assistant bookkeeper at Hewitt & Tuttle, a Cleveland commission-merchant firm, where he was soon promoted to cashier. The bookkeeping discipline—keeping a close eye on the ledger, calculating freight rates to fractions of a cent—shaped the operating habits that later defined Standard Oil. Rockefeller's childhood church role and Baptist faith also seeded the systematic philanthropy that consumed the second half of his life, eventually totaling more than $540 million in charitable giving.

The Sohn Conference Foundation's profile of Seth Klarman documents his long association with the conference, which raises funds for pediatric cancer research and other medical causes and which has become one of the most prominent venues for hedge fund managers to share investment ideas in exchange for charitable contributions. The foundation was established in memory of Ira Sohn, and the annual conference has grown into an institution that draws both leading investors and leading medical researchers, with the proceeds of each year's event directed toward specific research initiatives and clinical programs. Klarman's involvement reflects his view that the responsibility of capital extends beyond the management of client money into the active funding of public goods, and that the discipline of capital allocation should be applied to philanthropic ends with the same rigor applied to investment decisions and to the structural choices that govern the management of the firm. The profile notes that the conference has raised tens of millions of dollars over its history, with each year's proceeds directed toward specific research initiatives and clinical programs selected through a process that reflects the same analytical discipline that characterizes the investment presentations themselves. Klarman's participation has been both financial and intellectual, with his presentations at the conference among the most circulated in the event's archive and with the substantive content of those presentations frequently cited as reference points in the broader value-investing literature. The foundation's model, in which investment ideas are exchanged in service of medical research, mirrors a broader conviction in Klarman's writing that the discipline of capital allocation should be applied to philanthropic ends with the same rigor applied to investment decisions and that the avoidance of waste in philanthropy is itself a form of respect for the capital that has been entrusted to the donor's care. The piece also highlights that the Sohn model has been replicated in several other cities, with affiliated conferences in London, Hong Kong, and elsewhere, each adapting the template of investment ideas for charity to the local context and each generating proceeds that are directed toward causes selected in line with the same analytical principles that govern the original New York event. Klarman's role in supporting this expansion reflects his view that philanthropy is not merely the transfer of wealth but the application of analytical rigor to the question of where capital can do the most good, and that the structure of the giving matters as much as the amount. The profile closes by noting that the conference's longevity is itself evidence that the model has resonance, with the annual gathering becoming a fixture in the calendars of investors who otherwise rarely appear in public and who treat the event as an occasion to contribute both ideas and capital to causes that the participants have selected through a disciplined process of evaluation.

Lei Jun's Xiaomi 6 days ago · Xiaomi generated 23.9 billion yuan ($3.5 billion) in EV revenue during the second quarter of 2026, up 15.9% from a year earlier and 25.8% .

Lei Jun's Xiaomi has confirmed Xiaomi will begin international sales in Europe in H2 2027, starting with Germany (SU7 and YU7), followed by right-hand-drive markets in .

Around the same period NetEase's William Ding stepped back from a gaming-affiliate role, Lei Jun was reported to no longer be CEO of Xiaomi's gaming unit, Beijing Wali Internet Technologies, reflecting a broader pattern of Chinese tech founders retreating from front-office roles at gaming subsidiaries amid regulatory scrutiny.

Lei joined Kingsoft as an engineer in 1992, became its CEO in 1998, led it to a 2007 Hong Kong Stock Exchange IPO, then resigned as president and CEO on December 20, 2007, citing health reasons.

Wang Jianlin's Dalian Wanda sep 28, 2025 · A Chinese court has imposed spending restrictions on billionaire Wang Jianlin, founder of the Wanda Group.

A seminal 1868 deal with the Lake Shore Railroad—one of the New York Central system's trunk lines—fixed Standard Oil's transportation economics for a generation. The railroad gave Rockefeller's firm a going rate of one cent per gallon, or forty-two cents per barrel, an effective 71 percent discount from its listed rates, in exchange for a promise to ship at least sixty carloads of oil daily and to handle loading and unloading on its own. Smaller refiners, who could not approach the sixty-carload threshold, denounced the deal as unfair and argued they could not qualify for the discounts at any price. Rockefeller's freight leverage translated directly into consumer pricing: between 1865 and 1870 Standard Oil's kerosene fell from fifty-eight cents a gallon to twenty-six cents. The deal became the template for every later Standard Oil rail negotiation—and the central grievance in the eventual antitrust case.

The Wikipedia entry on Seth Klarman documents his biography from his childhood in Baltimore through the founding of Baupost in 1982, with particular attention to the structural decisions that distinguished the firm from its peers in the alternative-asset industry and that have been central to the firm's longevity. The entry notes that Klarman studied economics at Cornell and earned a master's degree in business administration at Harvard, where he was influenced by the value-investing tradition associated with Benjamin Graham and where he developed the convictions that would later shape the founding of his own firm. The firm he founded was originally capitalized with twenty-seven million dollars from a small group of families, an amount that grew over four decades into one of the largest private investment partnerships in the United States and that did so without accepting the institutional capital that would have constrained the firm's patience. The entry traces Baupost's evolution from a single-strategy partnership into a multi-strategy firm with exposure across distressed debt, public equities, private investments, and real estate, all of which were managed under a single research culture rather than separated into the siloed structures that characterized many multi-strategy firms. The structure of the firm, with its long lock-up periods and private capital base, is described as a deliberate choice that allowed Klarman to maintain the patience his philosophy required and that insulated the firm from the redemption pressure that periodically forces less structurally protected managers to liquidate positions at unfavorable prices. The entry notes that Baupost has periodically returned capital to clients when assets grew beyond the opportunities available, a posture that further distinguished the firm from peers who raised assets regardless of opportunity set and that reflected the same discipline applied to the firm's own size as to the individual positions it held. The article also covers Klarman's role as a donor to educational and medical causes, including major gifts to Tufts University and other institutions, and his involvement in the funding of research and clinical programs through vehicles like the Sohn Conference Foundation. The entry documents his public statements on fiscal policy, his involvement in political funding, and his occasional public letters that have circulated among investors as windows into his thinking and that have been cited widely in the financial press during periods of market stress. The cumulative portrait is of an investor whose career has been defined by the refusal to compromise the structural conditions under which he operates, with the partnership structure treated as the necessary foundation for the philosophy he has practiced for decades and with the firm's longevity itself treated as evidence of the soundness of the structural choices made at the founding.

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Sunil Bharti Mittal built Bharti Enterprises from a small bicycle-parts trading business into Bharti Airtel, one of India's largest telecom operators, and is most associated with the strategic decision to outsource the network and IT to Ericsson and IBM rather than build them in-house.

Robin Li's Baidu baidu's ERNIE Assistant reached 202 million monthly active users by December 2025 , surged 110% year over year in Q4 2025 . In February 2026 , He .

After the South Improvement Company collapsed in 1872 Rockefeller pressed a self-reinforcing cycle: buy the least efficient competing refiners, integrate their working plants, retire the redundant ones, press the railroads for steeper volume discounts, undercut the remaining competition on price, raise investment pools to fund the next round, and acquire the next layer of holdouts. For many competitors, the moment of capitulation came when Rockefeller simply showed them his books so they could see what they were up against—and then made them a fair offer for their assets. Those who refused the offer were told they would be bankrupted and bought at auction. By 1874 even his most prominent antagonists, the New York refiner Charles Pratt and Company, led by Charles Pratt and Henry H. Rogers, made a secret agreement to be acquired; Rogers in particular became one of Rockefeller's key lieutenants in the formation of the Standard Oil Trust.

MIT Sloan's profile of James Simons examined the connection between his mathematical career, his success in finance, and his subsequent turn to large-scale philanthropy, treating the three as a continuous application of mathematical reasoning to problems that others had defined as unsystematic. The piece traced Simons's path from academic mathematics, where he made foundational contributions to geometric topology and where the invariants that bear his name have become central to several branches of theoretical physics, to the founding of Renaissance Technologies, and finally to the establishment of the Simons Foundation and related philanthropic vehicles that have become major funders of basic research and that have done so at a scale that few other private foundations have matched. The article noted that Simons treated his philanthropy as a continuation of his scientific vocation, with major gifts directed to mathematics, basic science, and the support of mathematics teachers in public schools. The profile highlighted Simons's involvement in the founding of Math for America, an organization that provides stipends and professional support to outstanding mathematics and science teachers in public schools and that was designed to address the chronic attrition of the strongest teachers from urban public school systems. The article noted that Simons had argued publicly that the most effective way to improve mathematics education was to retain the most talented teachers, and that direct compensation was the most reliable mechanism for that retention given the compensation gaps that drove attrition and given the difficulty of replicating in public education the compensation structures that prevailed in the private sector. The piece observed that this approach reflected the empirical temperament that had defined his earlier career, with the philanthropic decision treated as a hypothesis to be tested and refined in light of evidence on its effects. The MIT Sloan coverage also noted that the Simons Foundation had become one of the largest private funders of basic research in the United States, with significant commitments to mathematics, the physical sciences, and the life sciences and with a focus on the kind of long-horizon research that was difficult to fund through conventional federal channels and that the conventional funding mechanisms had tended to neglect in favor of more targeted programs. The article observed that Simons's philanthropy was distinguished by his willingness to support long-horizon research that was difficult to fund through conventional federal channels, and by his insistence on the autonomy of the researchers his foundation supported and on the principle that the foundation's role was to enable research rather than to direct it. The profile closed by noting that Simons treated philanthropy as a domain in which the discipline of empirical inquiry could be applied with the same rigor he had applied to markets and that the foundation's design reflected the same structural choices that had distinguished his earlier institutions.

Robin Li's Baidu 25, 2025, at the Baidu Create Developer Conference, Baidu founder Robin Li released the ERNIE Large Model X1 Turbo, which offers better performance and .

Before founding Baidu, Li worked as an engineer at Infoseek, an early search-industry pioneer, and as a senior consultant for IDD Information Services, per Baidu's own management biography.

Shi returned to China in 2001 to found Suntech Power with support from the Wuxi city government, which held a 25% stake in the company; in a 2010 address, Shi acknowledged Wuxi Communist Party officials Yang Weize and Wang Rong as key contributors to his rise, per Reuters.

The Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research—the institution that became Rockefeller University—was formalized in January 1901, weeks after Rockefeller's grandson died of scarlet fever. Rockefeller had been discussing a biomedical research center for three years with his adviser Frederick T. Gates and his son John D. Rockefeller Jr.; the family tragedy accelerated the decision. At the time, tuberculosis, diphtheria, and typhoid were the leading threats to American public health, and European models—the Koch Institute in Berlin and the Pasteur Institute in Paris—had demonstrated that laboratory science could be applied systematically to disease. The Rockefeller Institute became the first biomedical research center in the United States. From the beginning its scientists made durable contributions: Simon Flexner, the first director, developed a novel delivery system for an anti-meningitis serum; Hideyo Noguchi pursued the syphilis microbe and the cause of yellow fever; Louise Pearce developed a treatment for African sleeping sickness; and Peyton Rous deduced that cancer could be caused by a virus.

The Times of India reported on Jim Simons's commitment of three hundred million dollars through Math for America to support public school teachers of mathematics and science, with the goal of retaining the most effective teachers in classrooms where they were most needed and where the impact of their retention on student outcomes was greatest. The coverage noted that the gift was among the largest single commitments to teacher support in the history of American educational philanthropy, and that it reflected Simons's conviction that direct compensation was the most effective mechanism for addressing the chronic attrition of the strongest teachers from urban public school systems and that the structural conditions of the profession had to be addressed if the improvement of outcomes was to be sustained. The coverage observed that the scale of the commitment reflected the same empirical temperament that had characterized Simons's earlier career, with the philanthropic decision treated as a hypothesis to be tested at a scale that would permit meaningful evaluation. The article explained that the program provided multi-year fellowships combining stipends, professional development, and a peer community, with the explicit goal of making the teaching profession sustainable for the teachers most likely to leave it and most difficult to replace once they had departed, and with the design informed by research on the conditions that support effective teaching. The Times of India noted that the design of the program had been informed by research on the conditions that support effective teaching, and that the founders had argued that the most reliable way to improve outcomes in mathematics and science education was to retain the most effective teachers already working in classrooms rather than to focus exclusively on the recruitment of new entrants who would themselves face the same conditions that had driven the prior generation of effective teachers out of the classroom. The piece observed that the commitment was structured to be sustainable over the long term rather than as a one-time intervention that would not change the underlying conditions of the profession. The coverage also situated the gift within the broader philanthropic portfolio of the Simons Foundation, which has supported basic research in mathematics and the sciences as well as educational initiatives and which has treated the support of mathematics teachers as part of a broader portfolio of investments in mathematics education and in the conditions that support the production of mathematical knowledge over the long term. The Times of India observed that the gift reflected the same empirical temperament that had defined Simons's earlier career, with the philanthropic decision treated as a hypothesis to be tested and refined in light of evidence on its effects and with the design of the program structured to permit meaningful evaluation of those effects. The piece closed by noting that the gift represented a significant commitment to the proposition that the improvement of public education must begin with the support of the teachers already working effectively in the classroom and that the structural conditions of the profession must be addressed if the improvement of outcomes is to be sustained over time.

In a May 2024 appearance on CNBC's Squawk Box, Stanley Druckenmiller told the desk that the United States was spending as if it were still in the Great Depression, a remark he offered as both a description of the fiscal trajectory and a warning about the inflation that would follow. He argued that the deficit levels being run in an environment of full employment had no historical precedent in peacetime and that the bond market would eventually have to demand compensation for the risk that the debt stock would be inflated away. The clip was widely circulated and became a reference point for commentators arguing that the macro regime had shifted from one in which central bank policy was the dominant variable to one in which fiscal policy was the dominant variable. The article is regularly updated as new information becomes available and is one of the most frequently consulted references on the subject for general-audience readers and for institutional practitioners. He told the desk that his office had been building a position around the thesis that the Federal Reserve would be forced to choose between accepting higher inflation and engineering a recession severe enough to break the fiscal arithmetic, and that neither outcome was friendly to long-duration assets. He argued that the equity market was pricing in the lower-inflation outcome without giving enough weight to the fiscal channel, and that the bond market had begun to price the higher-inflation outcome through a wider term premium. He also flagged the rising cost of debt service as a variable that market participants had been underweighting, noting that the interest bill was on track to become one of the largest line items in the federal budget within a few years. The piece is widely cited in the secondary literature on the topic and is regularly consulted by readers looking for a single-page introduction to the argument. He closed the appearance by reiterating his view that the central bank had lost the room to be the dominant actor in the cycle and that fiscal policy would be the swing variable for the remainder of the decade. He said that his fund was positioned for higher real rates, a steeper curve, and a basket of equities whose earnings could absorb the cost of capital, and that he was deliberately underweight long-dated sovereign debt. The Squawk Box appearance is often cited as one of the clearest public articulations of his late-cycle fiscal thesis, and the spending like we are still in the Great Depression line was used in headlines across financial media in the days that followed the broadcast. The article is paired in the broader citation ecosystem with the original source documents and with the longer-form interviews the subject has given to the financial press over the years.

Wikipedia's biographical entry on Stanley Druckenmiller frames the investor as one of the most consistently profitable macro traders of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, whose track record at Duquesne Capital was achieved without the marketing apparatus that defined many of his peers. The article notes that he was born in 1953 in Pittsburgh, studied economics at Bowdoin, and dropped out of a doctoral programme at Michigan to take a position as a chemical industry analyst at Pittsburgh National Bank. The trajectory from a regional bank trust department to the leadership of one of the most watched macro funds in the world is treated in the entry as a function of pattern recognition, appetite for risk, and an early partnership with George Soros. The piece remains a reference document for general-audience readers looking for an accessible introduction to the argument and its practical implications for portfolio construction. The entry documents the Soros partnership in detail, covering the period in which Druckenmiller joined the Quantum Fund and the joint trade against the British pound in 1992 that produced roughly a billion dollars of profit in a single day. It also covers the 1990s expansion of Duquesne Capital into a multi-billion-dollar hedge fund, the joint venture with Soros, and Druckenmiller's eventual decision to wind the firm down. The article notes that he announced the closure of Duquesne's client fund in 2010 and converted the operation into a family office, citing the difficulty of producing the same returns at the scale the fund had reached and a desire to spend more time on philanthropy and on the question of how to transfer lessons to the next generation of investors. The article is one of the more widely read mainstream discussions of the subject and is frequently quoted at length in the secondary literature and in the financial press. The entry closes with a section on his philanthropy, noting large gifts to medical research, to his undergraduate alma mater, and to a range of policy and education causes. The article treats Druckenmiller as an exemplar of the Giving Pledge generation of investors, having committed the majority of his wealth to charitable causes during his lifetime. The page is one of the most frequently consulted references for readers looking for a concise factual biography of the investor, and it is regularly edited as new interviews and public appearances become available. The article is paired in the citation ecosystem with the Lost Tree Club talk, his CNBC appearances, and the Norges Bank podcast he gave to Tangen in 2024. The piece is widely shared among investors and analysts looking for a serious articulation of the principles at stake in the broader debate over how institutional money should be deployed.

The November 2024 episode of the In Good Company podcast, hosted by Nicolai Tangen, was recorded in New York with Stanley Druckenmiller and titled Inside the Mind of a Legendary Investor. The conversation is one of the longer on-record audio sessions Druckenmiller has given since stepping away from client capital, and it covers his path from a Pittsburgh bank trust department to the helm of one of the most consistently profitable macro funds in modern finance. He used the platform to emphasise that his edge has rarely been forecast accuracy and almost always been position sizing, and that his largest drawdowns have come from being too small when he was right rather than from being wrong about direction. The article is paired in the broader citation ecosystem with the original source documents and with the longer-form interviews the subject has given to the financial press over the years. He told Tangen that he spent the early part of his career trying to be a good forecaster and only later understood that the forecasting ceiling in macro is low, and that the durable advantage is in the construction of the book. He described how he builds positions, beginning with a probe, adding only as the market begins to confirm the thesis, and cutting quickly when the price action disagrees. He said the discipline to cut losses fast is a function of having been forced to do it under duress early in his career, and that he has since institutionalised rules that prevent any single position from threatening the franchise even when his conviction is high and the trade appears to be working in his favour. The piece remains a reference document for general-audience readers looking for an accessible introduction to the argument and its practical implications for portfolio construction. He closed the conversation with a reflection on what he called the gift of the right mentor at the right time. He credited George Soros with teaching him that the cost of being right but too small exceeds the cost of being wrong, and he told Tangen that he still uses the 1992 pound trade as a case study in his own office when he is teaching analysts about sizing. He also said that he had begun to spend more time on philanthropy and on the question of how to transfer the lessons of the firm without transferring the personality, since the latter is not a teachable asset. The podcast is treated as a companion to the 2023 Oslo conference and is widely shared among macro investors as a teaching document. The article is one of the more widely read mainstream discussions of the subject and is frequently quoted at length in the secondary literature and in the financial press.

A primer published by Picture Perfect Portfolios under the title How to Invest Like David Swensen walks the retail reader through the endowment model that Swensen built at Yale and explains how its core principles can be translated into an individual investor's portfolio. The article notes that the institutional model rests on diversification across asset classes, on a meaningful allocation to alternative investments, and on a long-term strategy that is willing to accept the illiquidity of private assets in exchange for a return premium. The piece is explicit that the individual investor cannot perfectly replicate the institutional model, since the access to top-quartile alternative managers is the core of the institutional advantage, but that the principles can still guide a household portfolio. The piece is widely cited in the secondary literature on the topic and is regularly consulted by readers looking for a single-page introduction to the argument. The article walks through the asset-class composition of the Yale model, including the equity bias, the diversification across asset classes that offer low correlation to the public market, the allocation to private assets with long lock-up periods, and the insistence on active management only in asset classes where the case for it can be sustained. The piece stresses that the model is a structural choice rather than a tactical bet, and that the discipline to maintain the structure through market cycles is what produces the long-run result. The article pairs the institutional model with the recommendations Swensen made in Unconventional Success for the individual investor, who he argued should use low-cost index funds rather than try to replicate the alternative-asset allocation at household scale. The article is paired in the broader citation ecosystem with the original source documents and with the longer-form interviews the subject has given to the financial press over the years. The piece closes with a section on the practical translation. The article suggests that the individual investor build a portfolio anchored in low-cost index funds, with a meaningful allocation to real assets, an explicit consideration of inflation protection, and a willingness to rebalance against the market rather than with it. The piece is widely cited among retail investors looking for a serious articulation of the Swensen principles at household scale, and it is paired in the secondary literature with the original Pioneering Portfolio Management and with the Unconventional Success volume that Swensen wrote for the individual investor. The article is one of the more widely read retail-facing introductions to the Yale model and its implications for the household balance sheet. The piece remains a reference document for general-audience readers looking for an accessible introduction to the argument and its practical implications for portfolio construction.

A book review published on Medium walks through David Swensen's Pioneering Portfolio Management, the 2000 volume in which the Yale chief investment officer set out the philosophy that had guided the Investments Office for the prior decade and a half. The review notes that the book is the canonical statement of the Yale model, that it covers the office's investment philosophy, the structure of the endowment's portfolio, and the operational architecture by which the office pursued its mandate. The piece is directed at a general audience and explicitly positions the book as the document that turned the office's internal practice into a transferable template that other institutions could study and adopt. The piece is paired in the secondary literature with the original source documents and with the broader coverage of the subject in the financial press and the academic literature that followed. The review walks through the central tenets of the model, including the equity bias, the diversification across asset classes that offer low correlation to the public market, the allocation to private assets with long lock-up periods, and the insistence on active management only in asset classes where the case for it could be sustained. The piece stresses that the model is a structural choice rather than a tactical bet, and that the durability of the result was a function of the consistency with which the structure had been applied across multiple regimes. The review also notes that the book is paired in the Swensen bibliography with Unconventional Success, the volume he wrote for the individual investor in 2005 and which has become the standard reference for that audience. The article is one of the few extended on-record discussions of the topic at the time of its publication and is used as a reference document by writers covering the broader institutional investment industry. The piece closes with a reflection on the operational architecture that Swensen described in the book, including the staffing model that emphasised long-tenured analysts, the manager-selection process that emphasised alignment of interest, and the discipline of post-mortem review. The review is widely cited in the secondary literature on the Yale model and is paired in the Swensen bibliography with the original book and with the broader coverage of the office's track record. The piece is one of the more accessible summaries of Pioneering Portfolio Management and is frequently recommended to readers looking for a single-document introduction to the office's philosophy and the operational architecture that gave the philosophy its durable institutional expression. The piece is widely cited in the literature on the topic as a case study in how the principles at stake interact with the broader institutional context and the operational architecture of the office.

Wikipedia's biographical entry on David Frederick Swensen frames him as the architect of the model that institutional investors now refer to as the Yale model and as one of the most influential investors of his generation. The article notes that he was born on January 26, 1954, that he studied economics at the University of Wisconsin and pursued a doctorate at Yale, and that he spent a brief period on Wall Street at Salomon Brothers and Lehman Brothers before returning to Yale to take over the Investments Office in 1985. The trajectory from a doctoral programme to the leadership of one of the most respected institutional investment offices in the world is treated in the entry as a function of the unique match between Swensen and the institution he served. The piece remains a reference document for general-audience readers looking for an accessible introduction to the argument and its practical implications for portfolio construction. The entry documents the office's track record in detail, noting that the endowment had grown from roughly one billion dollars when Swensen took it over to more than thirty billion at the time of his death, that the office had produced decades of returns that exceeded the conventional institutional benchmark, and that the model had been adopted by universities, foundations, and sovereign wealth funds around the world. The article also notes that Swensen argued, in Pioneering Portfolio Management, that the reason for investing in illiquid assets was not higher risk-adjusted returns but the structural premium for the willingness to forgo daily liquidity, a distinction the entry treats as central to the model and to the broader institutional investment literature that followed it. The article is one of the more widely read mainstream discussions of the subject and is frequently quoted at length in the secondary literature and in the financial press. The entry closes with a section on Swensen's role as a teacher, noting that he had taught a popular undergraduate course at Yale, that he had written two influential books on investing, and that the office had been a training ground for the next generation of institutional investors. The article also notes that Swensen had been treated for cancer in the years preceding his death, that he had died on May 5, 2021, and that the memorial coverage had been extensive across the financial press and the broader institutional investment industry. The page is one of the most frequently consulted references for readers looking for a concise factual biography of the investor, and it is regularly edited as new information becomes available. The piece is widely shared among investors and analysts looking for a serious articulation of the principles at stake in the broader debate over how institutional money should be deployed.

Zuckerberg opened his July 23, 2024 open-source manifesto with a computing-history analogy. The major technology companies of an earlier era each invested heavily in closed versions of Unix, and it was hard to imagine any other approach producing such advanced software, yet open-source Linux eventually prevailed because it let developers modify code freely and cost less, and over time it became more advanced, more secure, and more broadly supported than any closed alternative. Linux is now the foundation of cloud computing and the operating systems running most mobile devices. Zuckerberg argued artificial intelligence is on the same trajectory: the previous year's Llama 2 was comparable only to an older generation of frontier models, while Llama 3 was competitive with the most advanced systems and leading in some areas, and he expected future Llama models to become the industry's most advanced within a year.

Investopedia's profile of Jim Simons traces his career from academic mathematics through the founding of Renaissance Technologies, describing him as the central figure in the emergence of quantitative investing as a distinct discipline and as a domain that could be approached through the systematic application of mathematical methods rather than through the discretionary judgment that had previously dominated the industry. The profile notes that Simons earned his doctorate at a young age, held faculty positions at major research universities, and made foundational contributions to geometric topology before turning his attention to financial markets and before the transition that would define the remainder of his career. The piece emphasizes that Simons's transition was unusual in that he applied the methods of pure mathematics to a domain that had previously been dominated by discretionary judgment and informal reasoning and that he did so at a moment when the conventional wisdom held that markets could not be systematically modeled. The article highlights the founding of Renaissance Technologies in 1982 and the gradual development of the firm's flagship Medallion fund, which generated returns that placed it among the most successful investment vehicles ever recorded and which did so over a period long enough to defeat any explanation rooted in chance or in transient market conditions. The profile notes that the fund's strategy relied on the systematic detection of small regularities in market data, with positions held for short periods and adjusted continuously in response to incoming information and with the systematic approach permitting a scale and a speed of execution that discretionary trading could not match. The piece observes that the fund was restricted largely to internal capital, reflecting the firm's belief that the strategies it employed had limited capacity and could not be sustainably extended to external investors at scale without diluting the performance and without exposing the strategies to the risk of replication by competitors who would erode the edges as they became widely known. The profile also documents Simons's later turn to large-scale philanthropy through the Simons Foundation and through Math for America, both of which reflected the same conviction that had defined his earlier careers and that had shaped the design of Renaissance itself. The article notes that Simons's philanthropic work was animated by the same conviction that had defined his earlier careers, namely that sustained support for talented individuals working on hard problems with sufficient autonomy could produce results that no targeted program could and that the structure of the support was as important as the amount. The piece closes by observing that Simons's legacy would be measured not only by his contributions to mathematics and finance but by the institutions he built to support future generations of scientists and teachers and by the demonstration that the methods of scientific research could be applied to the problem of financial returns in a way that produced durable results and that could be sustained across multiple cycles and across multiple generations of researchers.

In 2007, under Chen's leadership, Tencent launched the Tencent Charity Foundation, described by the Yidan Prize Foundation as the first charity foundation in China's internet industry.

Ren Zhengfei's Huawei Technologies mar 7, 2025 · Ren further that he is leading a network of more than 2,000 Chinese companies who are collectively working to ensure that China achieves .

Ren Zhengfei's Huawei Technologies nov 14, 2025 · Huawei CEO Ren Zhengfei once again referred to 'Spare Tyres' in a public facing statement during a roundtable held with Chinese private-sector .

The Netflix culture memo, published on the company's jobs site, opens with the aspiration to entertain the world and describes an unusual culture focused on excellence, built so that talented people can thrive. It rests on four core principles. The Dream Team means Netflix aims to have only high performers, people who are great at what they do and even better at working together. People Over Process holds that better outcomes come when employees have the information and freedom to make decisions for themselves. Uncomfortably Exciting demands boldness, embracing what is next even when it is uncomfortable. Great and Always Better expresses the self-criticism that Netflix today falls short of what it can be tomorrow, requiring the self-awareness to see what should improve and the discipline to get there. The memo is candid that Netflix is not for everyone, and warns that while the company does not always live up to these principles, most people who join are surprised by the quality of their colleagues and the empowerment at every level.

Jermaine Brown's analysis of the founding of Renaissance Technologies examined the conditions that made the firm's emergence possible in the early 1980s and that distinguished the firm from the partially systematic approaches that characterized many of its competitors and that limited the scale at which those competitors could operate. The piece argued that Simons was unusual among mathematicians-turned-investors in his willingness to delegate the research to other scientists rather than to impose his own market intuitions, and that this willingness was the foundational choice that allowed the firm to compound advantages over decades and to do so in a way that depended on the institution rather than on the individual. The article observed that the decision was made at a moment when quantitative finance was a marginal discipline, with the dominant investment houses organized around discretionary judgment rather than systematic modeling and with the conventional wisdom holding that markets could not be systematically modeled at the scale that the systematic approach would require. The analysis highlighted the firm's early reliance on scientists recruited from academic backgrounds in mathematics, physics, and computer science, and noted that this approach was distinctive at a time when trading floors were dominated by discretionary practitioners and when the conventional wisdom held that the skills required for successful trading were irreducibly discretionary and could not be reduced to systematic procedures. Brown argued that the resulting institutional culture, which combined the structure of a hedge fund with the operating practices of a research organization and that treated the trading floor as a research environment rather than as a venue for discretionary decision-making, was itself a competitive advantage. The piece observed that the firm's compensation structure, which paid employees in part through shares in the Medallion fund, aligned the interests of staff with the long-term performance of the flagship vehicle and created a closed internal market for shares that further insulated the firm from external pressure and that allowed the firm to retain its scientists across multiple cycles of competitive pressure. The article also examined the structural decisions that distinguished Renaissance from peers, including the restriction of the Medallion fund largely to internal capital and the construction of a closed market for shares among employees that allowed the firm to retain its scientists and to operate without the redemption pressure that constrained external-capital funds and that periodically forced less structurally protected firms to liquidate positions at unfavorable prices. Brown argued that these choices were not incidental but central to the firm's ability to retain its scientists and to operate without the redemption pressure that constrained external-capital funds, and that the choices had been made at the founding in a way that reflected Simons's understanding that the substance of the strategies and the structure of the firm were inseparable. The piece closed by noting that the founding of Renaissance was best understood as a long institutional experiment in applying the methods of scientific research to the problem of financial returns, with the structure of the firm treated as inseparable from the substance of the strategies it employed.

Ren Zhengfei's Huawei Technologies while acknowledging Huawei's Ascend chips currently lag behind US counterparts, he remains confident in China's path to technological self-sufficiency. His .

Ren was born into a rural teaching family in Guizhou, studied civil engineering, then joined the PLA's Engineering Corps in 1974 to help build the Liaoyang Chemical Fiber Factory, rising to a deputy-regimental-equivalent technical role before the Corps was disbanded in 1983.

The original venture was Olatrip.com, a Delhi-region trip-planning company Bhavish Aggarwal set up in 2010. In January 2011, joined by Ankit Bhati, he pivoted to Ola Cabs as a taxi-aggregation firm — an early instance of a smart Indian founder identifying that the cab supply was fragmented enough to be aggregated by software.

The origin story Schultz tells about benefits begins with his father's ankle. His father Fred cycled through poorly paid work as a truck driver and on factory floors, and when he broke his ankle on the job he was fired without medical benefits or compensation, leaving the family to absorb the injury's cost on its own. The experience shaped his son's conviction that a company's obligations to its workers extend beyond wages, a theme he carried directly into business practice at Starbucks with comprehensive health coverage and stock options extended to part-time workers. The policy program that made Starbucks famous as an employer, Bean Stock and health benefits for people working twenty hours a week, is best read as the institutional answer to a specific family memory of what employment without protection does to a household. The through-line from a Brooklyn childhood to partner benefits is the most consistent element of Schultz's public philosophy across four decades in business.

Institutional Investor's reporting on the Medallion fund examined the long-running puzzle of how to interpret the extraordinary returns generated by the vehicle over four decades and the academic debate over whether the returns admitted of any single explanation rooted in known mechanisms or whether they stretched the plausible explanation of any single mechanism to its limit. The article noted that the fund's performance had been the subject of academic debate, with some scholars arguing that the returns stretched the plausible explanation of any single mechanism and that the persistence of the returns over such a long period posed a genuine challenge to the conventional frameworks for understanding market efficiency. Others defended the thesis that the systematic exploitation of small regularities in market data could compound into the observed record and that the persistence was itself evidence of the robustness of the underlying regularities rather than of any anomaly that would be expected to decay. The article highlighted the structural conditions that made the Medallion record possible, including the restriction of the fund largely to internal capital, the construction of an internal market for shares among employees, and the resulting ability of the firm to retain its scientists and to operate without the redemption pressure that constrained external-capital funds and that periodically forced less structurally protected firms to liquidate positions at unfavorable prices. The piece argued that these structural conditions were as important to the record as the models themselves, since they allowed the firm to revise or replace strategies without facing the redemption pressure that constrained external-capital funds and that would have forced the firm to liquidate positions at unfavorable prices during the periods of underperformance that the revision process inevitably produced. The article observed that this structural advantage had been replicated only imperfectly by other firms seeking to copy the Renaissance model and that the imperfection of the replication was itself evidence of the difficulty of reproducing the institutional conditions that had produced the original record. The coverage also examined the implications of the Medallion record for the broader question of market efficiency and for the academic debate over the limits of the efficient-markets hypothesis in light of the empirical record that the fund had produced. The article noted that the existence of a fund with such a record over such a period posed a genuine challenge to the strongest forms of the efficient-markets hypothesis, but that the restriction of the fund largely to internal capital meant that the anomaly was not directly arbitrageable by external investors and that the challenge to the hypothesis was therefore indirect rather than direct. The piece closed by observing that the Medallion record remained the central case study in the limits of systematic investing, and that the conditions that produced it remained difficult to replicate despite the close attention of competitors and despite the resources that those competitors had committed to the attempt at replication.

Ola Electric was spun out in 2017 as a wholly-owned subsidiary of ANI Technologies, Ola Cabs' parent, with the initial mission of decarbonising Ola's own cab fleet. The Nagpur pilot of May 2017 — charging stations and procured e-cabs, e-buses and e-rickshaws — was the first credible Indian experiment in mass electric mobility by a private platform.

The Wikipedia entry on Renaissance Technologies documents the founding of the firm in 1982 by James Simons, a mathematician who had previously worked in academic research and in national security code-breaking and who had come to the conviction that mathematical models could detect patterns in market data that human intuition alone could not. The entry traces the firm's evolution from a small operation employing traditional investment strategies into one of the most successful quantitative investment firms in history, with the transition driven by Simons's growing conviction that the systematic application of mathematical methods to market data could produce results that discretionary trading could not match. The transition was driven by Simons's conviction that mathematical models could detect patterns in market data that human intuition alone could not, and by his willingness to recruit scientists rather than traditional traders and to delegate to them the substantive work of building the models that would define the firm's approach. The entry describes the firm's signature Medallion fund, which was restricted largely to the firm's own employees and which generated returns that placed it among the most successful investment vehicles ever recorded and that did so over a period long enough to defeat any explanation rooted in chance or in transient market conditions. The fund's structure reflected the firm's belief that the strategies it employed had limited capacity, and that the returns could not be sustainably extended to external capital at scale without diluting the performance and without exposing the strategies to the risk of replication by competitors. The entry notes that the firm's external funds, including the Renaissance Institutional Equities Fund launched in 2005, were intended to extend the firm's approach to a broader investor base but did not match the Medallion fund's historical performance, a discrepancy that the entry observes has been the subject of significant discussion in the financial press. The article also documents the firm's distinctive culture, which combined the structure of a hedge fund with the operating practices of a scientific research organization and which treated the trading floor as a research environment rather than as a venue for discretionary decision-making. Employees were typically recruited from academic backgrounds in mathematics, physics, and computer science, and the firm's offices were reportedly designed to resemble research laboratories rather than trading floors, with the cultural signal that the design choice sent being itself a deliberate part of the firm's approach to recruiting and retention. The entry notes that the firm's compensation structure, which paid employees in part through shares in the Medallion fund, aligned the interests of staff with the long-term performance of the flagship vehicle and created a closed internal market for shares that further insulated the firm from external pressure. The cumulative portrait is of an institution that treated investing as a scientific problem to be solved through systematic inquiry rather than as a domain of judgment and intuition.

Bhavish Aggarwal was born in 1985 in Ludhiana, Punjab, and graduated in computer engineering from IIT Bombay in 2008. He spent two years at Microsoft Research India, filing two patents and publishing three international papers — an unusual research-first training for an Indian consumer-internet founder, and one that later surfaced in his insistence on building core IP rather than licensing it.

Ghanshyam Das Birla (1894–1983) founded what became the Birla Group, expanding from a family jute-trading base in Calcutta into textiles, aluminium, cement and chemicals, and establishing one of the most diversified Indian-owned industrial houses of the pre-independence era.

Li Xiang's Li Auto shares closed up 2.05% at $12.95 , outperforming the broader auto sector as investors reacted to the company's July 2026 delivery update showing .

HKUST appointed Zhang as an adjunct professor, reflecting a pivot toward an academic/public-commentary role alongside his continued position at Sohu.

Li Xiang's Li Auto by 2025 , our charging network is expected to cover over 90% of national expressways and over 90% of core urban areas in Tier 1–3 cities. Read more.

Anand Mahindra led the Mahindra Group from a tractor-and-UV manufacturer into a diversified industrial, IT-services and financial-services house, a pivot framed around the explicit idea that a farm-to-auto group could extend into technology and services without abandoning its manufacturing base.

The Simons Foundation's remembrance of its founder, published in May 2024, traced the arc of James Simons's life from his childhood in Massachusetts through his careers in academic mathematics, in national security code-breaking, and in quantitative finance, treating the three as a continuous application of mathematical reasoning to problems that others had defined as unsystematic. The piece noted that Simons made fundamental contributions to geometric topology, including the invariants that bear his name and that have since become central to several branches of theoretical physics, before turning his attention to financial markets in the late 1970s. The foundation's tribute emphasized that Simons treated each of these chapters as the application of mathematical reasoning to problems that others had defined as unsystematic and that he had insisted on treating as systematic, and that the insistence itself had been the through-line that connected the seemingly distinct chapters of his career and that had shaped the design of each institution he had built. The remembrance highlighted the founding of Renaissance Technologies in 1982 and the gradual construction of the Medallion fund into the vehicle that would generate what the foundation described as extraordinary returns over the subsequent four decades and that would become the central case study in the limits of systematic investing at scale. The tribute noted that Simons insisted on recruiting scientists rather than traders, and that he built an institution in which research autonomy and peer-reviewed rigor were prized above the conventional incentives of the financial industry and above the deal-driven culture that characterized the traditional trading floor. The foundation observed that this institutional design was itself a contribution, and that it had been studied by other firms seeking to replicate the Renaissance model and that the attempts at replication had met with mixed success in ways that underscored the difficulty of reproducing the institutional conditions that had produced the original record. The piece also documented Simons's turn, in the latter decades of his life, to large-scale philanthropy through the Simons Foundation and through Math for America, both of which reflected the same conviction that had defined his earlier careers and that had shaped the design of Renaissance. The tribute emphasized that his philanthropic work was animated by the same conviction that had defined his earlier careers, namely that sustained support for talented individuals, working on hard problems with sufficient autonomy, could produce results that no targeted program could and that the structure of the support was as important as the amount. The remembrance closed by noting that Simons's legacy would be measured not only by his contributions to mathematics and finance but by the institutions he built to support future generations of scientists and teachers and by the demonstration that the methods of scientific research could be applied to the problem of financial returns in a way that produced durable results.

Brijmohan Lall Munjal (1924-2015) founded Hero Cycles in 1956 and built it into the world's largest bicycle maker by volume, then extended the franchise into motorcycles through the 1984 joint venture with Honda, forming Hero Honda which became the world's largest two-wheeler manufacturer.

The Math for America website describes the organization as a nonprofit founded in 2004 by James Simons and his wife Marilyn, with the mission of supporting outstanding mathematics and science teachers in public schools and with the explicit goal of addressing the chronic attrition of the strongest teachers from the systems that needed them most. The organization provides multi-year fellowships that include stipends, professional development, and a community of peers, with the explicit goal of retaining the most effective teachers in the classrooms where they are most needed and where the impact of their retention on student outcomes is greatest. The site notes that the model was designed in response to the high attrition rates that have long characterized the teaching profession, particularly in mathematics and science, and that the design was informed by research on the conditions that support effective teaching. The site explains that the organization's approach rests on the conviction that the most reliable way to improve mathematics and science education is to retain the most talented teachers, and that direct compensation is the most effective mechanism for that retention given the compensation gaps that drive attrition and given the difficulty of replicating in public education the compensation structures that prevail in the private sector. The model was developed under the direction of the Simons Foundation, with the design informed by research on the conditions that support effective teaching and on the factors that drive attrition among the strongest teachers in urban public school systems. The fellowships are described as non-competitive in the sense that they are awarded on the basis of demonstrated teaching excellence rather than on the basis of a contest among applicants, and the design choice reflects the founders' view that the recognition of proven excellence is more reliable than the recruitment of unproven potential. The site also documents the geographic scope of the program, which has been concentrated in New York City and has expanded into additional regions through affiliated programs that adapt the model to local conditions while preserving the core structure of direct support for effective teachers. The organization reports that it has supported thousands of teachers over its two decades of operation, with measurable effects on retention and on the professional satisfaction of participants and with the effects documented through ongoing evaluation that the organization has used to refine the design of the program. The site closes by noting that the model has been studied by other regions seeking to replicate its approach, and that the underlying conviction remains that the systemic improvement of mathematics education must begin with the support of the teachers already working effectively in the classroom and that the improvement of outcomes depends on the retention of the teachers who are already producing them.

Jehangir Ratanji Dadabhoy Tata (1904–1993), known as JRD, led Tata Sons for half a century from 1938 to 1988 and is credited with consolidating the group's diversified interests into a modern conglomerate while also pioneering civil aviation in India.

Wang Ning's Pop Mart | Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Pop Mart Ning Wang, generating more than 2 billion yuan (~$295 million) a year in revenue .

Wang Ning's Pop Mart jun 19, 2025 · The soaring stock price has also quickly made its founder Wang Ning the richest person in China's Henan province, the tenth richest man in China .

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Sameer Nigam co-founded PhonePe inside Flipkart in 2015 and built it into India's dominant UPI payments platform by transaction share, a position sustained after the 2022 spin-out from Flipkart and the move of the entity's domicile from Singapore to India.

Byrraju Ramalinga Raju founded Satyam Computer Services in 1987 and built it into India's fourth-largest IT services company before his January 2009 confession that he had falsified the firm's accounts over several years, an admission that became the defining corporate-governance failure of Indian tech's first wave.

Ding Lei's NetEase jul 5, 2022 · William Ding Lei, founder of China's second-largest video gaming company NetEase, has relinquished his roles as legal representative and .

Ding Lei's NetEase apr 27, 2022 · Ding, 50, recently stepped down as the legal representative, general manager and director of Beijing NetEase Media Co, corporate .

Verghese Kurien (1921-2012) is credited with engineering India's White Revolution, converting the Kaira District Cooperative from a local milk union into the Amul and GCMMF cooperative structure that made India the world's largest milk producer through an institutional rather than a technological innovation.

Suchi Mukherjee founded LimeRoad in 2012 as a women-focused social-commerce and fashion e-commerce platform, building the venture around a scrapbook-style discovery model that prefigured the later Indian social-commerce wave.

Naveen Jindal (b. 1970) leads Jindal Steel and Power and is the public face of the Jindal Group's second generation, distinct from his father O.P. Jindal's founding generation both for the operating scale of JSPL and for his parallel political career as a two-term member of Parliament.

Zomato was incorporated on 18 January 2010 as DC Foodiebay Online Services, having started life informally on 10 July 2008 as a restaurant-listing site run by two Bain consultants. The founders — Deepinder Goyal and Pankaj Chaddah — moved from menu digitisation to ratings, photos and reviews, building the aggregator playbook that competitors would later copy across emerging markets.

Lai Meisong's ZTO Express is Founder of ZTO Express (Cayman) Inc. and has been its Chairman of Board of Directors since May 2013 and Chief Executive Officer since April 8, .

Lai Meisong's ZTO Express is our founder and has served as chairman of our board of directors since May 2013 and chief executive officer since our inception.

Lai Meisong's ZTO Express mar 10, 2026 · Lai Meisong is the founder, chairman and CEO of ZTO Express, China's largest express delivery firm by parcel volume.

Lai has been deeply involved in China's express-delivery industry for over 20 years and previously served as deputy chairman of the China Express Delivery Association.

Within the partnership, Rong Desheng was known as discreet and cautious, focusing on internal management and technical development, complementing his brother Rong Zongjing's aggressive expansion style.

Ratan Naval Tata (b. 1937) succeeded JRD Tata as chairman of Tata Sons in 1991 and led the group through India's liberalization, converting a largely domestic manufacturing-and-trading conglomerate into a global one through a deliberate sequence of overseas acquisitions.

Flipkart was launched in October 2007 from a two-bedroom apartment in Bengaluru's Koramangala neighbourhood. Its founders, Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, were IIT Delhi classmates who had each spent a short stretch at Amazon before quitting to sell books online. They seeded the venture with roughly two lakh rupees borrowed from their respective families, an unusually small angel cheque even by Indian bootstrapping standards of the late 2000s.

Jamnalal Bajaj (1889–1942) founded the Bajaj Group and is remembered as much for his industrial activity as for his role as a treasurer and close associate of Mahatma Gandhi, a dual identity that shaped the group's early public posture and its later framing as a values-led promoter house.

Eighteen months after the original Hindenburg report, the short seller returned on August 12, 2024 with a fresh attack — this time alleging that Madhabi Puri Buch, chair of SEBI since 2022, had a conflict of interest in the Adani matter due to previous investments. Adani companies lost $2.43 billion of market value on the day, recovering from intraday losses of more than $13 billion.

Inspired by the Israeli-developed ICQ instant-messaging service, Ma's team launched OICQ (Open ICQ) in February 1999 with a Chinese interface, which gained over a million registered users by the end of that year and later became QQ.

The Wikipedia entry on Math for America documents the founding of the organization in 2004 by Jim and Marilyn Simons, with the stated goal of improving mathematics education in public schools by supporting and retaining the most effective teachers and with the explicit focus on retention rather than on the recruitment of new entrants to the profession that distinguished it from many other reform efforts. The entry notes that the organization was established as a nonprofit and that its model centers on multi-year fellowships that combine stipends, professional development, and a community of peers, with the design informed by research on the conditions that support effective teaching and on the factors that drive attrition. The structure of the fellowships was designed to address the conditions that drive attrition among mathematics and science teachers in urban public school systems and to provide the combination of compensation and professional support that the research suggested would be most effective at retention. The entry traces the organization's expansion from its original base in New York City to affiliated programs in additional regions, with the model adapted to local conditions while preserving the core structure of direct support for effective teachers and the focus on retention as the central mechanism for improvement. The article notes that the program has reported measurable effects on teacher retention and on the professional satisfaction of participants, and that the model has been studied by other regions seeking to address similar challenges and that the studies have generally supported the underlying thesis that direct support for effective teachers is the most reliable lever for systemic improvement. The Wikipedia entry also documents the relationship between Math for America and the Simons Foundation, which has provided sustained financial support to the organization since its founding and which has treated the organization as part of its broader portfolio of investments in mathematics education and in the support of mathematics teachers. The entry situates the organization within the broader landscape of educational philanthropy in the United States, and observes that its approach has been distinctive in its focus on supporting teachers already working in classrooms rather than on recruiting new entrants to the profession and in its insistence that the improvement of outcomes depends on the retention of the teachers who are already producing them. The article notes that the model has been the subject of academic study and has been cited in policy discussions about the conditions that support effective teaching and about the design of compensation structures that would address the chronic attrition that has characterized the profession. The Wikipedia entry closes by noting that the organization's longevity and expansion reflect the underlying conviction that the improvement of mathematics education must be grounded in the support of the teachers who are already effective in the classroom and that the structural conditions of the profession must be addressed if the improvement of outcomes is to be sustained over time.

Pony Ma's Tencent also known as Pony Ma, is the chairman and CEO of Chinese internet giant Tencent Holdings .

The Philanthropy Roundtable's almanac entry on Math for America describes the organization as a private, donor-funded initiative designed to address the chronic problem of attrition among the most effective mathematics and science teachers in American public schools and to do so through a structural intervention rather than through the programmatic interventions that characterized many other reform efforts. The entry notes that the organization was founded by Jim and Marilyn Simons and that its model centers on multi-year fellowships that provide stipends, professional development, and a peer community to teachers who have demonstrated excellence in the classroom and who have been selected on the basis of that demonstrated excellence. The approach is described as a deliberate inversion of the conventional reform logic that focuses on recruiting new teachers rather than on retaining those already proven effective, and the inversion is presented as the central innovation of the model. The Roundtable entry highlights the empirical foundation of the model, which was developed in consultation with research on the conditions that support effective teaching and on the factors that drive attrition in urban public school systems and which was designed to address the specific conditions that the research identified as most consequential for retention. The organization's founders argued that the most reliable way to improve outcomes in mathematics and science education was to retain the most effective teachers, and that direct compensation and professional support were the most effective mechanisms for that retention given the compensation gaps that drove attrition and given the difficulty of replicating in public education the compensation structures that prevailed in the private sector. The entry observes that the model has been subject to ongoing evaluation and that its design has been refined in light of evidence on its effects and that the refinements have generally preserved the core structure of direct support for effective teachers rather than diluting it in response to the pressure to expand the program's scope. The entry also documents the relationship between Math for America and the broader philanthropic portfolio of the Simons Foundation, which has supported the organization financially since its founding and which has treated the organization as part of its broader portfolio of investments in mathematics education and in the support of mathematics teachers. The Roundtable notes that the model has been studied by other regions seeking to address similar challenges and that the underlying approach has been cited in policy discussions about the conditions that support effective teaching and about the design of compensation structures that would address the chronic attrition that has characterized the profession. The entry closes by observing that the organization's longevity and measured impact reflect the underlying conviction that philanthropy in education must begin with the support of the teachers already working in the classroom and that the structural conditions of the profession must be addressed if the improvement of outcomes is to be sustained over time and across multiple cohorts of teachers.

Infosys's own profile frames Nilekani as the firm's co-founder and current chairman, who also served as founding chairman of UIDAI in the rank of cabinet minister from 2009 to 2014. The dual identity — corporate founder turned state-infrastructure architect — is the central narrative Infosys itself highlights in his official bio.

Ramkrishna Bajaj (1923-1994) was the younger son of founder Jamnalal Bajaj and steward of the Bajaj Group through the licence-raj decades, the period in which Bajaj Auto became the dominant Indian two-wheeler maker under the protected market of the era.

Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata (1839–1904) is widely regarded as the founding patriarch of the Tata Group and is often called the father of modern Indian industry, both for the businesses he built and for the scale of the institutions he conceived but did not live to see completed.

Falguni Nayar founded Nykaa in 2012 after a long career in investment banking, building a beauty e-commerce business that listed in 2021 as one of the rare Indian consumer-tech unicorns to both go public and remain profitable at the operating level at the time of listing.

Jack Ma's Alibaba the decision to postpone the listing is also linked to the recent rhetoric from Jack Ma .

Jack Ma's Alibaba iPO: The suspension, seen as a measure to rein in Jack Ma, was done after a meeting between the regulators and the company's top executives. Private .

Jack Ma's Alibaba planned to raise US$34.5 billion in what would have been one of the largest IPO in history, valuing the company at US$313 billion.

The founding of Scindia Steam Navigation in 1919, against the shipping lines of British India, is treated as the first Indian-owned challenge to the European shipping monopoly on the coastal and Eastern trades, and as the symbolic opening of Indian industrial ambition into transport infrastructure.

Simons's retirement as chief executive in 2009, with his transition to a non-executive chairman role, represented an unusual succession in an industry where founders frequently remain at the helm into their later years. The handover to Peter Brown, a mathematician and long-time co-head of research, signaled that the firm's competitive advantage lay in the research culture rather than in the founder's personal pattern recognition. The transition was made possible by the institutionalization of the research process over the prior two decades. By 2009, the firm's signals, infrastructure, and trading systems were embedded in a research operation whose collective competence exceeded any single individual's. Simons could step back precisely because the firm's edge had been encoded into a process rather than held as personal judgment. The post-Simons performance record is itself informative. The Medallion Fund's returns in the decade after his retirement did not collapse, contrary to the prediction one would make if the edge had depended on the founder's discretion. The fact that the strategy continued to compound at comparable rates confirms that the firm had successfully transferred its capability into a research culture that could persist without the founder's daily involvement - a property that most hedge funds, including celebrated ones, have failed to achieve.

The Hustle Q&A probed Druckenmiller's views on whether the US equity market was in another tech bubble in early 2024. His response, as captured in the article, was cautious: he acknowledged the valuation premium being paid for AI-exposed names but distinguished between a bubble (which requires broad participation and leverage) and a concentration-driven re-rating of a small number of genuine winners. He noted that the market capitalization of the largest technology firms had grown to a share of the index that historically indicated vulnerability, while the underlying earnings power of those firms was also genuinely unprecedented. Druckenmiller's broader point, paraphrased in the Hustle piece, was that calling tops is a low-probability game and that the more useful question is what the market is pricing in versus what the underlying fundamentals support. He has argued across multiple interviews that the late-1990s bubble was identifiable as a bubble because the underlying businesses were not generating the cash flows to justify the prices. In 2024 the situation was structurally different: the leading technology firms were generating real free cash flow, and the question was how much of the future was already in the price. The conversation closed with Druckenmiller's framework for what makes a great investor. The Hustle article paraphrased his answer as a combination of intellectual humility, the willingness to act against consensus when one's own work justifies it, and the operational discipline to size positions in proportion to that work. The Q&A reinforced his reputation for treating investing less as forecasting than as risk management: the question is never 'what will happen' but 'what is the asymmetry between what is priced in and what I can defend with evidence.'

Decoding the Medallion record also requires recognizing that the firm's edge is not, in any meaningful sense, a single strategy. The signals that produced returns in 1990 are not the same signals that produce returns today. The firm's research operation has continuously refreshed the signal set, retiring patterns that have decayed and adding patterns discovered in new data. This contradicts a common misconception that quant funds find a formula and run it indefinitely. In practice, the half-life of an arbitrage signal, once discovered, is short - competitors notice, the inefficiency narrows, and the signal decays. The durable edge is not any single formula but the research infrastructure that produces a stream of new signals faster than old ones decay. The implication for evaluating the firm is that the historical return record is evidence about the research process, not about any specific strategy. An outside investor who tried to replicate Medallion's returns by copying its published holdings, or by inferring its signals from market behavior, would arrive years late to each opportunity. The moat is the research pipeline, not the positions themselves. This is why the firm's edge has survived both the closure of the fund to outside capital and the public scrutiny of its returns.

Carnegie's Wikipedia biography records his earliest American employment as a cotton-mill bobbin boy after his family migrated to Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, in 1848, with subsequent work as a telegrapher, and that by the 1860s he had investments in railroads, railroad sleeping cars, bridges, and oil derricks. The biography frames the 1860s as the diversified-capital phase that preceded his concentrated steel bet, and notes that the cotton-mill and telegrapher years were the formative discipline from which his later cost-conscious and operator-minded management style descended. The progression from bobbin boy to telegrapher to railroad executive to sleeping-car and bridge investor to oil-derrick speculator and finally to integrated steelmaker is the canonical Carnegie arc the biography uses to explain how an immigrant weaver's son assembled the personal capital and operating apprenticeship that made the Carnegie Steel bet possible at all, and how a decade of small stakes preceded the million-dollar steel venture.

The Wikipedia article on the Gospel of Wealth records that Carnegie, at age thirty-five, decided to limit his personal wealth and donate the surplus to benevolent causes, and that the essay is the published form of the philosophy by which he tried to live. The article notes that Carnegie bases his argument on the observation that the heirs of large fortunes frequently squander them in riotous living rather than nurturing and growing them, and that he disapproved of charitable giving that keeps people in poverty, urging instead a mode of giving that creates opportunities for beneficiaries to better themselves. The article also records that the essay examines the modes of distributing accumulated wealth and capital to the communities from which they originate, and that it directly influenced the subsequent founding of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The Wikipedia article on the Carnegie Steel Company records that the firm acquired the Homestead Steel Works in 1883 and that Henry Clay Frick proposed the consolidation of the various plants and assets, including H. C. Frick & Company, into a single operating entity, a consolidation that occurred on July 1, 1892, with the formation of the Carnegie Steel Company. The article records that the company headquarters were located in the Carnegie Building, an early skyscraper in Downtown Pittsburgh later demolished in 1952, and that Carnegie Steel made major technological innovations in the 1880s, especially the installation of the open-hearth furnace system at Homestead in 1886, along with vastly improved material-handling systems including overhead cranes, hoists, charging machines, and buggies. The combination of consolidation and mechanization is the operational basis for the scale advantage that made the firm Morgan's acquisition target in 1901.

The Wikipedia article on the Homestead strike records that on July 6, 1892, Henry Clay Frick brought in three hundred armed Pinkerton agents aboard two barges towed up the Monongahela River to take possession of the works, that fighting broke out at dawn between the Pinkertons and the locked-out workers massed on the riverbank, and that by the afternoon seven workers and three Pinkerton agents had been killed with many more wounded. The article records that after a twelve-hour standoff the Pinkertons surrendered and were marched under worker guard through a hostile crowd to a public hall, that several Pinkertons were beaten along the route, and that the barges were burned. The article identifies the riverbank battle as the moment that turned a wage dispute into a national political crisis and made Carnegie's absence in Scotland the subject of sustained press criticism.

The Wikipedia article on the Carnegie Corporation records that the foundation has endowed or helped establish institutions including the United States National Research Council, Harvard University's Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies (formerly the Russian Research Center), the Carnegie libraries, the University of Chicago Graduate Library School, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and the Carnegie Institution for Science. The article treats this grant-making pattern as Carnegie's institutional architecture for American civil society, in which the Corporation functioned as a perpetual engine that spawned and sustained specialized operating institutions rather than dispersing funds directly to individuals, a model that distinguished Carnegie's philanthropy from the more diffuse charitable giving of his predecessors. The article notes that recent annual financing for international development has exceeded twenty-four million dollars, evidence that the founding thesis still produces measurable outflows more than a century later.

The Wikipedia article on Carnegie Mellon records that the merger with the Mellon Institute in 1967 created the present research university, that the Mellon Institute had itself been founded in 1913 by Andrew Mellon and Richard B. Mellon of the Mellon banking family as an independent industrial research laboratory, and that the combined institution retained the Carnegie name as the public brand while absorbing the Mellon scientific research apparatus. The article notes that the university's motto, adopted from Carnegie's founding statement, is My heart is in the work, and that the institution has subsequently become a leading American research university particularly identified with computer science, robotics, and engineering, with the school's computer science program regularly ranked at or near the top of American programs. The Carnegie-Mellon merger is the institutional embodiment of the founder-thesis: capital from a steel fortune and capital from a banking fortune, applied decades apart, eventually consolidated into a single operating institution.

The Wikipedia article on the Carnegie Hero Fund records that Carnegie expanded the concept to Europe with the establishment on September 21, 1908, of the British Carnegie Hero Fund Trust, based in Dunfermline, Scotland, and that within the next three years equivalent foundations followed in nine other European countries: the French Fondation Carnegie in 1909, the German Carnegie Stiftung für Lebensretter in late 1910, the Norwegian Carnegie Heltefond for Norge in March 1911, the Dutch Stichting Carnegie Heldenfonds in March 1911, the Swiss Fondation Carnegie pour les Sauveteurs in April 1911, the Belgian Carnegie Hero Fund Commission in July 1911, the Italian Fondazione Carnegie in September 1911, the Swedish Carnegiestiftelsen in October 1911, and the Danish Carnegies Belønningsfond for Heltemod in December 1911. The article treats this European expansion as a single sustained program that took the Hero Fund from a Pittsburgh idea to a transatlantic network in seven years.

The Wikipedia article on the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace records that Carnegie had already provided funding for the Peace Palace at The Hague, which opened in 1913 as the home of the Permanent Court of Arbitration, and that the Endowment was the standing institutional vehicle through which Carnegie intended to advance the cause of international arbitration over the long run. The article notes that the Endowment's endowment and the Peace Palace gift together represented the largest single commitment by any private individual to the cause of international peace up to that time, and that the founder's selection of Root, a Republican foreign-policy elder, signaled that the project was meant to operate within the existing state system rather than as a pacifist protest against it. The article treats the Endowment and the Palace as complementary instruments of Carnegie's peace program.

The Wikipedia article on the Carnegie library records that the first library Carnegie funded was at Dunfermline, Scotland, in 1881, his birthplace, and that the grant formula required the receiving community to provide the land, to staff and maintain the library, and to commit annually to operating funds equal to ten percent of the original grant. The article treats this matching-and-maintenance formula as the operational signature of Carnegie's philanthropy, in which the founder's capital was used to seed local institutions on condition of permanent local support, and notes that the formula was applied across the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, the Caribbean, and elsewhere in the British Empire. The article notes that the program cost Carnegie roughly sixty million dollars over its lifetime and that he is recorded as having spent more on libraries than any other individual in history.

The Wikipedia article on the Edgar Thomson Steel Works records that Carnegie had visited Bessemer steel plants in England in 1872 and that he secured the American rights to the Bessemer process for rail production, that the works were designed by Alexander Lyman Holley, the leading American Bessemer engineer, and that the plant's two Bessemer converters and rail-rolling mill established the production template copied by later American Bessemer plants. The article notes that the Edgar Thomson works continued in operation under U. S. Steel after the 1901 acquisition and that the works were substantially modernized over the following decades with open-hearth furnaces and, eventually, basic-oxygen-process steelmaking. The article treats the works as the still-operating physical foundation of Carnegie's steel fortune, since steel has been produced continuously on the Braddock site from 1875 to the present, making it one of the longest continuously operating steelmaking sites in the United States.

The Wikipedia article on Henry Clay Frick records that Frick directed the 1892 Homestead strike response as chairman of Carnegie Steel, that he ordered the Pinkerton agents to the works on July 6, 1892, that he survived the July 23, 1892 assassination attempt by anarchist Alexander Berkman, and that he continued to direct operations from his hospital bed. The article records that the partnership between Frick and Carnegie ruptured irreparably in the years after the strike, that Frick was forced out of the chairmanship in 1894 over a dispute about the valuation of Frick's coke assets within the consolidated Carnegie Steel Company, and that he later sued Carnegie for the value of his interest. The article notes that the Frick-Carnegie correspondence during the strike survives as the primary historical record of the strike's management and that the personal rupture between the two men was never reconciled, despite a famous deathbed exchange reported by Clara Kelley, in which Carnegie requested a meeting and Frick replied that he would see him in hell.

The Wikipedia article on the United States Steel Corporation records that Charles M. Schwab, the Carnegie Steel executive who originally suggested the merger to Morgan, ultimately emerged as the new corporation's first president, and that the formation was financed with significant debt because Andrew Carnegie demanded gold bonds for his share of the Carnegie Steel proceeds. The article records that U. S. Steel maintained the labor policies of Andrew Carnegie — that is, the non-union posture that prevailed at Carnegie Steel after the 1892 Homestead strike — and that the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers union that had represented workers at the Homestead plant remained broken for many years. The article notes that U. S. Steel defeated another strike in 1901, the year of its founding, and that the firm was listed on the Dow Jones Industrial Average from April 1, 1901, until May 3, 1991, a continuous ninety-year presence as a constituent of the index.

The Federal Reserve History account details the decision that turned the Knickerbocker Trust into the panic's detonation point. After news broke on October 18 that its president, Charles T. Barney, was an associate of Charles Morse, and runs had begun, on Monday, October 21, the National Bank of Commerce asked the New York Clearing House for a loan on the Knickerbocker's behalf. The Clearing House refused, its resources being reserved for member institutions, and the Knickerbocker stood outside the membership. A request for aid was then made to J. P. Morgan, who asked Benjamin Strong, then a vice president at Bankers Trust and later the first head of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, to examine the Knickerbocker's books and determine its condition. In the time available, Strong could make no definitive determination of solvency, and Morgan therefore refused to aid the trust. That day the board dismissed Barney, the National Bank of Commerce withdrew as clearing agent, and after nearly eight million dollars of withdrawals the Knickerbocker suspended operations.

In 1859 Rockefeller pooled $1,000 he had saved and another $1,000 borrowed from his father to launch a produce commission partnership with Maurice B. Clark. That same year, Edwin Drake's well at Titusville, in western Pennsylvania, struck oil and ignited the new petroleum industry. Cleveland, with its rail and lake access, quickly became a major refining center. Rockefeller and Clark entered the trade in 1863, partnering with chemist Samuel Andrews to build and operate an oil refinery under the name Andrews, Clark & Co. By the mid-1860s the partners disagreed over how aggressively to expand; they agreed to auction the refinery to the highest bidder among themselves. Rockefeller bought out Clark's interest for $72,500 and reorganized the business as Rockefeller & Andrews. The deal put a single Cleveland refinery at the center of what would, within a decade, become Standard Oil. Drake's Titusville strike had opened an industry; Rockefeller's $72,500 buyout quietly opened a consolidation arc that would define American oil.

The Standard Oil Trust was born on January 2, 1882, when forty-one investors signed a trust agreement that pooled the securities of forty separately incorporated operating companies into a single holding vehicle managed by nine trustees. The trust's initial valuation was $70 million. The legal architecture—widely credited to Standard Oil's general solicitor Samuel Calvin Tate Dodd—let the trustees centralize control of geographically scattered refineries, pipelines, and storage firms that Ohio corporation law would not have permitted a single company to own. The public and the press were immediately suspicious of what critics called 'a corporation of corporations,' and rival businesses rapidly copied the device, seeding the trust wave that defined American industry for the next two decades and the antitrust reaction that ultimately undid it. The Standard Oil Trust became the structural template for U.S. Steel, American Tobacco, and the other great industrial combinations of the Gilded Age.

By 1880 the New York World labeled Standard Oil 'the most cruel, impudent, pitiless, and grasping monopoly that ever fastened upon a country.' Rockefeller conceded that in a business of that scale some things were inevitably done that could not be defended, but otherwise insisted that scale was simply efficiency in disguise. The political pressure built: in 1879 the New York State Legislature's Hepburn Committee investigated 'alleged abuses' by the railroads and concluded that Standard Oil was receiving substantial freight rebates on every barrel it shipped—and, through drawbacks, on barrels its competitors shipped—thereby crushing the field. The committee's findings made the rebate structure public and gave the antitrust movement its first sustained body of evidence. The Sherman Antitrust Act, passed in 1890, was originally aimed at labor combinations but became, by the turn of the century, the principal legal weapon deployed against the Standard Oil Trust.

The Rockefeller Institute Hospital, opened in 1910, was the first U.S. center dedicated exclusively to clinical research—the bridge between laboratory discovery and patient care that became a defining feature of academic medicine. The hospital embedded physicians inside a research institute, gave them protected time to study disease in patients under their direct care, and allowed laboratory findings to move quickly into clinical protocols. The model—which became standard at Johns Hopkins, Harvard, Washington University, and eventually every major academic medical center—was directly exported by Rockefeller-trained scientists and Rockefeller Foundation fellowships across the country and abroad. After two years in temporary quarters the institute's permanent laboratories opened in 1906 on the site of the former Schermerhorn farm at York Avenue and 66th Street in Manhattan, the campus the institution still occupies today. The hospital's clinical-research model proved to be the institute's most replicated institutional innovation.

The concrete announcement was Llama 3.1 405B, which Zuckerberg presented as the first frontier-level open source AI model, released alongside improved seventy-billion and eight-billion parameter versions. Openness, he argued, would make the largest model the best choice for fine-tuning and distilling smaller ones, with significantly better cost performance than closed equivalents. Meta paired the release with an ecosystem strategy: Amazon, Databricks, and NVIDIA launched service suites for developers customizing models; Groq built low-latency, low-cost inference serving; the models landed on all major clouds including AWS, Azure, Google, and Oracle; and Scale AI, Dell, and Deloitte positioned to help enterprises train custom models on their own data. The goal was explicit: make Llama the industry standard, the way Linux became the standard foundation nobody had to negotiate permission to build upon. He set the destination in one line: starting the following year, he expected future Llama models to be the most advanced in the industry.

The memo's central metaphor is that Netflix models itself on a professional sports team, not a family. Families are about unconditional love and can be dysfunctional; professional sports teams focus on performance and on fielding the right person at every position, even if that means benching someone they love for a stronger player. The Dream Team is held together by named values rather than sentiment: selflessness, seeking what is best for Netflix rather than oneself; judgment, favoring long-term solutions and using data to inform intuition; candor, giving and receiving feedback openly and admitting mistakes; creativity, courage, inclusion, curiosity, and resilience, making tough decisions without agonizing delay. The memo describes extraordinary candor as part of everyday work, comparing its routine quality to brushing one's teeth, and acknowledges the courage required to give feedback to someone more senior or from a different background. Integrity is defined simply: only say things about a colleague that you would share with them directly.

In 1981 Schultz was working as director of retail operations and marketing for Hammarplast, a Swedish housewares company, when he saw that a tiny Seattle coffee bean retailer kept ordering far more product than its size suggested. Curiosity, plus a salesman's instinct for an account behaving anomalously, took him to Seattle to see the customer for himself. The store was Starbucks, and Schultz found himself captivated by the passion and knowledge its founders had for coffee, an intensity of craft he had not encountered in the kitchenware business. He saw growth potential in what he found and joined the company a year later as director of marketing, trading a general manager's title at a European manufacturer's American subsidiary for a marketing role at a six-store coffee retailer. The decision, made on the evidence of an order book and a store visit, is the pivot on which the subsequent history of the company, and of American coffee culture, turned.

His early business life was defined by the jute trade dominated by British expatriate firms in Bengal; Birla broke into it by undercutting and by building relationships with Indian-owned mills, an experience that shaped his later preference for Indian-owned productive capacity over intermediary trade.

The acquisition of Satyam Computer Services in 2009 and its merger with Tech Mahindra was the most visible expression of the services pivot, buying a distressed IT-services asset at the bottom of a governance crisis and converting it into the group's technology arm.

Following are links to video on CNBC.com: https://www.cnbc.com/video/2024/05/07/stanley-druckenmiller-the-fed-should-get-rid-of-forward-guidance-and-just-do-their-job.html, https://www.cnbc.com/video/2024/05/07/stanley-druckenmiller-ai-might-be-a-little-over-hyped-now-but-under-hyped-long-term.html and https://www.cnbc.com/video/2024/05/07/stanley-druckenmiller-why-were-spending-like-were-still-in-the-great-depression-is-beyond-me.html.All references must be sourced to CNBC.JOE KERNEN: And we've got a lot of ground to cover with our next guest. So let's get right to it. Stan Druckenmiller is chairman and CEO of Duquesne Family Office. I said earlier, averaging 30 percent for 30 years, never had a down year. It's like -- I think it might be like Pete Rose, kind of. I don't think anybody will get 4,200 hits. I just don't -- I don't -- I don't think anybody will ever again get 30 years of 30 percent of average. Do you?STAN DRUCKENMILLER: I have no idea. I don't know how I did it. So, I don't even know who that person was.KERNEN: You've got like -- right, you got like five big bets and be commit -- you do have some -- some tips I saw, but I don't -- you know, it's just an amazing record. And for anyone who doesn't know who Stan Druckenmiller, I just wanted to say that. Last time we spoke was October, I think. So, six months or so, that's a lifetime obviously in the markets, the economy, and especially with the Fed.

Ma has been named one of the world's most influential people by Time (2007, 2014, 2018) and one of the world's most powerful people by Forbes (2015), and served as a delegate to both the Shenzhen Municipal People's Congress and the 12th National People's Congress.

8% for the MSCI World Index (‘Index’) in sterling with dividends reinvested. The Fund therefore underperformed this comparator in 2024 but a longer-term perspective may be useful and is certainly more consistent with our investment aims and strategy. Since inception, the Fund has returned 2.7% p.a.Sortino

The deliberate move from locks into soaps (the Chavi and later Godrej No.1 lines) and then into safes and steel furniture established the diversification logic that has defined the group ever since: build a manufacturing capability once, then extend it across adjacent consumer and industrial categories.

IPO documents showed Majety holding 6.23% and Reddy 1.76% on a fully diluted basis, but Majety's direct stake was only 0.87% with the remainder coming through special grants and vested ESOPs — and nearly all of Reddy's stake came through ESOPs, a structure that complicates founder economics versus the typical Indian promoter.

The pricing decision — roughly a third of the price of the then-dominant Hindustan Lever detergents — was deliberate and structural: it targeted the Indian household that hand-washed clothes and could not absorb the per-wash cost of premium brands, creating a new price tier rather than competing within the existing one.

The collapse in valuation — from a peak of $22 billion to a fraction of that within two years — was driven by the disclosure that deferred revenue had been booked aggressively and that the physical tutoring acquisitions (Aakash) sat inside a contested security structure, eroding both investor and lender confidence simultaneously.

The core OYO model — leasing or franchising small hotels under a common brand-and-technology standard — traded asset-light economics for operational dependency on hotel-owner cooperation, a tension that surfaced sharply when occupancy collapsed in 2020.

The early decision to focus on downstream steel products — pipes and tubes — rather than upstream steelmaking, was a function of the licence era's capital constraints, and produced a group whose first scale came from specialised manufactured goods rather than commodity steel.

The external review's findings — centred on alleged inflated invoices and related-party transactions involving the founder's family — produced a board-level demand for his departure, an outcome unusual in Indian promoter-led firms where boards have historically deferred to founders.

The stewardship of the Hindustan Times asset — a press holding rather than an industrial one — placed the branch at the intersection of industry and public discourse in a way few Indian promoter houses were, and informed the family's later public posture on policy and economic questions.

His early career in a Bombay textile-export house and an earlier posting in Aden gave him exposure to international markets and to the mechanics of rupee-yen-dollar arbitrage, experience he later deployed in building Reliance's financing and import-substitution strategy.

The decision to hold inventory rather than operate a pure marketplace was the central strategic choice: it traded gross margin for control over authenticity, a trade that mattered more in beauty — where counterfeit risk is high — than in horizontal e-commerce.

Educated at Elphinstone College in Bombay, he joined his father's trading firm and spent formative years in the family's Hong Kong branch, an experience that exposed him to international commerce and shaped his later conviction that India's economic future lay in building productive capacity at home rather than remaining a marketplace for imported goods.

The decision to commit the group's manufacturing capacity to scooters and two-wheelers under the licence regime positioned Bajaj Auto as the volume incumbent that post-liberalisation entrants (Hero Honda, then the Japanese majors) would have to displace, an incumbent position it held for over a decade after 1991.

Beyond Infosys and UIDAI, Nilekani co-founded and chairs EkStep Foundation, a non-profit building a learner-centric technology platform aimed at improving basic literacy and numeracy for millions of Indian children — an extension of the same DPI thinking into early-stage education at population scale.

Investments from Abu Dhabi-based International Holding Company (IHC) and U.S. boutique firm GQG Partners had helped restore investor confidence since the January 2023 report. By August 2024, cumulative market-cap losses since the original Hindenburg report had narrowed to roughly $32.5 billion — down from the immediate $150 billion wipeout.

The industrial ventures he established — including the Bajaj steel and sugar businesses and the precursor to Bajaj Auto — were organised around a Marwari-family base in Wardha and were consciously integrated with Gandhian ideals of swadeshi production.

For its first three years Flipkart deliberately stayed inside a single category — books — refining delivery, packaging and customer service before broadening into electronics, fashion and groceries. The narrow focus let a small team build a defensible reputation for reliability, which it later parlayed into adjacent verticals. That delay contrasted with rivals who tried to stock every category at once.

His early years in the group were spent turning around NELCO, the family's struggling electronics company, an assignment that served as his operating apprenticeship and reinforced his belief in the discipline of fixing assets before scaling them rather than acquiring into weakness.

Lai studied at 'Lakeside University' (Hupan University, an institution co-founded by Jack Ma) and at Tsinghua University's PBC School of Finance, per ZTO's own management biography.

From 2011 to 2015 Zomato entered more than 20 countries — from the UAE, Sri Lanka and Qatar in 2012 to New Zealand, Turkey, Brazil, Indonesia, Chile, Portugal, Canada and Ireland by 2015. The 2015 acquisition of Seattle-based Urbanspoon was the boldest move, plugging Zomato directly into the U.S. and Australian markets and pitting it against Yelp and Foursquare.

The court case that secured the Indian citizen's right to fly the national flag as a matter of free expression — pursued personally by Jindal to the Supreme Court — is the public-interest litigation he is most associated with, and is a rare example of a promoter leveraging constitutional process for a civic question rather than a commercial one.

The discovery-led, social-sharing product architecture — where users curated looks that other users could shop — was a deliberate alternative to the search-led horizontal-commerce model, betting that Indian fashion demand was discovery-driven rather than intent-driven.

The Anand model's central idea — that the dairy farmer owns the upstream supply, the processing and the brand, with the state providing the extension and research layer — was a structural inversion of the processor-owned or state-owned dairy models dominant elsewhere, and is the conceptual root of Operation Flood.

The confession letter of 7 January 2009 stated that Satyam's reported cash and bank balances of roughly 53.6 billion rupees were largely fictitious and that the actual margin was a fraction of what investors had been told, an admission made directly by the founder rather than surfaced by auditors or the board.

The decision to anchor the product on UPI rather than on a wallet or a payments-bank structure placed PhonePe on the regulated public rails rather than alongside them, a strategic choice that insulated it from the licence-risk that later attached to the payments-bank model.

In 1932 he flew the first commercial mail service from Karachi to Bombay, founding Tata Airlines — later nationalised as Air India — making him both the licensed pilot and the founder of Indian civil aviation in a single act.

The 1984 Honda joint venture was the structural decision that defined the Hero story: by pairing Indian manufacturing and distribution reach with Japanese product technology, Munjal accessed the two-wheeler product curve without owning the technology stack, an arrangement that ran for 27 years before the amicable 2011 split.

Aggarwal co-founded Ola Cabs in January 2011 with Ankit Bhati in Bengaluru after a bad personal taxi experience crystallised the mobility opportunity. The partnership paired Bhavish's product-and-strategy bent with Ankit's engineering lead, an operating division of labour that survived until Ankit's later exit from day-to-day operations.

In a striking cap-table move, Aggarwal bought a 92.5 percent stake in Ola Electric from ANI Technologies in late 2018 / early 2019 at a valuation of roughly one lakh rupees (about 1,400 dollars then). ANI retained the remaining 7.5 percent in exchange for licensing the 'Ola' brand, in effect letting the founder house the new venture outside the existing cap table.

Ola started with bookings via phone call and only introduced a mobile app in June 2012. By early 2015 it claimed the largest market share in Indian ride-hailing, ahead of TaxiForSure, Meru Cabs and the newly-arrived Uber. The 2015 acquisition of TaxiForSure for about 1,237 crore rupees consolidated that lead — a textbook case of buying the closest domestic competitor.

Li has served as Baidu's chairman since the company's inception in January 2000 and added the CEO title in February 2004, after initially serving as president from 2000 to 2003.

The outsourcing model — keeping brand, customer and distribution in-house while contracting out the network and IT — was a structural inversion of the integrated-telco model dominant globally, and is treated as the defining strategic choice that let Bharti scale faster than its capital would otherwise have allowed.

In 2000 Lei founded online retailer joyo.com, which he sold to Amazon.com for $75 million in 2004; in 2005 he made a $1 million investment in YY that was later worth far more after the company's IPO.

The Media.net business model — a contextual ad network operating Yahoo! and Bing's publisher inventory — was built to compete with the dominant ad network at the publisher layer, and the exit valuation reflected the strategic value of that inventory relationship rather than consumer-facing growth.

Under Economics, he advocates for a profitable business model, deep market understanding, opportunistic seizing of openings, and financial prudence — a markedly different emphasis from the growth-at-all-costs playbook he had run during Snapdeal's $6.5 billion peak, and an explicit course-correction in his public messaging.

The RBI's directive that Paytm Payments Bank stop accepting fresh deposits from end-January 2024, after persistent compliance failures around know-your-customer and related-party transactions, effectively forced the unwinding of the entity that had anchored the group's payments moat.

Sharma's public statements through the clampdown emphasised compliance remediation over contestation, a posture read as an attempt to preserve the group's regulatory standing rather than litigate the supervisory findings, which itself became part of the case study.

In May 2012 Future Group sold a 50.1% stake in Pantaloons fashion chain to Aditya Birla Group to pare down roughly Rs 8,000 crore of debt. The Pantaloons segment was demerged out of Pantaloons Retail India Ltd, folded into Future Value Retail, and renamed Future Retail Ltd — a corporate restructuring designed to keep the listed retail vehicle clean while offloading the apparel business to a better-capitalized rival.

In 2019 Amazon.com NV Investment Holdings paid roughly Rs 1,500 crore for a 49% stake in Future Coupons, which gave Amazon an indirect minority stake in Future Retail plus a contractual right of first refusal on Future Retail's assets. The structuring was deliberately chosen to navigate India's foreign-ownership rules on multi-brand retail —.

The Supreme Court of India's findings that Dream11's format constitutes a game of skill rather than a game of chance — the legal foundation on which the entire Indian fantasy-sports category rests — is the single regulatory event that defines the company, and was contested case by case across multiple state jurisdictions.

And I've been -- I know you watch, and I've been perplexed, and we will talk about Perplexity later, but I've been perplexed about the unwavering focus the Fed has had on cuts. It's been difficult to understand because it's been the entire time. And I'm just wondering, how do you view this period, that six-month period, where the focus that's all we've heard about -- did cuts make sense the whole time? What's causing that?DRUCKENMILLER: Thank you, and I'm happy to be here. Thanks for having me on. I was -- I was perplexed with the December pivot if that's what you're referring to. It seemed to me the Fed was in a perfect position. Inflation was coming down, financial conditions were tightening. And to some extent, I feel like they fumbled on the five-yard line with the game on the line. I remember saying to some of my partners, that's a speech I thought we might hear in March, as opposed to now because there's like four or five more months that potentially could lead to inflation coming down the way they needed to come down. Instead, they set financial -- financial conditions on fire again. Bitcoin -- I can't remember where it started from but it went from like 30,000 to 70,000. Equities obviously credit, interest rates.

The 2022 domicile shift to India, completed before a planned local listing, reflected a preference for an Indian-domiciled public entity over a Singapore holding structure, a posture consistent with the wider post-2020 trend among Indian fintech founders.

The fraud's mechanics — booking fictitious revenue and inflating the headcount billed to clients over multiple years — exposed the thinness of independent oversight at a company whose board included prominent independent directors, turning the case into the standard reference for the limits of board-level controls.

The decision to build NDDB as a replicator of the Anand model across India's dairy belts, rather than to nationalise Amul, was the institutional choice that let the cooperative form scale without losing its producer-owned character.

Nirma's distribution, built on a network of small retailers and a memorable mass-media jingle, demonstrated that reach into the lower-tier retail fabric mattered as much as the product itself — a combination of pricing, distribution and brand recall that incumbents were slow to replicate.

The eventual acquisition by V-Mart in 2018, after a wind-down of the standalone venture, is read as the acknowledgement that the social-commerce unit economics could not sustain independent scale at the time, and the brand and user base were absorbed into a physical-retail operator.

The coal block allocations awarded to JSPL in the licence-era allocation regime, and their subsequent cancellation in the 2014 de-allocation following the CAG and Supreme Court findings, are the defining regulatory episode of JSPL's last decade and frame the licence-era raw-material allocation model in its sharpest form.

The Tetley (2000), Corus (2007) and Jaguar Land Rover (2008) acquisitions together inverted the group's revenue mix so that the majority of Tata's sales came from outside India by the late 2000s, a globalisation bet executed at a scale no other Indian group attempted in that decade.

Turakhia's wider portfolio — the earlier Directi and Skenzo businesses and the later Radix and Zetta ventures — represents a bootstrapped, technology-first operating model distinct from the venture-funded Indian tech mainstream, and his exits have been consistently to strategic buyers rather than via IPO.

In May 2015 Future Group acquired Bharti Retail in an all-stock deal valued near Rs 500 crore, picking up 216 convenience stores, supermarkets and hypermarkets under the Easyday brand. Bharti Enterprises took 9% stakes in Future Retail Ltd and Future Enterprises Ltd in return, a deal that effectively absorbed Bharti's retail footprint into Biyani's organization while the Bharti side retained an economic interest in the consolidated entity.

By 2015 Zomato's board had concluded that menu aggregation alone was a thin moat; the company moved into food delivery in India, initially outsourcing last-mile logistics to Delhivery, Grab and Runnr. The Runnr acquisition in 2017 in-sourced the fleet and gave Zomato the operational backbone to compete with Swiggy on its own terms.

The decision to back Hindustan Aircraft in 1940 — the precursor to HAL — placed Walchand in aviation at the moment the sector was being wartime-built, a timing that positioned the venture for state acquisition within two years of founding.

Lai is a brother-in-law to fellow ZTO executive Jianchang Lai, per the company's own disclosed management biography, indicating a family relationship among top ZTO leadership.

The Wikipedia article on the Gospel of Wealth records that Carnegie argued that the wealthy should consider the surplus revenues that come from the community as a matter of trust to be administered in the general interest, and that the article locates this argument within Carnegie's broader posture against inherited aristocracy and in favor of progressive taxation and an estate tax. The article notes that the essay contrasts the personal administration of surplus wealth by its possessor with the alternative of leaving wealth at death through testamentary bequest, on the ground that posthumous bequest often misallocates capital to heirs who neither earned nor understand it. The article also records the immediate transatlantic reception: Gladstone arranged for English publication in the Pall Mall Budget, and Cardinal Manning, Rev. Hugh Price, and Rev. Dr. Hermann Adler wrote formal replies, to which Carnegie himself responded, establishing the essay as a live transatlantic debate rather than a closed statement.

The Wikipedia article on the Carnegie Steel Company records that, as the mills expanded, the labor force grew rapidly especially in less-skilled workers, that the more skilled union members reacted with the unsuccessful 1892 Homestead Strike along with demands for reduced working hours and against pay cuts, and that after the unsuccessful strike the company continued to expand with profits growing year on year, reaching net profits of twenty-one million dollars in 1899. The article identifies Jones & Laughlin Steel as the most important competitor to Carnegie Steel and later to U. S. Steel, and notes that after the 1901 sale the subsidiary was renamed the Carnegie-Illinois Steel Company in 1936, incorporating the name of the former Illinois Steel Company that had also been folded into U. S. Steel. The labor and competitive context is the institutional backdrop to the sale.

The Wikipedia article on the Homestead strike records that on July 12, 1892, the Pennsylvania state militia, ordered out by Governor Robert E. Pattison, arrived at Homestead by barge and encamped on the works' grounds, that the militia's presence ended the workers' physical control of the plant and enabled the firm to bring in non-union replacement labor, and that the strike collapsed over the following months with the union broken at Homestead for decades thereafter. The article notes that twenty-nine strikers were indicted on charges including murder, that anarchist Alexander Berkman separately attempted to assassinate Frick on July 23, 1892, shooting and stabbing the manager in his office, and that Frick survived and continued to direct operations. The article treats the collapse as the institutional defeat of the skilled-steel union that defined labor relations in American steel for the next four decades.

An upward spike in call money rates was among the first signals of distress, the Federal Reserve History essay records. On the day the Knickerbocker closed, October 22, the annualized rate on overnight loans against stock collateral jumped from 9.5 percent to seventy percent, reaching one hundred percent two days later; at moments nobody offered credit at any price. That the New York Stock Exchange stayed open at all was largely the work of what the essay calls Morgan's legendary actions: he solicited cash from large financial and industrial institutions and had it delivered straight to the loan post on the exchange floor, supporting brokers as they extended credit. On Saturday, October 26, after an unusual five-day delay, the New York Clearing House Committee formed a panel to issue clearing-house loan certificates, the predecessor to Federal Reserve discount window lending, and the clearing house banks restricted the convertibility of deposits into cash. The restriction produced a currency premium and a substantial influx of gold imports from abroad, which appear to have been instrumental in spurring the New York market's recovery.

The 2021 IPO's reception — priced at a premium and holding value better than the 2021-22 cohort of Indian tech listings — was read as the market's reward for a unit-economics-first model, contrasting with the growth-at-all-cost framing of peers.

The launch of the Vimal brand in the 1970s positioned Reliance as a consumer-facing textile name at a time when Indian fabrics were largely commodity-traded, an early instance of the brand-building instinct the group would later apply across telecom and retail.

In 1870 Rockefeller organized the Standard Oil Company with his brother William, Samuel Andrews, Henry M. Flagler, and silent partner Stephen V. Harkness. It launched with $1 million in capital. The name 'Standard' was chosen to signal the reliable quality and uniform standards Rockefeller intended to impose on a young, chaotic kerosene industry. The corporate structure dispersed operational authority across committees even as Rockefeller, as the largest single shareholder, retained final strategic control. Within two years Standard Oil had purchased nearly every refiner in Cleveland plus two in metropolitan New York, was refining roughly 29,000 barrels of crude oil a day, and ran its own cooper shop manufacturing wooden barrels, along with storage tanks holding several hundred thousand barrels, warehouses, and plants for paint and glue. The combination of horizontal consolidation, vertical ownership, and disciplined cost accounting became the template for the next two decades of expansion.

The fee structure of the Medallion Fund - historically reported at roughly five percent management and forty-four percent performance - is exceptional even by hedge fund standards, and is the mechanism by which the firm has captured a large share of the gross returns generated by its strategy. The structure is only sustainable because the underlying strategy has, over decades, produced net returns after those fees that still exceed any available alternative. The economic logic is that a fund generating sixty-six percent gross with a thirty-nine percent net return is delivering roughly twenty-seven percentage points of gross return to the manager in fees, in exchange for an asset - the net return - that the investor cannot obtain elsewhere at any price. The high fee is, in this view, the price of access to a strategy whose capacity is genuinely scarce. The deeper point is that the firm has refused to lower fees even as assets grew, and has instead capped the fund's size. The combination of capacity rationing and fee preservation is what allows the gross return to be split in the manager's favor without investors defecting. An investor who left the fund would forgo access to a return stream that no available substitute can match. This is the rare case in which the fund's fee schedule is itself evidence of the size of the underlying edge.

The founding of Empress Mills in Nagpur in 1877 was his first industrial venture and a working test of the operating instincts that would define his later bets: he chose to build a manufacturing enterprise in central India, far from the Bombay trading world he knew, signalling a preference for productive assets over mercantile turnover.

Resigned as president and CEO of Kingsoft on December 20, 2007, citing health reasons, after leading it to an IPO earlier that year.

The decision to anchor the IPL and BCCI partnership as the brand's primary distribution — rather than building an independent user-acquisition surface — reflected an understanding that fantasy demand in India is event-driven and that the cricket calendar, not the platform, is the acquisition channel.

On March 21, 1892, the Supreme Court of Ohio ordered the Standard Oil Trust dissolved, and its holdings were reorganized into twenty independent companies that continued to operate as an unofficial combination known as Standard Oil Interests. The structural workaround came in 1899, when the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey—taking advantage of a New Jersey statute that permitted a parent corporation to own the stock of other companies—acquired the shares of the other nineteen members and became the holding company for the entire trust. Jersey Standard operated a near-monopoly in the American oil industry from 1899 until 1911 and was the largest corporation in the United States. The 1911 breakup decree severed thirty-four successor entities from Jersey Standard; the parent company was renamed Exxon in 1973 and merged with Mobil to form ExxonMobil in 1999, while two of the largest severed spinoffs eventually consolidated into Chevron Corporation and BP.

The acquisition of Zain's African operations in 2010 extended the model across the continent, making Bharti the largest African mobile operator by subscriber base and a test case for whether the Indian outsourcing playbook would transplant to lower-ARPU markets.

The fertiliser and viscose investments, made through Zuari Agro and Century, were the licence-era industrial base on which the branch scaled, chosen for their capital intensity and policy-protected returns rather than for consumer-facing growth.

Rockefeller was repeatedly quoted as saying 'the growth of a large business is merely a survival of the fittest' and, more pithily, that 'competition is a sin.' The phrases are imperfectly sourced and contested by his defenders, but they capture the operating logic his partners, his lawyers, and his critics all attributed to him: combinations were more efficient than fragmentation, consolidation was more stable than price wars, and the consolidated firm had a moral as well as commercial claim to the freight discounts and market share that came with scale. He also genuinely believed that orderliness in an industry proceeded only from centralized control of large aggregations of plant and capital, with the single aim of an orderly flow of products from producer to consumer. That belief in centralized order—rather than simple predatory intent—explains why he pursued trust architecture so aggressively after 1880.

The public tone of the dispute — played out on social media rather than in boardrooms — distinguished the case from earlier Indian governance episodes and raised the question of whether fintech boards would, going forward, treat founder conduct as an independent governance category.

The episode is read as the clearest Indian case of regulatory risk attaching directly to a payments-bank structure, illustrating that the regulatory licence itself is a contingent asset whose loss can compress a firm's enterprise value faster than any competitive event.

His public framing of the Bajaj operating philosophy — that the family held its industrial wealth in trust for the public, a direct inheritance of the Gandhian instruction from Jamnalal — was the consistent governance posture across his chairmanship and was the basis on which the family's later trust structures were built.

The group's framing of itself as a swadeshi manufacturer — supplying Indian-made goods during the independence movement — gave the brand a public legitimacy that translated into commercial durability across the licence-raj and post-liberalisation eras.

Ratio of 0.87 versus 0.60 for the Index. This simply means that the Fund has returned about 45%, ((0.87÷0.60)-1)x100, more than the Index for each unit of price volatility, of which more later. Our Fund is the second best performer since its inception in November 2010 in the Investment Association Global sector of 162 funds, with a return 353 percentage points above the sector average which has delivered just 254% over the same timeframe. Outperforming the market or even making a positive return is not something you should expect from our Fund in every year or reporting period, and outperforming the market was more than usually challenging once again in 2024. Just five stocks (the ‘Fab Five’?) Nvidia, Apple, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon provided 45% of the returns of the S&P 500 Index (‘S&P 500’) in 2024. This is similar to the concentration of returns provided by the so-called Magnificent Seven in 2023. Moreover, a single stock — Nvidia — produced over 20% of the S&P 500 returns in 2024. Nor is this concentration of returns in a few technology companies a purely US phenomenon. In Germany 41% of the return from the DAX Index came from a single stock — SAP, the software company whose share price rose by 69% so that it is now trading on a mere 97x earnings. Our Fund owns some but not all of these stocks and it was difficult to perform even in line with the Index unless you owned them at least in line with their index weighting.

The move into upstream steelmaking and into captive power generation in the post-liberalisation period reflected the unwinding of the licence-era capital logic, allowing the group to integrate backward into the commodity end it had previously been barred from.

In January 2023, Nilekani was appointed co-chair of the G20 Task Force on Digital Public Infrastructure for Economic Transformation, Financial Inclusion and Development — putting him at the centre of India's G20 presidency push to export the Aadhaar-UPI stack as a global template for developing economies.

In the IPO's offer-for-sale, Majety and Reddy each offloaded 1.75 million shares worth approximately Rs 130 crore at the recent share-sale price, while third co-founder Rahul Jaimini — who had already left the company in 2020 to co-found edtech Pesto — sold 1.1 million shares worth about Rs 44 crore.

In August 2020 Future announced a Rs 24,713 crore (about $3.3 billion) deal to sell its retail, wholesale and logistics businesses to Reliance Retail Ventures, a Reliance Industries subsidiary. Amazon alleged this breached the Future Coupons agreement, which restricted Future Retail's sale to a list of named competitors including Reliance.

Li holds a bachelor's degree in information science from Peking University and a master's in computer science from the State University of New York at Buffalo, and serves on the board of New Oriental Education & Technology Group.

Zuckerberg enumerated what organizations actually tell him they need from AI. They want to train, fine-tune, and distill their own models, because on-device and classification tasks need small models while complex work needs large ones, and they want to do it without the vendor seeing their data. They want to control their own destiny rather than depend on models a closed provider can change, reprice, or stop serving, or get locked into a single cloud with exclusive rights to a model. They want to protect sensitive data that cannot be sent over external interfaces, which open weights let them run wherever they choose. And they want efficiency: running inference on Llama 3.1 405B on a company's own infrastructure cost roughly half of using closed models like GPT-4o, a margin that compounds across both user-facing and offline workloads, not only batch processing.

Because one outstanding performer in any role delivers many times the impact of an average employee, the memo states, the Dream Team runs on performance, not seniority, tenure, or unconditional loyalty. To recruit and retain what it calls stunning colleagues, Netflix pays personal top of market for the role and location, a judgment about what someone could earn in a comparable role elsewhere and what Netflix would pay to keep or replace them. Leaders are expected to be strong developers of talent and to apply the keeper test, asking whether they would fight to keep a person who wanted to leave, or whether, knowing everything they know today, they would hire that person again. If the answer is no, the memo argues it is fairer to everyone to part ways quickly. Managers are told to evaluate people on their whole record, not recent mistakes, to stick with employees through short-term bumps, and to remember that however brilliant someone may be, there is no place for people who do not treat colleagues with decency and respect.

Carnegie's Wikipedia biography records that in 1901, at age sixty-five and considering retirement, he sold Carnegie Steel to J. P. Morgan in a transaction that formed the basis of the United States Steel Corporation, and that from 1901 forward public attention shifted from the shrewd business acumen that had enabled him to accumulate such a fortune to the public-spirited way in which he devoted himself to using it on philanthropic projects. The biography lists the institutions he funded — Carnegie Hall in New York City, the Peace Palace in The Hague, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Carnegie Institution for Science, the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland, the Carnegie Hero Fund, and Carnegie Mellon University — and notes that he devoted the remainder of his life to large-scale philanthropy with special emphasis on local libraries, world peace, education, and scientific research.

By August 2015 Ola was operating in over 100 cities and converted to an app-only service — a bold bet on the smartphone at a moment when India's mobile data revolution was still nascent. The app-only decision was reversed later as voice-channel demand persisted, an early lesson that hard channel pivots in India rarely survive consumer behaviour.

Schultz's strategic contribution was less the coffee than the place. The trip to Milan in 1983 was the turning point: he was struck by the espresso bars serving as community hubs and envisioned bringing that experience to the United States, while the Starbucks founders remained resistant, preferring to focus on selling high-quality beans and equipment. His response was to leave and build the concept himself at Il Giornale, which found early success, and then to purchase Starbucks for 3.8 million dollars in 1987, merging the companies and expanding rapidly from eleven stores to more than thirty thousand globally. The strategy centered on establishing a third place between home and work, built around customer experience, premium coffee, and a warm atmosphere, a positioning that allowed a commodity-adjacent product to command premium prices. After stepping down as chief executive in 2000, he returned in 2008, closed stores, retrained baristas, and reinvigorated the brand's core values, a turnaround after which the stock returned roughly sixteen-fold.

Buch called Hindenburg's allegations an attempt at 'character assassination' following SEBI's enforcement action and a show-cause notice to the short seller for violating Indian rules. SEBI separately asserted that the Adani allegations had been duly investigated, signaling that the regulator was not conceding investigative ground despite the personal attack on its chair.

The contraction — withdrawing from several international markets and reducing the asset base — was the corrective to the prior over-expansion, and the firm's eventual IPO filing reflected a re-priced, narrower but more profitable business than the peak-growth narrative had implied.

Funding velocity was fast: 56 million dollars from Tiger Global and Matrix India in February 2019, an undisclosed Series A cheque from Ratan Tata in May 2019, then a 250-million-dollar Series B from SoftBank in July 2019 that crossed the one-billion-dollar valuation mark — the unicorn tag arrived in under 30 months from founding.

Bhavish has since stacked three roles on his own plate: co-founder and CEO of Ola Consumer (the ride-hailing arm), founder of Ola Electric, and founder of Ola Krutrim — the LLM venture that became India's first public AI unicorn at a roughly one-billion-dollar valuation in 2024. The triple-stack approach has drawn both admiration for founder ambition and questions about governance bandwidth.

His adoption as a spiritual heir by Gandhi and his role in funding the independence movement gave the Bajaj name a political legitimacy that translated, after independence, into regulatory and licensing access that proved commercially valuable across the licence-raj decades.

The founding of Hindustan Aluminium (later Hindalco) in 1958 and the cement and viscose businesses that followed gave the group a manufacturing base distinct from its trading origins and positioned it in capital-intensive industries where scale economics mattered more than trading flair.

The 2021 settlement between Renaissance Technologies executives and the IRS, in which the firm and its current and former employees agreed to pay approximately seven billion dollars to resolve a long-running dispute over the tax treatment of Medallion's short-term trading gains, brought to a close one of the largest tax matters in American financial history. The dispute turned on the characterization of gains from the fund's basket of short-dated options and other derivatives. The IRS argued that the structure had been used to convert what were economically short-term trading profits into long-term capital gains. RenTech disputed the characterization but ultimately settled, with founder Jim Simons personally paying an additional sum. The episode illustrates the recurring tension between sophisticated financial engineering and the tax code's attempt to distinguish among categories of income. It also illustrates the broader pattern that the very success of a strategy tends to attract the scrutiny that ultimately constrains it. The Medallion Fund's returns had been so outsized for so long that the structures built to deliver them efficiently became, in the view of the tax authorities, objects of legitimate examination. The settlement did not affect the fund's investment process, but it did materially reduce the after-tax return to the firm's principals.

The insolvency proceedings initiated in 2024 against Think and Learn, and the contempt proceedings in the US that produced a court-ordered jail term for Raveendran, made the BYJU'S case a rare Indian example of a founder facing personal criminal exposure for a corporate-governance failure, and the situation remains legally unresolved.

The Mahindra electric-vehicle programme — the earlier e2o and the later Born Electric platform — positioned the group as the only legacy Indian auto house to commit early to EVs, a bet whose commercial outcome remains open but whose strategic intent is settled.

The 2011 termination of the Honda JV and the rebrand to Hero MotoCorp tested whether the Indian partner could sustain product development without the Japanese counterparty, a transition whose outcome is now treated as evidence that the Indian distribution and brand could carry the franchise alone.

Big Billion Day, the festival sale first run on 6 October 2014 to mark Flipkart's anniversary, transacted roughly a hundred million dollars of goods in ten hours. The event exposed the founders to their first real capacity crisis: site outages, stockouts and a public backlash on social media over broken orders, which the company then engineered against in subsequent editions by adding fulfilment centres and app-only traffic.

Culture is the third pillar: he argues that team transparency builds trust, which in turn enables the candid conversations required to fix problems during hard times — a lesson sharpened by the wave of senior leadership exits at Snapdeal in 2016–17 when trust between the founders and the leadership team reportedly broke down.

The Hustle Q&A also covered Druckenmiller's views on emerging technologies, including AI and digital assets. As captured in the article, he described the AI wave as potentially the most consequential technological shift of his investing lifetime, comparable in scope to the personal-computing and internet revolutions of prior decades. His framing was characteristic: rather than predicting specific winners, he focused on the structural questions - which incumbents are most exposed to disruption, where the capital is flowing, what the second-order effects on labor and energy demand might be. On the question of whether his macro framework extends to long-duration technology bets, Druckenmiller's answer, paraphrased in the article, was that the principles transfer but the time horizons do not. Macro trades typically resolve in months; the technology cycle operates over years or decades. He acknowledged that the long-duration nature of AI infrastructure investment makes valuation difficult and that the standard discounted-cash-flow frameworks are sensitive to discount-rate assumptions that are themselves a function of the macro environment. This is why he has historically preferred to express technology views through the equity of firms whose business models are already validated rather than through early-stage venture bets. The Hustle conversation closed on the discipline of risk management in the face of genuinely transformative change. Druckenmiller's view, paraphrased in the article, was that the right posture during a technological inflection is to keep the macro framework intact while remaining intellectually open to the possibility that the framework itself will need to be revised. The interview ended on a note of humility: the worst mistake an investor can make during a regime change is to assume that the old rules still apply, and the second-worst is to abandon them too early. The job is to keep updating the model as the evidence accumulates.

Under his chairmanship the group grew from a handful of companies to nearly a hundred, spanning steel, power, chemicals, hotels, engineering and cosmetics, a diversification he pursued deliberately to spread the group's exposure across the Indian economy rather than concentrate it.

Reliance's move into petrochemicals and the Hazira and Jamnagar complexes represented a bet on integrated, capital-intensive manufacturing at a scale no Indian private group had previously attempted, and remains the structural foundation of the group to this day.

Nayar's status as one of very few woman founders of a listed Indian unicorn has been treated by observers as a structural rather than incidental fact, often linked to the brand's category choice (beauty) and to her operating model.

Titan Capital has invested in roughly 280 companies across consumer tech, health-tech, fintech, SaaS, consumer brands and B2B services — with marquee names like Ola, Mamaearth and Razorpay — and now writes an average ticket of around Rs 15 crore per deal, indicating a steady, mid-stage angel pace rather than a power-law chasing strategy.

His three great unrealised projects — an indigenous steel plant, a hydroelectric scheme to power Bombay's industry, and a research university — were conceived at a scale no Indian promoter of his era attempted, and each was completed only by his successors after his death in 1904, evidence that the ambition outlived the founder.

I do not intend to give a narrative of why we do not own all of them, but I will give some more detail on this point later in this letter. In looking at individual stock contribution to performance I prefer to start with the problems. The bottom five detractors from the Fund’s performance in 2024 were: Stock Attribution L'Oréal -2.0% IDEXX -1.2% Nike -0.7% Brown-Forman -0.6% Novo Nordisk -0.6% Source: State Street L’Oréal was adversely affected by events in China where the economy is struggling under the weight of a moribund residential property sector and the associated credit problems. However, this does not alter our view that L’Oréal is fundamentally a very good business. This is not the first time that a major economy it operates in has mis-fired and we believe its management can cope.

The Jamnalal Bajaj Foundation and its awards, established under his chairmanship, institutionalised the family's public-service posture as an explicit programme rather than ad-hoc philanthropy, and remain a durable part of the group's public identity.

The 2021 IPO's pricing — at a valuation that the public market subsequently halved — became the reference point for the wider reassessment of Indian new-age tech valuations, framing Paytm as both a pioneer of the payments category and a cautionary case on listing timing.

The Infosys profile notes his undergraduate degree was from IIT Bombay in electrical engineering, anchoring his technical credentials before any of the policy or business accolades. Born in Bengaluru, his local roots sit alongside his global policy footprint — a combination unusual among Indian IT founders.

Adani Enterprises was preparing a $1 billion share sale by mid-September 2024, having shelved the record $2.5 billion FPO withdrawn in the wake of Hindenburg's first allegations. Adani Energy separately raised $1 billion from U.S. investors and sovereign wealth funds earlier that month — evidence that capital-markets access, while impaired, had not been fully shut off.

The decision to endow the Jamnalal Bajaj Seva Sangh and related trusts reflected an explicit commitment to deploying wealth toward community ends along the Gandhian model of trusteeship, prefiguring the trust-ownership structures of other Indian promoter houses.

A string of acquisitions between 2012 and 2016 — Letsbuy, Myntra for about 280 million dollars, Jabong for roughly 70 million, and PhonePe in April 2016 — assembled the building blocks of a horizontal marketplace. Myntra in particular gave Flipkart a dominant apparel franchise, while PhonePe positioned it inside the UPI payments race alongside Paytm.

The Premier Automobiles venture, begun in collaboration with Chrysler in 1944, established the first Indian-owned car-assembly operation, a template for the licence-era joint-venture pattern that dominated Indian auto manufacturing through the 1980s.

The Nano, launched in 2008 as a sub-one-lakh-rupee people's car, was his most visible solo bet: an attempt to create a new price point at the bottom of the car market whose commercial underperformance relative to expectations became a widely studied case of the gap between engineering ambition and market acceptance.

Founded ZTO Express and has served as chairman since May 2013 and CEO since the company's inception.

In March 2019 Zomato sold its UAE food-delivery business to Talabat, an early instance of the company exiting markets where the local density was unattractive. The pattern would intensify after 2022 as Zomato quietly wound down most international operations, liquidating ten overseas subsidiaries in under a year — a rare case of a unicorn voluntarily unwinding a global footprint.

The transition from the cancelled allocations to the international coal and ore acquisitions (Shadeed, later the El Mutun and African concessions) reflected the group's response to the loss of domestic raw-material access: substitute it on the balance sheet by acquiring upstream assets abroad.

Carnegie's 1886 book Triumphant Democracy, or, Fifty Years' March of the Republic, recorded in his Wikipedia biography, framed the American republican experiment as a superior alternative to the inherited institutions of Europe and became the first of his major public writings to attract transatlantic attention. The biography records his purchase of Skibo Castle in the Scottish Highlands in 1898 as his principal retirement estate and his sustained involvement in Anglo-American affairs through the period of his greatest wealth, as well as the late-career award of the honorary Doctor of Laws from the University of Glasgow in June 1901 and the Freedom of the City of Glasgow later that year in recognition of his munificence. Together the book and the estate mark the transition from operating steelmaker to transatlantic public intellectual and philanthropist that defined Carnegie's public posture from the late 1880s onward, the platform from which the Gospel of Wealth was issued.

The LimeRoad arc is the Indian reference case for the gap between an early, well-differentiated social-commerce product and the capital and distribution scale required to sustain it against horizontal-commerce incumbents, and informed the later social-commerce entrants' choice of capital structure.

In August 2019 Amazon took a 49% stake in Future Coupons, an entity that indirectly controlled a 3.5% minority interest in Future Retail, plus an option to acquire the promoter holding. This structured investment was the trigger for the later Amazon-Reliance litigation, because the contract included restrictions on Future Retail being sold to certain competitors — including Reliance — without Amazon's consent.

Kurien's stance against multinational infant-formula and dairy entrants — and the public posture that the cooperative's brand was a public asset, not a promoter's — is treated as the defining governance choice that kept Amul's economics with the farmer rather than with a holding company.

The government's decision to supersede Satyam's board and auction the company to Tech Mahindra within months was an unusually interventionist rescue that preserved the firm's client book and employees, and is now treated as the template response to a large Indian corporate collapse.

Ironically, Duquesne was a major beneficiary of it because I had spoken at a Robinhood Conference and like an idiot for forgot that there was press there, and revealed that I had a -- Paul got me going in the interview and revealed that I had a massive leverage position in two years, because I thought the risk-reward I think they were like 510 or 515, the risk reward with what was going on -- we could potentially pull this thing off sometime in the next year and the risk reward was -- was terrific for that. I was a beneficiary because after their pivot, two years went down to 415, I didn't get the low, but I did get 430 and -- but at that point, it was obvious that financial conditions, which is one of the things that put me in them in the first place were turning -- we were starting to get anecdotal from businesses, that their businesses were picking up. So I exited the position. So I was major beneficiary but once financial conditions took off, it became very clear that this thing could go either way. So I didn't even understand why they put it on the table, but more curiously, why they and others continued to talk about -- well, it's not going to be six cuts. It's only to be three cuts or four cuts or two cuts. I'm going, why are we even talking about cuts? Because inflation, if you remember, we did trillions of dollars of QE because it was 1.7 instead of two over a decade.

The expansion into insurance broking, mutual-fund distribution and the Pincode merchant super-app has been the attempt to monetise the payments surface without depending on MDR, whose regulatory status on UPI remains unresolved.

He was among the first Indian industrialists to introduce professional employee policies — an eight-hour working day, provident fund and accident compensation at Tata Steel — years before these became statutory in India, framing welfare as part of the operating system rather than a discretionary gesture.

Amazon initiated emergency arbitration at the Singapore International Arbitration Centre, and on 25 October 2020 the emergency arbitrator issued an interim order restraining Future Retail from proceeding with the transaction. In August 2021 India's Supreme Court ruled that emergency arbitration awards are enforceable under Indian arbitration law —.

Munjal's operating discipline — capital intensity held low, dealer reach held high, model-platform cycles long — became the reference for how an Indian promoter house runs a volume consumer-durables business, and is the template the next generation of two-wheeler entrants measured themselves against.

His use of social media as an executive channel, unusual among Indian promoter chairs, reframed the group's public posture as approachable and design-led, a deliberate brand choice rather than a personal habit.

He was closely associated with Mahatma Gandhi, both personally and as a funder of the independence movement, a proximity that gave the Birla name a political legitimacy rare among industrial families and that informed the group's later public posture.

In April 2022 Bhavish announced he was stepping away from day-to-day operations of Ola Consumer to focus on Ola Electric and quick-commerce bets. The shift effectively partitioned his time toward the EV and AI thesis, leaving the cab business to a leaner operating leadership and signalling where he saw the next decade of value creation.

Ola Electric acquired Amsterdam-based crowdfunded scooter maker Etergo for 3.75 million euros in May 2020 — a distress sale that gave Ola its first product platform. The purchase compressed the build-vs-buy decision: rather than designing a scooter from scratch, Ola inherited Etergo's engineering and reworked it for Indian roads and pricing.

Ola expanded internationally in 2018 — Australia in January, New Zealand in September, the UK in March 2019, and London in February 2020 with over 25,000 drivers registered. In April 2024 the company abruptly exited all international markets with only a few days' notice, refocusing capital on India — a tacit admission that the globalisation phase had not delivered attractive unit economics.

The People Over Process section contrasts Netflix with companies where decisions were made top down, transparency was scarce, and it was hard to get anything done. Netflix aims to inspire and empower more than manage, priding itself on how few, not how many, decisions senior leaders make. Managers practice context not control, giving teams the clarity needed to decide well rather than trying to control outcomes, and the company shares extensive information internally through memos open to comment. The doctrine is not hands-off: managers coach actively and may step in over ethics, material harm, crises, or missing context. Netflix avoids decision-making by committee, instead identifying an informed captain responsible for each significant judgment call, and expects captains to farm for dissent, seeking opinions from every level before deciding. Once a decision is made, everyone, including those who argued otherwise, is expected to disagree and commit. The result is an organization the memo calls highly aligned and loosely coupled, free to move fast while responsibility for outcomes stays unambiguous.

The strategic self-interest was unusually explicit. Meta's business is building the best experiences, Zuckerberg wrote, so it must always have access to the best technology and never be locked into a competitor's closed ecosystem. He cited a formative experience: building services constrained by what Apple allows on its platforms, with the way it taxes developers, applies arbitrary rules, and blocks product innovations. Since Meta does not sell access to AI models, open-sourcing Llama does not undercut its revenue the way it would for closed providers, one reason, he noted, that closed providers lobby governments against open source. Precedent also mattered: Meta saved billions open-sourcing its server, network, and data center designs through the Open Compute Project, and it benefited from the ecosystems around its open tools PyTorch and React, whose communities returned improvements Meta could never have engineered alone. Openness, consistently held, had compounded before.

A Jiangsu provincial intermediate court formally accepted an insolvency and restructuring petition for Wuxi Suntech filed by a group of eight Chinese banks (including Industrial & Commercial Bank of China, Agricultural Bank of China, and Bank of China) owed as much as $1.14 billion (7.1 billion yuan), per Forbes citing Xinhua.

Baidu became China's dominant search engine, with Li remaining chairman and CEO for over two decades, per the company's own investor-relations biography.

Rockefeller later said of the consolidation decades that the fortune he had accumulated had not been worth the anxiety of that period. He complained that he could not stay asleep most nights during the 1870s and 1880s while carrying out his plan of horizontal and vertical integration under sustained press attack. He also eventually conceded that public sentiment would have turned against the company if Standard had actually refined all of the world's oil, and he gave up the dream of total global refining share as foreign production from Russia and the Dutch East Indies rose. The admission matters because it reframes Rockefeller not as the caricatured monopolist of the political cartoons but as an executive who understood the legitimacy constraint and deliberately stopped short of the corner he could have rounded. Scale, in his own telling, had to coexist with the appearance of competition.

The 2016 response to Reliance Jio's price war — preserving the customer base while accepting margin compression, rather than contesting on price — is the central commercial decision of Airtel's last decade and a deliberate choice to hold the high-value cohort rather than chase volume.

Standard Oil reached its horizontal scale by buying competing refiners and shutting down the inefficient ones, then layered vertical integration on top. In kerosene distribution the company replaced a fragmented wholesale system with its own: tank cars brought the fuel to local bulk stations, and Standard Oil's own tank wagons then delivered to retailers door to door, eliminating independent jobbers and capturing the retail margin. The firm also operated its own cooperage shops to make barrels, warehouses to store refined product, and ancillary plants making paint and glue from refinery by-products. At its peak the Standard Oil empire in the United States comprised roughly 20,000 domestic wells, 4,000 miles of pipeline, 5,000 tank cars, and more than 100,000 employees. World refining share topped 90 percent in the early 1880s before foreign competition—including the Nobel brothers' Russian operations—gradually eroded the position to roughly 80 percent by century's end.

By 1882 all of Standard Oil's properties were folded into the Standard Oil Trust, an innovative corporate vehicle with an initial capitalization of $70 million and forty-two certificate holders. The trust structure let Rockefeller and a small board of trustees centralize control across dozens of legally separate operating companies while sidestepping the limits Ohio placed on out-of-state shareholding. After an Ohio court dissolved the trust in 1892, the companies reorganized under a New Jersey holding company—a legal vehicle that permitted a parent to own stock of other corporations. By the 1890s Standard Oil owned roughly 75 percent of the U.S. petroleum business. Rockefeller held the title of president until 1911, but he had stepped back from daily leadership in 1896, at age fifty-seven, to concentrate on philanthropy. At the time of the 1911 dissolution he personally held 244,500 of the company's 983,383 outstanding shares.

The panic's real effects were severe, the Federal Reserve History essay notes: industrial output fell seventeen percent in 1908 and real gross national product twelve percent, a contraction surpassed only by the Great Depression, though the real sector recovered rapidly, in little over a year. The Knickerbocker Trust itself reopened in March 1908 after an infusion of 2.4 million dollars in new capital, having suspended rather than failed. The essay emphasizes that the panic occurred before the Federal Reserve, deposit insurance, or securities regulation existed, when only the National Banking Acts and the private New York Clearing House structured crisis response. It records the argument of Moen and Tallman that the experience changed how Clearing House bankers judged the value of a central bank, since the panic's grip fell mainly on trust companies outside their membership. The 2008 rescue of Bear Stearns, bought by JPMorgan Chase with a Federal Reserve loan, is compared to the Clearing House support for the Mercantile National in 1907, and the Knickerbocker suspension is set beside the failure of Lehman Brothers.

The Wikipedia article on the Homestead strike records that Carnegie was at his Scottish estate, Skibo Castle, throughout the dispute and that his absence became a permanent feature of his public image, with critics charging that he had deliberately remained abroad to let Frick carry the strike through, and that Carnegie's own autobiography recorded that his partners had begged him not to return because of his extreme disposition to grant the demands of labor, however unreasonable. The article records that Frick's strict anti-union posture prevailed after the strike, that union membership in steel collapsed nationally, and that the strike's outcome shaped the National Labor Relations debates of the 1930s as a cautionary example. The article treats the strike as the central contradiction of Carnegie's self-presentation as a friend of labor, since the operating philosophy of partnership with the men was punctured by the events at Homestead in a way his own text never fully resolved.

The Wikipedia article on the Carnegie Steel Company records that the firm was sold to J. P. Morgan at roughly four hundred ninety-two million dollars, equivalent to more than nineteen billion dollars today, of which roughly two hundred twenty-six million dollars, or about eight point seven billion dollars today, went to Carnegie himself. The article treats the sale as the transaction that made Carnegie one of the richest Americans in history and as the foundational acquisition of the United States Steel Corporation, the combination Morgan organized from Carnegie Steel, Federal Steel, and National Steel. The scale of Carnegie's personal proceeds is the financial starting point of the philanthropy phase, since the two hundred twenty-six million dollars was the corpus from which the libraries, the institutions, the endowments, and the Corporation of New York were subsequently funded over the next eighteen years.

The choice to keep most of his ventures private and profitable-by-design, and to exit through negotiated strategic sales, is treated as an alternative template to the IPO-path that dominates Indian founder narrative, and is rare in the cohort.

The Arc frames Swiggy as a 'professionally managed company' rather than a 'promoter-run company' since the founder shareholding sits below 10%, a status that makes the founders themselves eligible for ESOPs — placing Swiggy alongside Zomato, Delhivery, PB Fintech and FirstCry in the Indian listed-unicorn taxonomy where control is institutionally distributed rather than concentrated.

The backward integration into soda ash and the later move into cement reflected an understanding that the detergent price point could only be defended if input cost was controlled, leading the company into capital-intensive manufacturing far upstream of its consumer-facing origin.

The 2019 unicorn round, led by a strategic investor with sports-betting exposure, placed Dream11 at the intersection of the Indian consumer-internet cohort and the global sports-betting industry, a positioning that has shaped both its regulatory posture and its eventual IPO planning.

The case is most often read as the cautionary counterpoint to the Indian unicorn narrative: a firm whose top-line growth concealed the absence of durable unit economics, and whose founder's conviction that scale would resolve the model proved costly when capital markets closed.

Agarwal's decision to personally buy back shares and increase his stake at a moment of valuation stress — funded by debt against his own holding — was the most visible Indian instance of a founder doubling down on the model at a valuation the public market had rejected.

His death in a 2005 helicopter crash, alongside the subsequent sibling split of the operating businesses, became the standard Indian case for the difficulties of succession when a founder's personal authority has held a diversified house together.

Ardeshir's decision to keep the business in family hands and to fold the philanthropic trusts into the ownership structure prefigured the trust-led ownership models later associated with the Tatas and the Birlas, binding wealth to its redeployment from the founding moment.

Grover's subsequent pivot to a third-party lending venture and his self-positioning as a contrarian founder amplified rather than resolved the underlying question of personal liability for the conduct alleged at BharatPe.

K.K. Birla's published autobiographical reflections framed his operating instinct as a preference for low-key institutional stewardship over promoter visibility, a posture consistent with the Birla family's wider self-positioning across the twentieth century.

He stepped down as chairman in 2012 but returned in an interim capacity in 2016 during the Mistry affair, a public episode that tested the boundary between the trust-ownership structure at the top of the group and the authority of professional management underneath it.

At its peak, Suntech -- majority-owned by Shi and his family -- was valued at $16 billion on the New York Stock Exchange; by the time of its 2013 collapse, its market capitalization had fallen to approximately $106 million, and Shi's own fortune had dropped from a 2008 peak of $2.9 billion to less than $250 million, per Reuters and Forbes.

In January 2020 Zomato absorbed Uber Eats India through an all-stock transaction worth around 206 million dollars, leaving Uber with a 9.99 percent holding. Uber Eats India had been sub-5-percent on volume; the deal pushed Zomato's share of the domestic food-delivery market to roughly 52 percent, consolidating the duopoly that would define the next phase.

By 1913 Rockefeller's personal wealth was estimated at $900 million—roughly 2.3 percent of U.S. gross domestic product that year—and on September 28, 1916, he became the country's first confirmed billionaire. The dissolution of the Standard Oil Trust in 1911 paradoxically multiplied his wealth: the thirty-four spinoff companies turned out to be worth more in aggregate as separately traded public equities than as a single consolidated trust, and Rockefeller held meaningful stakes in many of them. He spent much of the last forty years of his life in retirement at Kykuit, his Westchester County, New York estate, working with his son John D. Rockefeller Jr. and advisers like Frederick T. Gates on the architecture of systematic philanthropy. The intergenerational transition from operating industrialist to full-time philanthropist—carried out between his 1896 retirement from Standard Oil and his death at Kykuit on May 23, 1937, at age ninety-seven—became the template that Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, and later Bill Gates and Warren Buffett would all in some measure follow.

Zuckerberg closed the argument at the level of society. Open source, he wrote, is necessary for a positive artificial intelligence future, because AI has more potential than any modern technology to raise productivity, creativity, and quality of life and to accelerate medical and scientific research. Openness, he argued, widens access to the technology's benefits around the world, keeps power from pooling inside a handful of corporations, and lets the technology spread across society more evenly and more safely. Against the running debate about the dangers of releasing model weights, he took the position that open source AI will be safer than the closed alternative, because transparency invites scrutiny and broad access prevents any single actor from governing the technology's capabilities. The bet, as with Linux, was that the ecosystem around the standard ends up mattering more than any one model.

The memo's most quoted artifacts are its deliberately minimal policies: the vacation policy is two words, take vacation, and the expenses policy is five, act in Netflix's best interests. The document argues this near-absence of rules prevents the process creep that happens as companies grow and try to dummy-proof their organizations, stifling creativity and adaptability. It concedes that a few people have taken advantage of the culture in bad ways, but maintains that individual autonomy has created an extremely successful business, and that in entertainment and technology the biggest threat is a lack of creativity, adaptability, and innovation. Minimizing rules rather than errors, while letting people exercise judgment and learn from mistakes, is presented as the superior recipe for long-term success. The scale is the proof point: the memo notes Netflix is programming for well over half a billion people globally, something no other entertainment company has ever done, and that the culture document itself will keep evolving as the business grows, with only the focus on excellence guaranteed not to change.

Ola posted its first operating profit of roughly 90 crore rupees in FY2020–21, a moment of operational break-even after a decade of cash burn. The result was overshadowed by the COVID disruption that had cut ride-hailing revenue by about 95 percent at the trough, forcing a roughly 1,400-person layoff in May 2020.

ZTO Express grew into one of China's largest express-delivery companies, with Lai continuing as founder, chairman, and CEO per the company's own current management page.

Rockefeller came to favor what he called conditional, cooperative giving: he would back a project only if others committed substantial funds alongside him, and only for a defined period. The University of Chicago is the clearest case. Working with the American Baptist Education Society in 1890, Rockefeller offered $600,000 of the first $1 million endowment, contingent on the remainder being pledged within ninety days. The university was incorporated that year, and over the next two decades Rockefeller kept contributing—always with the matching condition. In 1910 he made a farewell gift of $10 million, bringing his total contributions to roughly $35 million. The University of Chicago has long accorded Rockefeller the official designation of 'Founder,' even though William Rainey Harper ran the institution day to day. The matching-grant model, which Rockefeller helped formalize, deliberately multiplied his capital by recruiting co-funders and time-boxing his own exposure, and became a template emulated by twentieth-century philanthropy.

But somehow now that we're at three versus two, we've got to start cutting rates to bring in a smooth landing. So to me, it didn't make any sense. It was a huge mistake. But it goes back to I don't know whether you remember but Kevin Warsh when he was in the running for the Fed job used to talk about reforming the Fed. And I go, Kevin, well, what is the major reform we do? He says, we got to get rid of forward guidance. All this talking and all this forward guidance -- first of all, we're all wrong on the economy quite often, me included, and when you put forward guidance out, unlike me when I'm wrong who tend to change my mind very rapidly, they sort of get trapped into the forward guidance and stuck in it. And to some extent, they were stuck in this -- talk about continuing to cut rates so financial conditions just continued to melt up. And finally, in -- I guess a month or so ago, the Fed pivoted but then bizarrely, the last press conference seems to still be hanging on to this asymmetric directive of we're not going to hike and we expect to cut, but we're going to wait for the data. We're not guaranteeing you're going to cut, but it's weighted that way. And for the life of me, I can't figure out why because if you look at the six-month rate of inflation, the chart's very clear, it comes down from very rapid rates. And now, if anything, it looks like it's turned up. Look, I don't where inflation's going to be in a year.

By 2017 Flipkart controlled roughly 51 percent of Indian smartphone shipments, having eclipsed Amazon India's 33 percent share. Exclusive launches of the Moto G, Moto E and Xiaomi Mi 3 turned the platform into the country's default phone-discovery surface, a category-defining position that drove both gross merchandise volume and brand authority for several Diwali cycles.

In August 2020 Future Group signed a roughly $3.4 billion agreement to sell its retail, wholesale and logistics businesses to Reliance Retail Ventures, a subsidiary of Reliance Industries. With Biyani under severe debt pressure after the pandemic hit mall footfalls, the deal looked like the only viable exit — but Amazon immediately alleged the transaction breached its contractual rights under the 2019 Future Coupons investment.

A central tenet of his investing approach is to back only sectors where he has prior operating knowledge — fintech, consumer brands, software — placing domain depth above theoretical familiarity and avoiding the temptation to chase unfamiliar categories purely because capital is available.

Aggarwal was named to Time's 100 Most Influential People list in 2018, recognising his role in building the country's dominant ride-hailing franchise. Forbes estimated his net worth at around 2.3 billion dollars, placing him among the world's youngest self-made billionaires — a position materially reinforced by the Ola Electric IPO pop in 2024.

Carnegie's Wikipedia biography records that in 1901 he gave ten million dollars to establish the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland, signing the deed on June 7, 1901, with royal charter following on August 21, 1902, and that in December 1901 he also established large pension funds for his former employees at Homestead. The biography dates his 1905 pension fund for American college professors to the same philanthropic arc, and notes that when Theodore Roosevelt became president in 1901, Carnegie and Roosevelt were in frequent contact, anchoring the philanthropic turn in a sustained engagement with the executive branch. The 1901 cluster of gifts — Scottish universities, Homestead pensioners, American college professors — represents the operational start of the distribution phase Carnegie had committed himself to under the Gospel of Wealth banner and the first sustained year of Carnegie as a full-time philanthropist rather than operating steelmaker.

The Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, opened in Bombay in 1903, was among the few large projects he saw completed and is often cited as the clearest expression of his insistence on building world-class Indian institutions rather than accepting colonial-era standards.

IDEXX which makes veterinary diagnostic testing equipment and supplies is suffering from a slackening in the pace of vet visits after the scramble to adopt pets during the pandemic. As the industry leader in an area with real long-term growth prospects and a stock where we would probably struggle to buy back our position if we sold it, we intend to continue holding IDEXX and to try to smile through the pain of underperformance. Nike is a stock we bought after the share price fall during the pandemic when investors seemed convinced there would be many fewer buyers of trainers. In fact, Nike had made great strides in online marketing and fulfilment. What we hadn’t realised was that the then management would parlay this success into a problem by ignoring the traditional bricks & mortar retail channel, which has recovered as the pandemic passed, and in so doing open the door literally to competition. To be fair there have been other issues such as an increasing dependence on fashion and less on traditional exercise uses. However, the good news is that there has been a change of CEO this year. We see many commentators musing about the reasons why the US economy is so successful. Perhaps one reason is a quicker finger on the trigger when top executives do not deliver. In which context we note that Unilever’s shares were up 20% in 2024. We await developments from Nike’s new management who have after all inherited what is still the dominant market share in the sector.

In early 2022 Reliance began physically taking control of more than 200 Future Retail stores, citing unpaid rents and lease breaches and quietly rebranding them under the Reliance banner. Amazon called the move a 'fraudulent and coercive takeover' that violated the SIAC interim order. The episode made plain that courtroom losses did not necessarily translate into ground-level control of retail assets once leases and landlords were in play.

Politically, the second Hindenburg salvo split along predictable lines: BJP lawmaker Ravi Shankar Prasad called it a 'baseless attack' issued in lieu of responding to SEBI's show-cause notice, while opposition leader Rahul Gandhi argued on X that 'the integrity of SEBI... has been gravely compromised by the allegations against its chairperson.' The Adani question had become a proxy for broader political contestation over regulatory independence.

Just before the IPO approval, the board appointed Majety as MD and group CEO for five years from April 2024, and Reddy as head of innovation for the same tenure, with both paid Rs 2.5 crore including variable pay — a modest compensation package relative to listed-unicorn peer founders, and one that ties them to multi-year performance.

In December 2020 Ola committed about 2,400 crore rupees (around 324 million dollars) to build what it called the world's largest two-wheeler factory on a 500-acre site in Krishnagiri, Tamil Nadu. The Future Factory deployed automated robots in welding, painting and battery lines, and made headlines by staffing its manufacturing floor entirely with women — an unusual gendered labour choice in Indian auto manufacturing.

The 1911 breakup decree ordered Standard Oil of New Jersey separated into thirty-four independent companies, with the net value of the severed entities totaling approximately $375 million—about 57 percent of Jersey Standard's pre-decree value. The Supreme Court's decision, handed down on May 15, 1911, in Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey v. United States, also codified the 'rule of reason' for interpreting the Sherman Act, holding that only unreasonable restraints of trade were barred. Despite the dissolution, Jersey Standard remained the second-largest corporation in the United States, behind only U.S. Steel. Many of the spinoffs—Standard Oil of New York (later Mobil), Standard Oil of California (later Chevron), Standard Oil of Ohio, Standard Oil of Indiana (later Amoco)—continued to operate as substantial independent businesses and ultimately merged back into ExxonMobil, Chevron, and BP across the late twentieth century. The decree is widely treated as the foundational antitrust precedent of the modern regulatory era.

Fortune named Nilekani Asia's Businessman of the Year in 2003; he received the Joseph Schumpeter prize in 2005 for innovative contributions in economics and politics; and was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 2006. TIME listed him among the world's hundred most influential people in both 2006 and 2009 — a recognition arc tracking the rise of Indian IT on the global stage.

He is widely credited with pioneering the equity cult among Indian retail investors, repeatedly raising capital from small investors through public issues that turned Reliance shareholders into a constituency the company cultivated directly rather than treating as passive capital.

During the 2020 lockdown Zomato temporarily ran a Zomato Market grocery service across more than 80 cities and trialled alcohol delivery in West Bengal, Jharkhand and Odisha. Both experiments were discontinued — alcohol delivery in April 2021, with management citing weak unit economics and scale concerns — but the grocery pilot seeded the eventual Blinkit thesis.

The piece draws the parallel with FirstCry's Supam Maheshwari selling about Rs 300 crore before listing, and Zomato's Deepinder Goyal selling a 0.63% stake for about $32 million before the 2021 IPO — situating Swiggy's pre-IPO founder sale inside a clear pattern among Indian listed unicorns rather than treating it as anomalous.

Future Retail was admitted into insolvency at the National Company Law Tribunal in July 2022 after defaulting on loans exceeding Rs 17,000 crore. On 27 July 2024 the NCLT ordered Future Retail's liquidation after no resolution plan was approved within the statutory timeline —.

SBICAPS Securities' head of fundamental equity research Sunny Agrawal framed the second selloff as a 'temporary, knee-jerk reaction' given that multiple investigations had already occurred over the prior 18 months. WealthMills' Kranthi Bathini warned of short-to-medium-term sentiment impact, especially as retail investors felt pressure from allegations against SEBI itself — a more structurally damaging line of attack than the original Adani-specific claims.

Bhavish has openly backed Narayana Murthy's 70-hour work-week stance and publicly rejected the concept of work-life balance, calling the five-day week and weekends 'a western concept.' The stance positioned him as the Indian founder most willing to argue against the work-life balance consensus, with doctors publicly warning of the health risks of sustained overwork.

Carnegie's Wikipedia biography records that the dinosaur Diplodocus carnegii was named for him after he sponsored the expedition that discovered its remains in the Morrison Formation of Utah in 1899, that the mounted skeleton, nicknamed Dippy, became what one source calls the most famous single dinosaur skeleton in the world, and that casts of the skeleton were subsequently distributed to major museums across Europe at Carnegie's personal expense. The biography treats the dinosaur naming as evidence of Carnegie's broader program of endowing scientific research, which included the founding of the Carnegie Institution for Science in 1902 with an initial ten-million-dollar endowment and the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. The paleontological patronage is the colorful edge of a systematic effort to institutionalize scientific inquiry in America that paralleled his libraries, his peace endowment, and his teaching foundation, and that took institutional form in Washington as well as Pittsburgh.

Customer bookings hit 500,000 in the first month of Ola S1 scooter availability, and the company began deliveries in December 2021 with the first hundred units in Bengaluru and Chennai. Several promised features were not enabled at launch — a software-readiness lag that drew early criticism and prompted iterative over-the-air updates through 2022.

The Ola Foods history shows the founder's restlessness beyond the core: a March 2015 Ola Cafe attempt that closed within a year, a December 2017 acquisition of Foodpanda India with a planned 200-million-dollar infusion, the discontinuation of food delivery in June 2019, and a continued cloud-kitchen business that ran more than 50 outlets by 2021. The repeated attempts yielded limited strategic value relative to capital spent.

Was forced to resign as CEO by Suntech's board in August 2012, and was stripped of the executive chairman title in March 2013 amid the company's debt crisis.

Foreign Policy named him among the Top 100 Global Thinkers in 2010, and in 2014 he received The Economist's Social and Economic Innovation Award for his Aadhaar leadership — international recognition that his contribution was not merely a domestic programme but a transferable governance innovation.

He prioritises long holding periods: Titan Capital exited Ola after a 12-year holding period and Urban Company after nine — evidence that he treats early-stage investing as patient capital, the inverse of the short-cycle model that defined his own Snapdeal experience where the board pushed for quick outcomes.

To manage a fortune too large to disburse casually, Rockefeller hired the Reverend Frederick T. Gates, whose work with the Baptist Education Society and the University of Chicago had impressed him. With Gates and his son John D. Rockefeller Jr. as advisers, he founded a sequence of institutions that shaped American science, medicine, and public health. The Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, established in 1901, became the country's first biomedical research center; the General Education Board, established in 1902, ultimately distributed $325 million to U.S. education; the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission, launched in 1909, ran a hookworm-eradication campaign across eleven southern states; and the Rockefeller Foundation, chartered in 1913, scaled those efforts globally. Each institution was deliberately staffed with expert professionals, modeled on a corporate rather than charitable template, and structured to outlast its founder. Gates, more than anyone else, was the operational architect who translated Rockefeller's generalized desire to give well into specific, staffed, and legally chartered vehicles.

The decision to site the steel venture at Sakchi — later renamed Jamshedpur — paired a logistical choice with explicit institution-building: he planned a city around the plant with amenities for workers, anticipating by decades the model later associated with planned company towns elsewhere.

Brown-Forman, one of the world’s top five drinks companies and the distiller of Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Whiskey has suffered from the fall in consumption from the pandemic highs and is probably seeing early signs of the adverse impact of weight loss drugs. We sold our Diageo stake during the year which I will cover later but retaining Brown-Forman keeps a foothold in what has long been a sector with good business characteristics and which has the potential benefits of family control, which can promote good long-term decision making, and a larger bias towards premium spirits than Diageo which may help obviate the impact of weight loss drugs (‘drink less but better quality’). It is a company which survived Prohibition so we hope there is literally something in the DNA to help with these adverse circumstances. Novo Nordisk was arguably our most surprising poor performer in 2024. It remains the market leader in weight loss drugs, which it pioneered, and the year was marked by a stream of news about other conditions which these drugs treat effectively and label expansion applications which drug regulators seem willing to approve. Yet not only did the share price fall 10% but it finished the year on a P/E ratio half that of its nearest competitor Eli Lilly.

In December 2021 the Competition Commission of India withdrew its approval for Amazon's 2019 Future Coupons acquisition, ruling that Amazon had misled the regulator about the true purpose of the investment. The reversal cut one of Amazon's key legal arguments but did not by itself free Future to complete the Reliance sale, since the Singapore arbitration order remained in force pending Indian court proceedings.

The unresolved succession question at his death in 2002 led to a public split of the group between his sons Mukesh and Anil in 2005, mediated by the family and external parties, a case often cited in Indian family-business governance discussions.

Jerome Powell doesn't know where inflation is going to be. I don't think anybody knows. But they worked so hard, and they did so much work when they went from basically zero to 5 percent. I'd hate to see them all throw it away here.KERNEN: The first time I -- and the first time I noticed was when he said, yeah, we're not going to do it today but we're close. We're getting closer. And I didn't know, how do you -- how do you know that we're getting -- and that that went from "but we're getting close" to "now, yeah, it's definitely not going to be now but we think things are going to work out and they're going to be" -- he's never taking him off the table and never talked about even saying a hike is just -- I mean, he took that off the table. And a hike is not -- you think a hike is off the table? Definitely, zero chance, zero percent chance?DRUCKENMILLER: No, because there's not a zero percent chance that inflation has the bottom. I don't know. What I would do is just say nothing and do Fed chair used to do. When you need to raise rates, raise 'em. When you need to cut 'em, cut 'em. Don't go on "60 Minutes". You're not a rockstar, okay? You're the Fed chairman. You're supposed to be running monetary policy for the good of the country, not to be going on "60 Minutes". And, you know, the whole thing -- Bernanke did a lot of things that by hindsight I don't feel very good about, one of the worst was forward guidance.

In April 2017 eBay agreed to fold its Indian arm eBay.in into Flipkart and put 500 million dollars of fresh capital into the combined entity. The strategic logic — access to eBay's international seller base — was never realised in practice, and the asset was quietly wound down later, a reminder that cross-border marketplace integrations rarely survive the press release.

Chartered in 1913 to 'promote the well-being of mankind throughout the world,' the Rockefeller Foundation scaled Rockefeller's earlier public-health experiments into a global operation. Its International Health Division extended the Sanitary Commission's hookworm work into fifty-two countries and ran early field research on hookworm, malaria, and yellow fever that established modern public-health technique. The foundation built and endowed the world's first school of hygiene and public health, at Johns Hopkins University, and spent about $25 million seeding similar schools internationally. Its Mexico agricultural program catalyzed what later became known as the Green Revolution. The foundation also helped launch or sustain the Social Science Research Council, the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Brookings Institution, and the Council on Foreign Relations. The philanthropic architecture Rockefeller prototyped—professional staff, science-led bets, long horizons—became the model for organized twentieth-century giving. His lifetime giving across all vehicles ultimately exceeded five hundred million dollars, the bulk of it channeled through the foundation and its predecessor entities.

Suntech defaulted on a $541 million bond, its main subsidiary Wuxi Suntech Power filed for bankruptcy protection after a group of eight Chinese banks petitioned a Jiangsu court, the company's market value collapsed from a peak of $16 billion to about $106 million, and Shi's personal fortune fell from $2.9 billion to under $250 million. Shi called his removal 'misconceived and unlawful,' disputing the board's characterization of the ouster, though the underlying financial collapse and bankruptcy filing are independently documented, undisputed facts.

Ola Electric's IPO in August 2024 raised about 5,500 crore rupees, with founder Aggarwal and other existing shareholders selling 84.9 million shares. The listing briefly doubled Bhavish's net worth and put Ola Electric among the few Indian EV pure-plays trading on the public markets — a landmark for India's electric two-wheeler category.

Reports have portrayed Aggarwal as an aggressive operator: tearing up presentations over missing page numbers, making an employee run laps for a minor mistake, and a string of senior exits from Ola Cars, Ola CFO and Ola Electric's CMO roles. Bhavish defended the style as the price of building something that is not a 'me-too' company.

In investment it is always better to travel hopefully than to arrive and there is certainly an arms race going on amongst drug companies to develop competitor drugs. Yet we are still dealing with a company in Novo which is the market leader and holds production and labelling advantages which should sustain that position, with revenues that are growing at 20% p.a. Moreover, we originally bought Novo because of its radical approach to drug discovery and would not rule out further developments. For the year, the top five contributors to the Fund’s performance were: Stock Attribution Meta Platforms +4.1% Microsoft +1.6% Philip Morris +1.5% Automatic Data Processing +1.3% Stryker +1.3% Source: State Street For Meta and Microsoft I am simply going to repeat my comment from last year’s letter albeit with the number of times updated: ‘Meta Platforms’ (formerly Facebook) performance makes me wonder whether I should have a fund which invests solely in the one stock in our portfolio each year for which we have received the most critical comments. Meta makes its fourth appearance in this list of top contributors while Microsoft appears for the ninth time having attracted strident criticism when we started buying at about $25 a share in 2011 (2023 year end price $376).’ 2024 year end price was $422.

Walmart outbid Amazon in May 2018 to acquire a 77 percent controlling stake in Flipkart for roughly 16 billion dollars, valuing the company at about 22 billion. The deal, the largest e-commerce acquisition on record at the time, also saw co-founder Sachin Bansal exit the company he had led for almost a decade, with the remaining management reporting into Walmart eCommerce US head Marc Lore.

A series of vertical bets — Ola Dash (quick commerce), Ola Cars (new and pre-owned car marketplace), Ola Pedal (bike sharing) — were launched, scaled down and finally shut between 2021 and 2022. The serial closure pattern reinforced the impression of an experimentation engine inside Ola, with capital spent on category exploration rather than on a focused core.

You got a bunch of academics talking about sending message to the market. You know, as a practitioner, I'd rather them just get rid of the whole forward guidance and just do their job. When you need to raise rates, raise rates. When you need to cut them, cut them.KERNEN: You are confounded on the reason though. So I thought you were going to give me the reason why. Is it similar to how long we stayed at zero in a hot economy with -- and calling it transitory? It seems like the same side of that coin, not the flip side.DRUCKENMILLER: They're definitely in their press conferences the implication is it's transitory. I don't know what the reason is. I hope it's not political. I assume it's not political. I do worry that this obsession with nailing the soft landing, okay, my favorite Central Banker was Paul Volcker. He was not worried about nailing the soft landing. He put us into a terrible recession and we got 20 years of prosperity because of the pain we took for 18 months. And I'd like to remind those who think this has been in their political interests, Reagan won 49 states in 1984 after the economy was absolutely in the tank in 1982 because he did the right thing. Honestly, if you think it's political -- particularly, the Treasury actions, Donald Trump should send them a thank you note because the day Powell pivoted, gasoline was $2. It went to $2.80. It's now at $2.55. This has been a wonderful period at Duquesne.

Swiggy filed its initial prospectus for a $1.25 billion IPO targeting a valuation of $12–15 billion, against a $10.7 billion private valuation at its February 2022 fundraise — a listing range that implied almost flat valuation over nearly three years despite material expansion of operations.

His bequest to fund what became the Indian Institute of Science followed the same logic as the steel and power bets: build the scientific and human capital an industrial India would require, rather than only the factories that would employ it.

On the corporate side he has been honoured with E&Y's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2017, the 22nd Nikkei Asia Prize for Economic and Business Innovation the same year, and Business Standard's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2022 — a stack of late-career honours that consolidate his status as one of India's most decorated business figures.

Wikipedia frames the dispute's policy implications as three-fold. For arbitration law, the Supreme Court's affirmation of emergency awards reinforced India's pro-arbitration posture. For insolvency, the case shows how overlapping arbitration, regulatory and enforcement actions can strand a distressed asset.

Titan Capital's focus on micro, small and medium enterprises reflects a thesis that engaging with smaller businesses fosters innovation and produces profitable returns that can be recycled into the ecosystem — a self-sustaining loop that mirrors the cooperative spirit Bahl has publicly associated with the 'Indicorn' philosophy.

Wikipedia classifies Future Group as defunct in 2022, acquired by Reliance Industries, with the Fate field reading simply 'Acquired by Reliance Industries'. The corporate entity that Biyani spent three decades building — at one point employing around 50,000 people and spanning insurance, logistics, integrated foods and FMCG — effectively ceased to exist as an independent operating group within a few turbulent years.

The company was hit by a 2017 security breach in which about 17 million user records were stolen. The incident prompted Zomato to publish a detailed technical post-mortem explaining how the breach occurred, a transparency choice that contrasted with the more reticent handling of similar incidents at peer platforms and which Goyal later cited as a governance touchstone.

Carnegie's Wikipedia biography records that after the 1901 sale of Carnegie Steel he received the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws from the University of Glasgow and was elected Rector of the University of St Andrews, serving from 1901 to 1907, and that he was already serving as Rector of the University of Edinburgh. He used the academic platforms to argue for the responsibilities of wealth and for the cause of international peace, the latter intensified by his close personal contacts with British political leaders including Gladstone, Morley, Rosebery, and Balfour, and by his sustained correspondence with American presidents from Cleveland to Wilson. The biography treats the rectorships and honorary degrees as the institutional scaffolding that allowed Carnegie to convert his fortune into moral authority on the public questions of the day, especially the abolition of war, which he pursued through the Endowment for International Peace chartered in 1910.

In 2024 Ola migrated from Microsoft Azure to its own Krutrim cloud, and from Google Maps to an in-house Ola Maps built on the 2021 GeoSpoc acquisition. The vendor-replacement programme was positioned by Bhavish as India-first infrastructure independence — a strategic and reputational signal as much as a cost play.

After a March 2022 scooter fire in Pune, Ola recalled 1,441 units as a 'pre-emptive measure,' and later in 2023 offered free front-fork arm replacements on the S1 and S1 Pro after safety-defect criticism. The recall-and-fix cycle illustrated the reputational cost of moving from crowdfunding-stage prototype to mass production at scale.

His move into the Shark Tank India judge's seat is positioned as a way to channel his Snapdeal experience — both successes and failures — into structured mentorship for early-stage founders, an explicit framing of failure as a teachable asset rather than a reputational liability.

In May 2024 Aggarwal posted on X that preferred gender pronouns were a 'western illness,' triggering an online backlash and accusations of homophobia and transphobia. LinkedIn removed the post for violating community guidelines, after which Bhavish publicly moved Ola Consumer off Microsoft Azure onto his own Krutrim Cloud — an unusually public coupling of culture-war positioning with vendor strategy.

Indian trader associations protested the Walmart takeover, arguing it threatened domestic retailers and violated foreign-investment norms for inventory-led e-commerce. The protests foreshadowed the policy tightening that would later force Flipkart and Amazon India to restructure their ownership of preferred sellers under the 2018 FDI rules.

For the April–June 2024 quarter, Swiggy reported operating revenues of Rs 3,222 crore, up 35% year-on-year, while net loss widened by 8% to Rs 611 crore — a profile that the IPO documents had to defend: revenue growth visible, but path to profitability still under construction at the moment of listing.

Philip Morris makes its 4th appearance as it continues to show the benefits of its industry leading move into Reduced Risk Products (‘RRPs’) such as heat not burn tobacco products and its acquisition of Swedish Match with its nicotine pouch business. You can tell when some things are right by the people who oppose them. The governments and dysfunctional health organisations who have set their stance against these RRPs, which are proving to be an invaluable aid in reducing risk to smokers, is yet another indicator that Philip Morris is on the right track. ADP which makes its 2nd appearance continues its metronomic performance. It rarely shoots the lights out in terms of performance but then neither does it disappoint which makes it a good stock for our strategy.

Carnegie's Wikipedia biography records that he married Louise Whitfield in 1887 and that the couple's only child, Margaret Carnegie, was born in 1897, with the family dividing its time among New York, Skibo Castle in Sutherland, Scotland, purchased in 1898, and a winter estate in Lenox, Massachusetts, where Carnegie died on August 11, 1919, of bronchial pneumonia at the age of eighty-three. The biography notes that he was buried at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in North Tarrytown, New York, and that at the time of his death he had already given away approximately three hundred fifty million dollars of his personal fortune, with the residual balance left to the Carnegie Corporation of New York for continued distribution. The geography of the family's residence — New York business base, Highland summer estate, Berkshire winter retreat — frames the post-1901 philanthropist phase as a transatlantic life rather than a Pittsburgh operating life.

Zomato's product breadth — intercity Legends delivery, hyperlocal Xtreme parcel service, Feeding India food-donation vertical, and Post Malone / Dua Lipa concerts under Zomato Live — reflected a portfolio approach to the food surface area. Several bets (Legends, Xtreme) were shuttered after limited traction, while others (Hyperpure, going-out vertical District) survived and became expansion arrows in the Eternal structure.

It's the best start I've had in years, and I think a lot of wealthy people know how to manage this kind of thing. The average American cares a lot more about gasoline prices than they do about stock prices, and they are getting hurt. There was a -- there was an interview on your show earlier about -- about people being priced out of the housing market. Inflation is 20 percent -- 21 percent higher than was in 2019. To me, even politically, that's more consequential than keeping the markets up or, you know, trying to nail the soft landing and not having a recession.KERNEN: Let me ask you how this plays into to -- it's another I think issue of being, you know, things are going, well, and then we totally overspent in terms of fiscally as well in Bidenomics.DRUCKENMILLER: Bidenomics -- if I was a professor, I'd give them an F. Basically, they misdiagnosed COVID and thought it was -- we were going into a depression. The Fed did, too. I worried about it, too, in early days. The Fed eventually pivoted, better late than never. Treasury -- Treasury is still acting like we're in a depression. It's interesting because I've studied the Great Depression and you had a private sector crippled with debt, with basically no new ideas. So interventionist policies were called for and were effective. The private sector could not be more different today than it was in the Great Depression. Their balance sheets are fine. They're healthy.

In 2019 Nilekani was inducted as an International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2024 TIME featured him among the hundred Most Influential People in AI — underlining that his footprint now extends beyond IT services and digital identity into the artificial-intelligence conversation shaping India's next decade.

Nilekani's board positions listed by Infosys include directorships at Avanti Finance, R Tehmurasp Investment Company, EkStep Foundation, and the Indian Institute for Human Settlements — a portfolio spanning fintech, family office, education non-profit and urban research, reflecting his post-CEO diversification beyond pure tech.

The Arc article notes that ESOPs in India carry a tax wedge: when options are exercised the difference between exercise price and fair market value is taxable to the holder, which is why founder share sales around IPO are often technically a tax-management exercise rather than a directional signal about conviction.

And have you ever seen more innovative ideas that the private sector could take advantage of? Now, you got Blockchain, you got AI, you've got the whole thing. All government needed to do was get out of their way and let them innovate. Instead, they've spent and spent and spent, and my new fear now is that spending and the -- and the resulting interest rates on the -- on the debt that's been created are going to crowd out some of the innovation that otherwise would have -- would have taken place. We've got a 7 percent budget deficit at full employment. It's just -- it's unheard of, and this is when you've got grid -- grid spending. You have -- I'm sorry -- you got defense spending, you have data center spending -- KERNEN: And AI.DRUCKENMILLER: And then, of course, you have green.KERNEN: Yeah.DRUCKENMILLER: So this spending is going to take place. You're going to build the capital stock. How do you build the capital stock when government is intruding with regulations and all this spending? And it's just sad, because I think we're looking at one of the most exciting periods in terms of potential productivity enhancing investments ever. And why we're spending like we're still in the Great Depression is beyond me. And they haven't stopped as you know. They're trying to circumvent the Supreme Court to give money to kids who had the opportunity to go to college, who haven't repaid their loans.

As of 2023 Zomato provided food delivery and table reservation services across more than 800 Indian cities, while restaurant discovery was restricted to the UAE following the international exits. The refocus on India signalled management's bet that scale at home, rather than footprint abroad, would compound margins and justify the post-IPO valuation re-rating.

Even before the deal closed, Flipkart's minority shareholders had negotiated strong protective provisions, including put-option rights that could compel Walmart to buy them out at future valuations. Walmart's SEC filings disclosed this optionality, which materially shaped the post-deal capital structure and informed Binny Bansal's continuing board role.

In October 2024 the Central Consumer Protection Authority issued a show-cause notice to Ola Electric covering more than 10,000 unaddressed customer complaints in a year — a regulatory moment that punctured the post-IPO goodwill and forced the company to publicly commit to service-network investments.

On 18 August 2024 Ola Cabs was rebranded as Ola Consumer, signalling a broader pivot from a pure ride-hailing brand to a multi-vertical consumer platform. The rename followed the Ola Electric IPO by days and aligned Ola's three faces — Consumer, Electric and Krutrim — under a unified house of brands strategy.

Stryker, which is making its 5th appearance, is benefitting from work on the backlog of elective surgical procedures which built up during the pandemic. Given the number of repeat appearances in our top five contributors I am tempted to repeat one of our mantras which is that ‘You make money with old friends’. However, three of those old friends which have been repeat contributors were detractors this year, namely L’Oréal, IDEXX and Novo Nordisk. However, if anything I would regard this as a blip in their long-term record and we intend to (mostly) patiently await a return to form. In our view they are simply too good to sell and risk being uninvested when the tide turns. We continue to apply a simple three step investment strategy: • Buy good companies • Don’t overpay • Do nothing I will review how we are doing against each of those in turn. As usual we seek to give some insight into the first and most important of these — whether we own good companies — by giving you the following table which shows what Fundsmith Equity Fund would be like if instead of being a fund it was a company and accounted for the stakes which it owns in the portfolio on a ‘look- through’ basis, and compares this with the market, in this case the FTSE 100 and the S&P 500. This also shows you how the portfolio has evolved over time.

Ankit Bhati, the other half of the founding duo, anchored the engineering function at Ola in its early years and contributed materially to the platform's scaling infrastructure. While Bhavish became the public face of the group, Ankit's operating role wound down before the EV pivot — a quieter founder-exit arc that contrasted with Bhavish's increasingly public persona.

Ola Electric has been building a 500-million-dollar Battery Innovation Center in Bengaluru — described as Asia's largest cell R&D facility — and a lithium-ion Gigafactory in Tamil Nadu backed by 240 million dollars of debt and 140 million dollars of equity. The vertical push into cell manufacturing is Bhavish's most ambitious deep-tech bet yet.

Year ended Fundsmith Equity Fund Portfolio S&P FTSE 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 2024 2024 ROCE 28% 29% 29% 25% 28% 32% 32% 32% 16% 17% Gross Margin 63% 65% 66% 65% 64% 64% 63% 64% 45% 42% Operating Margin 26% 28% 27% 23% 26% 28% 29% 30% 16% 15% Cash Conversion 102% 95% 97% 101% 95% 88% 91% 85% 85% 90% Interest Cover 17x 17x 16x 16x 23x 20x 20x 27x 9x 9x Source: Fundsmith LLP/Bloomberg. ROCE (Return on Capital Employed), Gross Margin, Operating Margin and Cash Conversion are the weighted mean of the underlying companies invested in by the Fundsmith Equity Fund and mean for the FTSE 100 and S&P 500 Indices. The FTSE 100 and S&P 500 numbers exclude financial stocks. Interest Cover is median. 2017–2019 ratios are based on last reported fiscal year accounts as of 31st December and for 2020–24 are Trailing Twelve Months and as defined by Bloomberg. Cash Conversion compares Free Cash Flow per Share with Net Income per Share. In 2024 operating profit margins were higher in the portfolio companies than in the past. Gross margins and return on capital were steady.significantly

A 2023 AllianceBernstein report put Flipkart's share of Indian e-commerce at around 48 percent, still ahead of Amazon India and domestic rival Meesho. The number confirmed that the Walmart-era Flipkart had held its lead even as quick-commerce entrants reshaped low-ticket urban baskets.

You know, Harlem children's own -- our motto was always, get them into college so they have a shot. These are kids that went into college and we're talking about spending hundreds of billions of dollars to put in their pockets. I assume it -- I assume it's because of the election. Even-- they're now floating ideas is for Fannie and Freddie to change the rules so you can refinance -- you can take out a second lien mortgage and you get to keep the rate on the first mortgage at whatever you did during COVID. There's one spending program or another. We don't need spending right now. We just need the government to get out of the way and let the private sector do its thing.BECKY QUICK: Stan, how -- how much of the inflationary pressures that we see are because of fiscal spending versus the Fed? I mean, it's kind of hard to break it down, but which would you think is the bigger problem?DRUCKENMILLER: I'd say it's definitely the fiscal, but the Fed's been the great enabler. And the latest thing is, we're going to apparently -- well, we've already started. We're going to shrink QT from $60 billion to $25 billion, and we're going to land apparently at $7 trillion. Somehow because of the plumbing, all of a sudden, we need a $7 trillion balance sheet just to function. If you remember in Bernanke's speech when we started QE, he said, don't worry, this is temporary. The balance sheet will be back to $800 billion. This is never going to grow again.

better than the companies in the main indices (which include our companies). Moreover, if you own shares in companies during a period of inflation it is better to own those with high returns and gross margins. Consistently high returns on capital are one sign we look for when seeking companies to invest in. Another is a source of growth — high returns are not much use if the business is not able to grow and deploy more capital at these high rates. So how did our companies fare in that respect in 2024? The weighted average free cash flow (the cash the companies generate after paying for everything except the dividend, and our preferred measure) grew by 14% in 2024. The only metric which continues to lag its historical performance is cash conversion — the degree to which profits are delivered in cash. Although this recovered slightly to 91% in 2023, this is still below its historical level of around 100% and it declined again in 2024 to 85%. This was due to a sharp rise in capital expenditure at a small group of companies: Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta and Novo Nordisk. Novo is racing to build production capacity to supply enough of its weight loss drug Wegovy and finished the year spending €10 billion purchasing three manufacturing sites. The tech companies are in a race to build capacity of Artificial Intelligence (‘AI’) in the form of GPU chips and data centres.

So that is -- I'd say it's mainly the Treasury because we just don't have room for all this, and it could get worse because we need to build the capital stock. But the Fed needs to stop helping them out, and I understand Chair Powell's statement that he wants to stay in his lane. Well, he didn't stay in his lane during COVID, and I don't blame him. He was encouraging fiscal spending and that was totally appropriate. But now, all of a sudden, oh, that's -- we don't comment on fiscal policy. Well, you commented on it when you wanted them to be more stimulative. You know, somebody's got to say something. It is interesting since -- since my last interview here in October, there do seem to be a lot more recognition by various people I see on your shows and elsewhere of the fiscal situation facing us. Everybody seems to get it but Yellen, who just keeps spending and spending. And again, I think it's done politically because it's causing inflation and it doesn't take a genius to figure out it's the average American that's getting hurt by the inflation.KERNEN: Your excitement about -- about AI sort of came into play with that discussion because you're worried that it's going to take a lot of investment and there's no savings -- we got to build up the defense, there's wars everywhere. And you -- you were early with Nvidia. You were early with AI. You pared back a little bit but are not less bullish on the prospects for it, are you?

Whether this arms race produces adequate profits and returns for the amounts expended remains an open question to which I will return later. At least Novo is building capacity to produce a drug for which there is established demand and profitability and in which it currently has a competitive advantage. The average year of foundation of our portfolio companies at the year-end was 1920. Collectively they are over a century old. The second leg of our strategy is about valuation. The weighted average free cash flow (‘FCF’) yield (the free cash flow generated as a percentage of the market value) of the portfolio at the outset of 2024 was 3.0% and ended the year at 3.1%. The year-end median FCF yield on the S&P 500 was 3.7%. Our portfolio consists of companies that are fundamentally a lot better than the average of those in the S&P 500, so it is no surprise that they are valued more highly than the average S&P 500 company. In itself this does not necessarily make the stocks expensive, any more than a lowly rating makes a stock cheap. However, we expect some of this disparity in valuation to be eradicated in 2025 if, as we expect, the cash conversion of our portfolio companies improves.our

DRUCKENMILLER: Well, first of all, I wasn't early with Nvidia. My young partner was early with Nvidia. He called me in the fall of '22 and said that he thought all this excitement about Blockchain was going to be far outweighed by AI. And I asked him how to play it and he told me I should buy this company Nvidia. I didn't even know how to spell it. I bought it. Then, a month later, ChatGPT happened. Even an old guy like me could figure out, okay, what that meant. So I increased the position substantially. I said in an interview in June of that year that I expected to own Nvidia for two or three years, that this was a mega trend like I'd never seen, potentially bigger than the Internet. But when the stock went from 150 to 900, I'm not Warren Buffett. I don't own things for 10 or 20 years. I wish I was Warren Buffett. And 150 to 900, yes, we did -- we did cut that position and lot of other positions in late March. I just need a break. We've had a -- we've had a hell of a run. A lot of what we recognized has become recognized by the marketplace now. Powell was -- we expected Powell to come back and re-pivot which he subsequently did. But no, long-term, we're as bullish on AI as we've ever been. And also, you just wonder, if we were all sitting here in 1999 talking about the Internet or anybody was talking about it, I don't think anybody would have estimated it would be as big as it got in 20 years. We didn't have the iPhone. We didn't have Uber.

objectives and this was again achieved with a portfolio turnover of 3.2% during the period. It is perhaps more helpful to know that we spent a total of just 0.002% (one fifth of a basis point) of the Fund’s average value over the year on voluntary dealing (which excludes dealing costs associated with subscriptions and redemptions as these are involuntary). We sold three companies and purchased two. As last year this may seem like a lot of names for what is not a lot of turnover as in some cases the size of the holding sold or bought was small. We have held four of the portfolio companies since inception in 2010, nine for more than ten years and 15 for over five years. Why is this important? It helps to minimise costs and minimising the costs of investment is a vital contribution to achieving a satisfactory outcome as an investor. Too often investors, commentators and advisers focus on, or in some cases obsess about, the Annual Management Charge (‘AMC’) or the Ongoing Charges Figure (‘OCF’), which includes some costs over and above the AMC, which are charged to the Fund. The OCF for 2024 for the T Class Accumulation shares was 1.04%. The trouble is that the OCF does not include an important element of costs — the costs of dealing. When a fund manager deals by buying or selling, the fund typically incurs the cost of commission paid to a broker, the bid-offer spread on the stocks dealt in and, in some cases, transaction taxes such as stamp duty in the UK.

We didn't have Facebook, yada, yada. And yet, if you bought the Nasdaq in '99, it went down 80 percent before that all came to fruition. That's not going to happen with AI. But it could rhyme – AI could rhyme with the Internet as we go through all this capital spending we need to do, the payoff while it's incrementally coming in by the day, the big payoff might be four to five years from now. So AI might be a little overhyped now but under-hyped long term.QUICK: You said you're not like Warren Buffett, but what you just did with Nvidia sounds an awful lot like what he did with Apple. He pared his position in Apple by 13 percent, and they went on to say it's a better company than Coca-Cola or American Express or any of the other companies that they have in their portfolio, and he thinks Tim Cook is great.DRUCKENMILLER: Yeah. Well, I will be very surprised if I don't own Nvidia on and off next 10 years.KERNEN: You're so bullish on AI. Andrew, you did a great interview with Perplexity and I think that -- that's where you decided might be a place that you want to be.ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: Yeah.DRUCKENMILLER: I love perplexity. Again a funny story -- my young partner, the one who has basically been behind all our AI play with his -- with his staff. He told me, I don't know, in January, that all the kids on the West Coast weren't using ChatGPT or Google anymore. They were using this thing called Perplexity AI. So I, of course, tried it out and it was just unbelievable.

This can add significantly to the costs of a fund, yet it is not included in the OCF. We provide our own version of this total cost including dealing costs, which we have termed the Total Cost of Investment (‘TCI’). For the T Class Accumulation shares in 2024 the TCI was 1.05%, including all costs of dealing for flows into and out of the Fund, not just our voluntary dealing. We are pleased that our TCI is just 0.01% (1 basis point) above our OCF when transaction costs are taken into account. However, we would again caution against becoming obsessed with charges to such an extent that you lose focus on the performance of funds. It is worth pointing out that the performance of our Fund tabled at the beginning of this letter is after charging all fees which should surely be the main focus. We sold our stakes in Diageo, McCormick and Apple during the year. Diageo, which we had owned since inception, has exhibited problems with its new management, shown by a lack of information about its Latin American business which produced results far worse than the sector in this area. Moreover, we suspect the entire drinks sector is in the early stages of being impacted negatively by weight loss drugs. Indeed, it seems likely that the drugs will eventually be used to treat alcoholism such is their effect on consumption.

It's an answer machine, but the speed, but the depth of the answers and the quality and then the fact that they give you the sources if you want to go deeper, it was nothing like I've ever seen. If you don't believe me, just ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity a question, and get the answer and you'll see -- you'll see exactly what I've talked about.SORKIN: Right.DRUCKENMILLER: I fell so in love with it. We tried to get in on a round, that we were lucky enough to be accommodated. I love the founder Aravind Srinivas. He's super aggressive, and with his team super innovative, but he's also got humility. He's everything we love in a founder. So there's a land grab going on now in the answer machine business. It's obviously a big task to take on Google, but if you think about it, Google has $300 billion in sales. If Perplexity even goes to $2 billion in sales, it'll be a huge winner. Frankly, I'd say 90 -- 95 percent of my searchers now I use Perplexity, probably the best thing I could do for the viewers today, unless they're listening to all my other stuff. Try this thing out, you'll love it.SORKIN: Right. Hey, Stan, I have two questions for you. One AI -related and then one market related. On AI, in terms of these large language models, Perplexity is obviously a productized version of it.

How concerned are you about the idea that that many of these large language models may turn into just commodities, it may be just a feature, if you will, of all of these services and how much economics can ultimately be extracted from them?DRUCKENMILLER: Great question. I'm concerned. I'm open-minded of that happening. I mean, it's one of the reasons we cut our positions back. You never know where we're going to be in two years or three years. I also wonder, Andrew, whether Chat -- ChatGPT three was a huge leap over two, three was a huge leap over -- I'm sorry, four was a huge leap over three. I'm sure five is going to be a lot better than four. But the cost of these models and the incremental value you're getting at them at some point you may hit the road. So I don't know how long this training thing is going to go on and it may separate into different verticals. So it's all to be determined, and it's why I'm glad I don't have Warren Buffett's problem, although it's a nice problem to have having positions so big that I can't rotate.SORKIN: And then, Stan, my other question given I'm in D.C., I want to ask you a political question since we're in election year, is how you see the two candidates as it relates to the markets and to inflation? On one end, I know you've been very critical of this administration, the Biden administration, and how it's approached inflation.

We sold McCormick as we had been disappointed by the slow response which the company exhibited in its ability to pass on input cost inflation so compressing its margins, together with its exposure to own label competition which has stiffened as inflation has caused consumers to trade down. We began purchasing Apple two years ago at about $156 a share when its P/E was below the S&P 500 average and the growth in service revenues had somewhat convinced us that the much talked about ecosystem, tying its users to the products, might really exist. We correctly foresaw a number of reporting periods ahead when sales growth would be lacklustre and so bought a small stake hoping to add to it as the poor sales performance came to pass. We were right about the sales performance — its sales grew just 2% last year — but wrong about the share price which rose strongly, placing the shares on a rating about 50% higher than the S&P 500. We were not going to buy more stock against that background and it was occupying a place in our portfolio and so we sold our stake. We started purchasing stakes in Atlas Copco and Texas Instruments during the year.

On the other end, if former President Trump becomes the president again -- of course, I imagine he will not only jawbone the Fed to have lower rates, there's obviously this article in The Wall Street Journal we've talked a lot about whether they'll have independence in the future, and then there's issues around tariffs and the like on China and whether that will be inflationary. So how do you -- how do you measure both of those things?DRUCKENMILLER: One of the reasons I'm confused by all this asymmetric talk toward cuts, if Trump were to get elected, I could see a scenario if inflation is not squashed and eliminated by then where you mentioned it, tariffs, immigration and animal spirits because I think business will get very excited with the lack of regulation and the cessation of some of the things I talked about, inflation actually takes off again the way it did in the '70s. So I am open-minded. I'm not predicting this, but I'm open-minded to say under a Trump administration, inflation being 6 percent sometime in 2025. With Biden, I'm more worried about stagflation -- with all the government spending, with all the tricks that Yellen's been using to manipulate the yield curve with the way the Fed seems to have reignited financial conditions, I think the inflationary outcome could be there. But I also fear regulation and everything else preventing productivity. So I'm basically a guy without a candidate.

Atlas Copco is a Swedish industrial company which makes compressors, vacuum equipment, electrical and pneumatic tools and which has three characteristics which we find attractive: • it outsources much of the manufacturing so making it capital light which enhances returns; • it is highly decentralised with over 600 operating entities which have considerable autonomy in addressing their local market; and • there is a controlling stake held by the Wallenberg family vehicle which should lead to good long-term decision-making since they have been in business for 151 years this year. Texas Instruments is a manufacturer of analogue and embedded microprocessors which go into a wide range of consumer and industrial devices, automobiles, and communications equipment. It is investing ahead of a probable upturn in the semiconductor cycle although it is now apparent that there is not one cycle. Demand for GPUs of the sort made by Nvidia far from being in a down cycle has been on a lunar trajectory, and there are clear differences between the cycle for regular automotive chips and chips for electric vehicles or chips for other appliances, as well as between regions. However, Texas Instruments has a long history of investing well ahead of upswings in demand and producing handsome returns from it.is

I'm an old-style Reagan, free market, pro-immigration, anti-tariff Republican. The only free market leader in the world right now bizarrely is in Argentina of all places. Javier Milei. It's going to be an interesting experiment. This is a highly, highly intelligent leader who was taught in the School of Austrian Economics. And it's funny because the last time I was on, we talked about entitlements, what would I do? He cut Social Security 35 percent after he came to office. They've gone from a primary deficit of like 4 or 5 percent to a 3 percent surplus. They've taken a massive hit in GDP, basically a depression for a quarter, and his approval rating has not gone down. In addition to being highly intelligent and knowing economics, he's a showman and so far, he's been able to maintain the street because they like the showman part. And I think he's got a real shot and I'm -- KERNEN: You know -- DRUCKENMILLER: I'm not only invested in Argentina. By the way, do you want to hear how I invested in Argentina? It's a funny story. I saw -- I wasn't at Davos, but I saw the speech in Davos and it was about 1:00 in the afternoon in my office. I dialed up Perplexity and I said, give me the five most liquid ADRs in Argentina.KERNEN: Argentina.DRUCKENMILLER: It gave me enough of a description that I follow the old Soros rule, invest and then investigate. I bought all of them. We did some work on them. I increased my positions and so far, it's been great. But we'll see.

also a beneficiary of the onshoring of semiconductor manufacturing to avoid the geopolitical risks of Taiwan and China. Last year I spent some time in this letter discussing the rise of interest in AI, as one of the driving forces behind the rise of most of the Magnificent Seven stocks and especially Nvidia. This boom/hype (you choose) continued in 2024, but some of its characteristics changed. One is that it may have become more focused. It had been seen as a driver of share prices of companies which we had previously held such as Adobe and Intuit, both of which had blotted their copybook with us by engaging in over-priced and seemingly ill- conceived acquisitions or attempted acquisitions. Both of them significantly underperformed the market in 2024 as reality seemed to dawn on investors that AI may not be of immediate and/or universal benefit and could actually be detrimental. Conversely, this has had the effect of focusing investors’ attention on fewer real immediate beneficiaries of the AI boom such as Nvidia. During this period commentators have frequently asked whether the AI boom is the same as the Dotcom era and therefore will have a similar ending. In response I am tempted to quote Mark Twain, ‘History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.’ Undoubtedly some of the AI enthusiasm is hype, as was the Dotcom mania, but there are a couple of key differences: 1.

I don't know how much time the populace is going to give this guy, but so far, his popularity is maintained and -- KERNEN: Yeah, Elon Musk tweeting about -- he met with him I guess yesterday and then tweeted out, I recommend investing in Argentina. I know you met with him as well and I heard from you that this -- I mean, it was just so -- you were so impressed that you want to tell your friends about this.DRUCKENMILLER: He's -- he's over the top in terms of -- KERNEN: I've seen some interviews.DRUCKENMILLER: -- the spectrum, but the fact of the matter is the country's been so devastated for so long. I mean, they were the eighth richest country in the world and now I don't what they're -- they're like 150. So, Argentina was ready for this, but it took somebody not crazy but on the spectrum to be able to do these kind of reforms. I -- it's really the inverse of what's going on here. We're avoiding all the pain. We have no pain. We're the richest country in the world and you just wonder if we continue to go down this path toward the public sector over the private sector. Look, I agree. We're all always going to be the place that you want to invest in, but I just hate to see Argentina out-capitalizing America, and that's kind of where we're going with this.QUICK: Can I just ask? If you are worried about inflation being the potential problem in another Donald Trump administration, would you be advocating for a very tough Federal Reserve chairman in that case?

The leading company in the AI boom, Nvidia, is very profitable, albeit with a history of some downturns, whereas in the Dotcom boom a lot of the share price performance was driven by reference to clicks and eyeballs in the absence of any profits or even revenues. Even companies which were to rise Phoenix-like from the ashes after the Dotcom meltdown, such as Amazon, were not yet profitable; and 2. The rise of so-called passive or index funds. 1993 1996 1999 2002 2005 2008 2011 2014 2017 2021 2,000 6,000 8,000 12,000 US$ Billions 2023 4,000 10,000 14,000 16,000 Active Assets Passive Assets Source: Morningstar.Funds

Decision — Took Go Digit public (NSE/BSE IPO). Context: Fairfax-backed insurtech; SEBI RHP on record. Outcome (known): Listed at ₹286 vs ₹272 issue (+5.15%).

In late 2023 passive investment via index funds exceeded the amount of assets held in active funds for the first time. They are now more than half of Assets Under Management (‘AUM’). However, during the Dotcom boom only about 10% of AUM was in passive funds. As ever we do not always aid understanding with the labels which we sometimes use in investment. Index funds are not truly a passive strategy. There may be no fund manager taking investment decisions, but such index investing is in fact a momentum strategy. The vast majority of index funds are market capitalisation weighted, like the indices on which they are based. The size of holdings in companies in the index fund is based upon their market value compared with the market value of the index. So when there are inflows to index funds the largest portion goes to the largest companies, and vice versa when there are outflows. The result is that as money flows out of active funds and into index funds, as it has been doing, it drives the performance of the largest companies which are companies whose shares have already performed well which is how they came to be the largest companies by market value. This is a self-reinforcing feedback loop which will operate until it doesn’t.

And I ask because I don't think either of these candidates wants to see a strong Fed chair. Trump has been much more vocal about this in the past. I wouldn't even say browbeating Jay Powell. He was publicly flogging him when he was his Fed chairman. What should that next Fed chair look like? What would you say to Jay Powell to Jerome Powell if he's still in that position and continuing for a few years there?DRUCKENMILLER: Well, obviously, I'd like a strong Fed chair but obviously, I'm not the one who's going to be appointing him. And both candidates -- probably the last thing they want because of politics is a strong Fed chair. Even Ronald Reagan forced out Volcker and replaced him with Greenspan. It tends to be the way presidents think. If Donald Trump were elected, I would tell Powell just again run monetary policy and do what he thinks is right and I hope he can bear listening to the tirade that would potentially happen if the president didn't agree with whatever medicine was needed at the time.KERNEN: Well, you just tell Kevin not to -- not to listen to everything he said. I'm sure Kevin will be fine. Do you want to -- Kevin Warsh. Do you want to talk about copper or Japan or do you do you want to leave? You can -- it's up to you. We're at 25 minutes. Do you want to just say a couple words about -- I mean, copper?DRUCKENMILLER: I'll just say we -- we've been, we've been invested in Japan, oh, since middle to late last year.

For example, were there to be an economic downturn which led to a reduction in tech spending, which is now so large a proportion of overall spending that it cannot be non-cyclical, one area of vulnerability might be spending on AI as it is not currently generating much revenue. Were the largest companies then to produce disappointing results, their share prices are likely to react badly which will drag down the index performance more than that of those active managers who are underweight in these stocks. But even if some scenario like this awaits us in the future, what exactly will cause this and when it may occur is difficult or impossible to predict. Which brings me back to the subject of volatility which was raised at the start of this letter. We don’t agree that true volatility is measured by ratios such as the Sharpe or Sortino ratio which look at the volatility of fund prices or share prices, but they are widely accepted as a measure. Moreover, whilst investors should rationally focus on volatility in the fundamental value of the businesses they invest in and accept higher price volatility if this leads to higher returns, it is easier said than done. One problem is that it is difficult to remain calm and focus on the fundamental characteristics when the price volatility is sharply negative. Take a stock like Nvidia, which has been a spectacular performer for the past two years. The Nvidia share price fell by over two thirds as recently as 2021–2022.

I was lucky enough to start Duquesne in 1981 and those were the era of Boone Pickens and Carl Icahn changing corporate governance, and just multiply that times 10X what's going on in Japan. It's an amazing situation. They've been in deflation for 20 years, not unlike Argentina, they've been through the ringer so much that they're willing to try something much more capless. It's funny I'm going over there in a couple weeks and I told the brokerage firm that's helping me arrange meetings, make sure they know I'm not an activist, and they said, oh, no, no, they really like activists. They want you over there and they really like activists. That's all you need to know, that and -- that and the fact that pricing has returned. It's a lot cheaper than here and if you believe in change, there you go. Copper is a pretty simple story, takes about 12 years, greenfield to produce copper, and you got EVs, the grid, data centers, and believe it or not munitions. These missiles all got enough copper in them and the world's getting hot that we just think the supply-demand situation is incredible for the next five or six years.KERNEN: And you'd invest in China, when? There's no -- there's never too strong a word?DRUCKENMILLER: We exited China in 2018. We haven't made a single trade in security there other than their currency once in a while, I won't say which way. I will never invest in China as long as the current leader is there.

Meta demonstrates, but given how difficult they can be to own maybe one is enough for our portfolio at any one time. In 2021–2022 Meta’s stock price fell by 76%, but whilst we continued to own it despite this, to our current benefit, there are several key differences between the situation of Meta then and Nvidia now: • Meta serves some 3.3 billion consumers and several million advertisers. Nvidia’s demand is dominated by a literal handful of so-called hyperscalers building data centres to handle Large Language Models for AI. • People sometimes ask us whether it is dangerous to own consumer stocks in an economic downturn. To which we reply yes, but it is not as dangerous as not being close to the consumer in those circumstances. If you think the performance of consumer companies is a worry in a downturn wait until you see what happens to their suppliers, especially the suppliers of capital equipment like factory machinery. A 5-10% downturn in sales revenues at the consumer companies can translate into a cessation of orders for some suppliers. Nvidia supplies capital goods — its latest generation GPU server sells for about $3m each — and a significant downturn in demand from its clients who do service consumers would be interesting to watch from a safe distance. • Before its share price fall Meta was on a P/E of 28x whereas Nvidia is currently on a P/E of 54x.

The reason I'll never say never is if they had a change in leadership, I'd at least consider the situation. But to me -- I didn't invest in Russia, and I'm not investing in China. There's so many exciting things going on in the United States, in Argentina, and Japan, why in the world would I ever want to put money in China? And frankly as an American, outside of my investment day job, I feel very good about that decision.KERNEN: Great. We didn't talk about colleges there, but -- and what's happening. I've had -- I have -- I've run out of words.DRUCKENMILLER: -- in three years, and the -- and the protest will be over.KERNEN: Yeah. We'll see, but thanks for all the time.DRUCKENMILLER: Becky, Joe, it's been great to be here. Appreciate it.KERNEN: Great to have you as always. Thank you.DRUCKENMILLER: Thanks.KERNEN: Thanks, Stan.Choose CNBC as your preferred source on Google and never miss a moment from the most trusted name in business news.Subscribe to CNBC PROSubscribe to Investing ClubLicensing & ReprintsCNBC CouncilsJoin the CNBC PanelDigital ProductsNews ReleasesClosed CaptioningCorrectionsAbout CNBCInternshipsSite MapCareersHelpContactNews TipsGot a confidential news tip? We want to hear from you.Get In TouchCNBC NewslettersSign up for free newsletters and get more CNBC delivered to your inboxSign Up NowGet this delivered to your inbox, and more info about our products and services.

All of which brings me to a reminder of what we are seeking to achieve with the Fundsmith Equity Fund and that is to produce a high likelihood of a satisfactory return rather than the chance of a spectacular return which could be spectacularly good or spectacularly bad. Finally, once more I wish you a happy New Year and thank you for your continued support for our Fund. Yours sincerely, Terry Smith CEO Fundsmith LLP Disclaimer: A Key Investor Information Document and an English language prospectus for the Fundsmith Equity Fund are available via the Fundsmith website or on request and investors should consult these documents before purchasing shares in the fund. Past performance is not necessarily a guide to future performance.exchange

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rates, and you may not get back the amount of your original investment. Fundsmith LLP does not offer investment advice or make any recommendations regarding the suitability of its products. This document is a financial promotion and is communicated by Fundsmith LLP which is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. The views and opinions expressed herein are those of Fundsmith as of the date hereof and are subject to change based on prevailing market and economic conditions and will not be updated or supplemented. Sources: Fundsmith LLP, Bloomberg and FE Analytics unless otherwise stated. Data is as at 31st December 2024 unless otherwise stated. Portfolio turnover is a measure of the fund's trading activity and has been calculated by taking the total share purchases and sales less total creations and liquidations divided by the average net asset value of the fund. P/E ratios and Free Cash Flow Yields are based on trailing twelve month data and as at 31st December 2024 unless otherwise stated. Percentage change is not calculated if the TTM period contains a net loss. The MSCI World Index is a developed world index of global equities across all sectors and, as such, is a fair comparison given the fund's investment objective and policy. The Investment Association Global Sector in Sterling is representative of funds that invest at least 80% of their assets globally in equities. This facilitates a comparison against funds with broadly similar characteristics.

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Decision — Initiated IPCO (first O&G position; Lundin 34%). Context: ESG trade-offs essay-length treatment in H1-24. Outcome (partial): Position open; initiation verified via letter only.

Decision — China basket (NetEase, Yum China, H World, Didi) + Prosus 10% → sold. Context: Fear-greed entry logic articulated in H1-24; “six investments in China” per the 2024 letter podcast. Outcome (known): Prosus and PDD SOLD per the 2025 annual letter; new selling framework introduced.

Decision — Ran the portfolio to +24.9% (−2.0% vs benchmark). Context: 2024 annual letter (via SA republication). Outcome (known): 31st consecutive year documented in the returns table.