2025

Wang Jianlin's Dalian Wanda dec 6, 2025 · In 2025 September, a China court imposed luxury spending ban Wang Jianlin, after Wanda Real Estate Group & subsidiaries failed to repay $26 .

Willow Run, also known as Air Force Plant 31, was the manufacturing complex the Ford Motor Company built between Ypsilanti Township and Belleville, Michigan, to manufacture the Consolidated B-24 Liberator heavy bomber during World War II. The 3.5-million-square-foot plant was the largest enclosed room in the world at the time of its completion and at peak employed forty-two thousand five hundred workers. The Wikipedia account records that by 1944 Ford was rolling a Liberator off the Willow Run line every sixty-three minutes, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Peak monthly production came in April 1944, with four hundred and twenty-eight B-24s. Ford ultimately built six thousand nine hundred and seventy-two of the eighteen thousand four hundred and eighty-two total B-24s, and produced knock-down kits for another one thousand eight hundred and ninety-three to be assembled by Consolidated in Fort Worth. By 1945 Ford was producing seventy percent of all B-24s across two nine-hour shifts.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's account of Henry Ford's antisemitism documents that Ford owned an influential newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, and used it to spread antisemitic ideas to hundreds of thousands of American readers. Beginning in 1920, the paper began publishing a series of antisemitic articles under the title The International Jew, drawing on longstanding false conspiracy theories that originated outside the United States and reframing them for an American audience. The Museum notes that Ford made a policy of automatically subscribing every new Model T buyer to the Independent, an unprecedented fusion of industrial distribution and propaganda. When his editor Edwin Gustav Pipp resigned in protest, Ford replaced him with William J. Cameron, who eventually wrote most of the International Jew series. The Museum also records that Ford's antisemitic publications influenced readers beyond the United States, including Adolf Hitler and other Nazi Party leaders in Germany.

The Dearborn Independent, also known as The Ford International Weekly, was a weekly newspaper established in 1901 and published by Henry Ford from 1919 through 1927 out of Dearborn, Michigan. The Wikipedia account records that at its height during the mid-1920s the paper claimed a circulation in the hundreds of thousands, sustained in part by Ford's policy of automatically subscribing every Model T buyer. The paper's antisemitic editorial line drew multiple libel lawsuits, including from San Francisco attorney and farm cooperative organizer Aaron Sapiro, and triggered a sustained campaign by the Anti-Defamation League for a boycott of Ford vehicles. The last issue was published in December 1927, after Ford's signed apology to Sapiro and the closure of the libel trial. The closure ended a public-relations crisis that had begun to depress Model T sales and turned the Independent into the most notorious newspaper episode in American industrial history.

The Fordson tractor went into mass production in 1917 and debuted for sale on October 8, 1917, at a price of seven hundred and fifty dollars, built at a hurriedly constructed factory in Dearborn, Michigan. Ford used the same assembly-line techniques he had pioneered on the Model T. According to the Wikipedia account, it took thirty hours and forty minutes to convert raw materials into the four thousand parts used for each tractor, with a manufacturing cost of five hundred and sixty-seven dollars and fourteen cents and a per-unit profit of one hundred and eighty-two dollars and eighty-six cents. The Fordson was the first tractor that combined the properties of being small, lightweight, mass-produced, and affordable, with a nationwide dealership network and the trusted Ford brand behind it. For the first time, the average American farmer could own a tractor, and Henry Ford had done for agriculture what he had done for passenger cars.

Edsel Bryant Ford, the only child of Henry and Clara Jane Bryant Ford, served as president of Ford Motor Company from 1919 until his death in 1943. The Wikipedia account records that Edsel died of stomach cancer on May 26, 1943, aged forty-nine, after a long tenure in which he was stylistically and commercially adventurous but perpetually subordinated to his father. On Edsel's death Henry Ford, then eighty, temporarily reassumed the presidency of Ford Motor Company. Two years later, in 1945, Edsel's eldest son Henry Ford II succeeded his grandfather as president of the company, beginning the family's second-generation leadership and the eventual professionalization of Ford's management. Edsel's presidency, bookended by his father's interventions, also covered the founding of the Ford Foundation in 1936, the construction of the Willow Run bomber plant, and the company's wartime conversion, all of which he championed before his early death.

In 1936 Edsel Ford, son of Henry, established the Ford Foundation with an initial gift of twenty-five thousand dollars. The Ford Foundation's official account records that the founding charter committed the institution to administer funds for scientific, educational, and charitable purposes, all for the public welfare, and that during its early years the foundation operated in Michigan under the leadership of Ford family members. The foundation was chartered as an independent philanthropy unaffiliated with the Ford Motor Company. After the deaths of Edsel Ford in 1943 and Henry Ford in 1947, the family's bequests turned the foundation into the largest philanthropy in the world. Henry Ford II, Edsel's eldest son, assumed leadership of the foundation and commissioned a blue-ribbon panel led by H. Rowan Gaither to determine how the greatly increased resources could best be put to use, a study that reshaped American institutional philanthropy after mid-century.

The Ford Foundation was founded on January 15, 1936, by Edsel Ford and his father Henry Ford as a 501(c)(3) charitable organization, originally funded by Edsel's twenty-five-thousand-dollar gift. The Wikipedia account records that by 1947, after the deaths of both founders, the foundation owned ninety percent of the non-voting shares of Ford Motor Company, while the Ford family retained the voting shares. Between 1955 and 1974, the foundation sold its Ford Motor Company holdings and now plays no role in the automobile company. In 1949, Henry Ford II created Ford Philanthropy, a separate corporate foundation that today channels Ford's ongoing community giving. By the middle of the twentieth century the foundation had shifted its focus from Michigan philanthropic support to five program areas identified in the Gaither report: economic improvements, education, freedom and democracy, human behavior, and world peace. As of 2025 the endowment stood at approximately sixteen billion dollars.

Rockefeller framed the accumulation of wealth as a religious vocation. 'I believe the power to make money is a gift from God,' he said, describing it as his duty to make money and still more money, and to deploy what he made for the good of his fellow man according to the dictates of his own conscience. That conviction welded his operating and philanthropic philosophies into a single arc: aggressive industrial consolidation was not merely defensible but a duty, because the wealth it produced could then be redeployed under deliberate, professional stewardship for human welfare. Biographer Ron Chernow estimated Rockefeller's wealth peaked in 1913 at roughly $900 million—more than $29 billion in 2025 dollars—and that he ultimately donated about $540 million. The arc, with its implied claim that accumulation and redistribution were two halves of a single calling, became the template for the modern billionaire-philanthropist and remains the most contested part of Rockefeller's legacy.

John Pierpont Morgan Sr., whose life ran from April 17, 1837, to March 31, 1913, was the financier and investment banker who dominated Wall Street's corporate finance across the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, according to his Wikipedia biography. Heading the banking house that eventually became JPMorgan Chase and Co., he drove a wave of industrial consolidations at the turn of the twentieth century, among them U.S. Steel, International Harvester, and General Electric. Controlling interests in Aetna, Western Union, the Pullman Car Company, and twenty-one railroads gave him and his partners enormous influence over the nation's capital markets. When the Panic of 1907 struck, the coalition of financiers he assembled saved the American monetary system from collapse. He died in Rome at seventy-five, leaving fortune and business to his son, J. P. Morgan Jr., with biographer Ron Chernow estimating his wealth at eighty million dollars, about 1.9 billion in 2024 terms.

A January 2025 entry in CMG Wealth's On My Radar series revisits an interview Stanley Druckenmiller gave to Norges Bank Investment Management's chief executive, Nicolai Tangen, in which he set out what he called the three nails in the coffin of the prevailing macro regime. The piece paraphrases Druckenmiller's argument that the post-2020 combination of large fiscal deficits, a Federal Reserve that had stopped expanding its balance sheet, and rising debt service costs was producing an inflationary bias that the market was still underpricing. The CMG note uses the interview as a teaching moment for advisers who are constructing client portfolios against a backdrop of structurally higher rates and shorter duration. 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. Druckenmiller's three death nails, as the piece summarises them, are the fiscal trajectory of the United States, the cost of servicing an ever-larger debt stock, and the political difficulty of closing the deficit through either tax increases or spending cuts. He told Tangen that the bond market would at some point demand a higher term premium, that the dollar's reserve status did not insulate the United States from that repricing, and that the broader equity market's earnings yield would have to compete with a higher risk-free rate. The piece pairs Druckenmiller's framing with charts on the deficit and on real yields, and is widely shared among wealth managers as a clean summary of the macro setup he was warning about. 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 note closes with Druckenmiller's prescription for an investor worried about the regime. He argued that the answer was not to load up on duration but to own a basket of hard assets, equities with pricing power, and a meaningful cash position to be deployed when the inevitable repricing forced central banks to back off. The CMG piece treats this as an actionable framework for retail and high-net-worth investors, translating a macro hedge fund manager's positioning into a household balance sheet. The article is paired in the On My Radar archive with a long-running series on debt sustainability and on the politics of the Federal Reserve, and is cited by advisers who want a single-page summary of Druckenmiller's view. 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.

In a September 2025 video published on Forbes' social channels, Stanley Druckenmiller told the audience that the first two decades of his career were marked by a lot of failures, and that the way his firm learned from those failures was the foundation of the track record that followed. The clip is short but dense, and it has been widely shared because it sits in tension with the public perception of Druckenmiller as an investor who rarely made material errors. He said that the firm's use of data to systematically review every closed position, identify where the process had broken down, and re-engineer the rules that had permitted the error was the single most important investment in process he had made over the course of his career. 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. He used the clip to argue that the difference between investors who compound and investors who blow up is not the frequency of mistakes but the discipline of post-mortem review. He said that his firm institutionalised a written log of every material error, paired with the rule change that emerged from it, and that the log had become a more valuable document than any individual position file. He framed the practice as borrowed from the airline and medical traditions of incident review, in which the goal is not to assign blame but to re-engineer the system so the same incident does not recur. The clip has been used as a teaching moment by investors looking to build their own post-mortem processes and to learn from the documented errors of a top-down macro trader. 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. He closed the clip with a reflection on what he called the humility of the long-run track record. He told Forbes that the investors he admired most were the ones who had survived multiple regimes and had been willing to admit, in public, that they had been wrong. He said the willingness to update one's mind in response to the data was a rare quality in finance, where the social pressure to defend a prior position is strong, and that the firms that institutionalise the post-mortem are the ones that compound across cycles. The Forbes clip is one of a small number of short-form video statements Druckenmiller has given on the topic of process, and it is widely cited on social media as a one-stop teaching moment on the value of learning from documented errors. 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.

History.com's profile emphasizes how unpolished the rising magnate remained. A descendant of Dutch settlers who arrived in the mid-1600s, Vanderbilt was born on May 27, 1794, to Staten Island farmers, and his father supplemented farm income by ferrying produce and merchandise to Manhattan in his periauger. As a teenager Cornelius moved cargo around the harbor in his own periauger, then acquired a fleet of small boats and learned the fundamentals of ship design. In 1817 he signed on as ferry captain for Thomas Gibbons's commercial steamboat service, mastering the steamship business before going independent in the late 1820s and becoming one of the country's largest operators through fierce fare wars, with rivals sometimes paying him hefty sums simply not to compete. In the 1840s he built a large brick home at 10 Washington Place in what is now Greenwich Village. The city's elite remained unmoved, considering him rough and uncultured.

In 2025 Gates made two decisions that define his philanthropy's endgame: he will donate virtually all of his remaining wealth, about $200 billion, over the following two decades, and the foundation will close its doors at the end of 2045. In his own telling of the story, he understood from the beginning that the foundation would not be permanent, because philanthropy works best when it is time-limited and aimed squarely at the needs that matter most. The final chapter concentrates the institution on three goals: no mother, child, or baby dying of a preventable cause, a generation growing up without deadly infectious diseases, and hundreds of millions of people escaping poverty. Across its first twenty-five years the foundation invested more than $102.3 billion in global health and development, American education, and economic mobility, with teams and partners in over 140 countries, and child mortality has been cut in half since 2000.

ThoughtCo's retelling captures the Erie War's theatrical absurdity. Wall Street after the Civil War was largely unregulated, and manipulators moved stocks at will. The Erie, opened in 1851 as a rolling counterpart of the Erie Canal, was chronically unprofitable and controlled by Daniel Drew, a former cattle drover who had walked herds from upstate New York to Manhattan, deeply religious, prone to lapsing into prayer, and benefactor of the New Jersey seminary that became Drew University. Vanderbilt, who had known Drew for decades and held what observers could not explain as an abiding respect for him, began working with him in late 1867 to buy up the majority of Erie shares. When Drew, Gould, and Fisk turned to issuing watered stock against him, Vanderbilt kept buying. In March 1868 the trio fled across the Hudson and barricaded themselves in a Jersey hotel guarded by hired thugs, Drew sitting silently in prayer, Gould morose, and Fisk parading before reporters with outrageous quotes, until Albany payoffs and a buyback settlement ended the farce.

The company's own history of the split frames it as an experiment that worked too well. In 1984 Schultz, then director of operations and marketing, led Starbucks' first experiment with espresso, and the results were promising, but the founders did not want to distract from the business's primary goal of selling arabica coffee beans at retail. So in 1985 Schultz left and started Il Giornale, a company built on the ritual and romance he had observed in Milan's coffee bars. The break was not total: Starbucks became his first investor, and Il Giornale's coffee and espresso drinks were made from Starbucks beans, with chief coffee buyer Dave Olsen working with the new venture. By 1987 the concept had proven itself in the market, and the path back to the original brand opened when the founders decided to sell. The episode demonstrates how a corporate refusal to cannibalize a core business can hand the adjacent opportunity to someone else.

A Chinese court (Lanzhou Intermediate People's Court in Gansu province) imposed high-consumption spending restrictions on Dalian Wanda Group, Wang Jianlin personally, Wanda Real Estate Group, and two Wuhan-based subsidiaries, according to a filing surfaced via business registry Qichacha and reported by Caixin on September 29, 2025.

When Starbucks first turned a profit in 1990, Schultz set out to do something he considered radical: distribute the company's newly won financial success among everyone responsible for creating it, from baristas up through store managers. A year later, in 1991, he introduced Bean Stock, a stock option plan that converted workers into partners with an ownership stake in the business. The first grant enrolled seven hundred people across roughly one hundred stores in the United States and Canada, and Starbucks became the first privately owned American company to offer a stock option program to all eligible employees, even part-timers. In an industry where hourly retail work carried no expectation of equity, the program redefined who a company's owners were. The company's own account stresses that the benefits ran in both directions, deepening pride, mutual support, and shared vision, and Bean Stock has remained a standing component of the benefits package through every subsequent restructuring and leadership change.

Robin Li's Baidu nov 13, 2025 — Robin Li , Co-founder and CEO of Baidu , highlighted the importance of internalizing AI capabilities in every facet of the modern workflow.

Robin Li's Baidu feb 10, 2025 — Robin Li, Co-Founder and CEO of Baidu, shaping the future of autonomous driving and cloud computing. Ernie Bot, China's first public ChatGPT- .

Faqir Chand Kohli, born 19 March 1924 in Peshawar in a Punjabi Hindu Khatri family, studied at Khalsa Middle School and National High School in Peshawar before earning a BA and BSc (Honours) at Government College, Lahore, where he was a university gold medalist — a colonial-era education foundation for someone who would later be called the 'father of the Indian IT industry'.

Forbes estimates Nadar's wealth at about US$29.2 billion, accumulated almost entirely from his holding in HCL Technologies, the IT-services company he cofounded in a garage-like setting in 1976 alongside five friends to make calculators and microprocessor-based systems.

Shiv Nadar, born 14 July 1945 in the Tamil village of Moolaipozhi, studied electrical engineering at PSG College of Technology in Coimbatore and graduated in 1967 before beginning his career at the Walchand group's Cooper Engineering outfit in Pune — a conventional start that belied the computing empire he would soon help build.

Li Xiang's Li Auto apr 30, 2025 — As of April 30, 2025, Li Auto's cumulative deliveries reached 1,260,675 .

Wang Ning's Pop Mart mar 25, 2026 · Wang Ning, Pop Mart's chairman and chief executive, the company expects to deliver revenue growth of no ​less than 20% from a year earlier .

Wang graduated from Sias University in 2009 with a degree in advertising, worked a year at Sina Corporation, then founded Pop Mart in 2010 as a variety store in Beijing's Zhongguancun district, taking inspiration from Japanese gashapon vending machines.

As of the April 2025 Yicai report, under Dong's 13 years as chairwoman (and 35 total years at the company), Gree had transformed from an air-conditioner maker into a conglomerate spanning smart equipment, industrial robots, and new energy, with annual revenue exceeding CNY 200 billion (approximately USD 27.4 billion).

Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw was born on 23 March 1953 in Bangalore to Gujarati parents. Her father Rasendra Mazumdar was head brewmaster at United Breweries — an unusual career for a Brahmin family — and steered her toward fermentation science after she failed to win a medical school scholarship.

TIME's 2025 Philanthropy list noted that over five decades Premji transformed his parents' small vegetable-oil business into a global IT leader, then became better known as one of India's most generous philanthropists, directing wealth to systematically improve India's public education system. The two identities — operator and giver — are presented as a single arc rather than separate chapters.

Azim Hashim Premji, born 24 July 1945 in Bombay, is the Indian billionaire businessman and philanthropist who led Wipro for decades as chairman before stepping into a non-executive board role as founding chairman. As of late 2023 Forbes put his net worth at roughly eleven point six billion dollars, with his reputation equally split between building Wipro and giving away most of it.

Wikipedia records that Bisleri International, formerly Parle Exports and Parle Bisleri, is an Indian multinational best known for its eponymous bottled water brand. Ramesh Chauhan started the company in 1969.

Speaking at Stanford on 27 May 2025, Nilekani framed Aadhaar and UPI as twin pillars of India's digital public infrastructure for 1.4 billion people. Stanford's Dean Arun Majumdar called him one of a handful of people who laid the foundation of modern India — an unusually strong endorsement from an academic institution normally cautious in its language.

Nandan Mohanrao Nilekani, born in Bangalore, is the Indian entrepreneur who co-founded Infosys and serves as its non-executive chairman. He returned to that post on 24 August 2017 after Vishal Sikka's exit, replacing the dual-chair structure of R Seshasayee and Ravi Venkatesan. As of late 2025 he was ranked the hundredth-richest person in India with a net worth of about three point two billion dollars.

The origins of J.P. Morgan and Co. reach back to 1854, when Junius S. Morgan joined George Peabody's London banking business, the firm's history records. Junius took control of the house on Peabody's retirement, restyling it J.S. Morgan and Co. in 1864, while his son Pierpont apprenticed in New York, opened his own firm, and in 1871 joined Anthony Drexel in Drexel, Morgan and Co. Drexel's death brought the 1895 reorganization into J.P. Morgan and Co., the house that financed the formation of the United States Steel Corporation, the world's first billion-dollar company. That same year the firm supplied sixty-two million dollars in gold to the United States government, floating a bond issue and rebuilding the Treasury's hundred-million-dollar surplus. From 1892 it financed the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad, steering that carrier through acquisitions to dominance in New England. Its 23 Wall Street quarters, built in 1914, became known as the Corner and as the House of Morgan.

The Panic of 1907, called the Bankers' Panic or the Knickerbocker Crisis, was a financial crisis unfolding over three weeks from mid-October, when the New York Stock Exchange suddenly dropped almost fifty percent from its previous-year peak, its Wikipedia article records. The panic occurred during a time of economic recession, with numerous runs on banks and trust companies, and it eventually spread throughout the nation as state and local banks and businesses entered bankruptcy, producing the eighth-largest decline in United States stock market history. The crisis was triggered by the failed October attempt to corner the stock of the United Copper Company; runs struck the banks that had financed the cornering scheme and spread to affiliated banks and trusts, bringing down the Knickerbocker Trust Company, New York's third-largest trust, a week later. Only the intervention of J. P. Morgan, who pledged large sums of his own money and pressed other New York bankers to match him, kept the panic from deepening.

Kingswell's 2025 retrospective on Lynch dwelt on his decision to retire from Magellan at age 46, when the fund had grown from a $20 million afterthought to a $14 billion colossus. Lynch's stated reason was family: he had been working six-day weeks since 1977, his children were growing up, and his wife Carolyn had been carrying the household through his career. The decision was unusual because Lynch was at the peak of his returns, not because he had lost his touch. He turned the keys over to Morris Smith and walked away from the public markets at a point where most successful managers would have ridden the franchise for another decade. The deeper point of the retirement, in Lynch's own telling, was that fund management at the scale Magellan had reached was no longer the job he had signed up for. The early Magellan — small, obscure, with a portfolio of a few dozen names — had allowed Lynch to do the primary research he loved. The $14 billion Magellan required managing flows, monitoring a thousand positions, and explaining quarterly performance to consultants. The work had become administrative rather than analytical. Lynch's retirement was a decision to leave a job that had evolved away from the work that had produced the record. Lynch's post-retirement career at Fidelity has been as a vice-chairman, mentor, and philanthropist. He has continued to write, to advise younger analysts, and to fund medical research and Catholic education through the Lynch Foundation. The decision to retire from Magellan has held up as a model of succession planning — Smith and his successors preserved the Magellan culture for years after Lynch's departure, before the fund's scale eventually made the Lynch-style returns structurally difficult. Lynch's retirement is the rare case of an investor leaving at the top and not looking back.

Jack Ma's Alibaba in 2024 November, Ant Group or its subsidiaries have been to be planning for potential IPO in 2025. In January 2024, Ant Group .

Murthy told McKinsey that his vision for Infosys in 1981 was simply to make it India's most respected company. After the 1999 NASDAQ listing, he broadened the ambition to making Infosys one of the world's most respected companies — betting that pursuing respect would, as a byproduct, deliver on every conventional business metric.

Nagavara Ramarao Narayana Murthy, born 20 August 1946 in Sidlaghatta, Karnataka, is the founder of Infosys and one of the architects of India's outsourcing industry. After leading the company for over two decades as CEO and then chairman, he transitioned to chairman emeritus and saw his personal fortune reach roughly five billion dollars by early 2025.

Wikipedia identifies Cyrus Soli Poonawalla, born 11 May 1941 in a Pune-based Parsi family to parents Soli and Gool Poonawalla, as an Indian billionaire businessman and chairman-managing director of the Cyrus Poonawalla Group. The group includes Serum Institute of India — the world's largest vaccine manufacturer by volume — and Poonawalla Fincorp, a leading Indian NBFC.

The Knickerbocker Trust was chartered in 1884 by Frederick G. Eldridge, a friend and classmate of J. P. Morgan, and as a trust company it chiefly acted as trustee for individuals, corporations, and estates, its Wikipedia history records. Charles T. Barney, president from 1897, had the trust's funds committed in 1907 to a plan for driving up copper prices through a corner, a gamble that unraveled when millions of dollars of copper were dumped to defeat an unrelated hostile takeover. Barney sought a meeting with Morgan about assistance for the bank and was rebuffed. Once Barney admitted his part in the F. Augustus Heinze and Charles W. Morse speculations, the board called for his resignation; that same afternoon the National Bank of Commerce declared it would stop clearing the Knickerbocker's checks, touching off the depositor run that forced suspension of operations. Barney shot himself on November 14, 1907. Weeks after its forced closing the trust reopened, ultimately paying every depositor in full with interest.

In 1901, J. P. Morgan created the United States Steel Corporation by merging the Carnegie Steel Company, Federal Steel, and National Steel for 492 million dollars, roughly nineteen billion today, the company's Wikipedia history records. At its peak the company, which Wall Street called simply the Corporation, drew more notice for size than for efficiency or innovation: in 1901 no steelmaker came close to it, with roughly two-thirds of all American steel pouring from its mills, and its Pittsburgh Steamship Company ran the largest commercial fleet on the Great Lakes. Capitalized at 1.4 billion dollars, it was the world's first billion-dollar corporation, although the Bureau of Corporations would later value it at around seven hundred million. Because Andrew Carnegie demanded gold bonds for his share, leaving large founding debts, and because of concerns about antitrust lawsuits, U.S. Steel operated cautiously. Charles M. Schwab, the Carnegie Steel executive who originally suggested the merger to Morgan, became the new corporation's first president.

Born in Shivamogga, Karnataka, into a Konkani family, Nithin Kamath grew up in a household where his father was a Canara Bank executive and his mother taught the veena; the family shifted to Bengaluru in 1996, placing him near India's emerging equity culture just as retail broking was being democratized.

Elbert Henry Gary, a lawyer and former DuPage County judge addressed as Judge Gary ever after, numbered among the founders of U.S. Steel in 1901, together with J. P. Morgan, William H. Moore, Henry Clay Frick, and Charles M. Schwab, his Wikipedia biography records. He first became interested in steel while hearing a case as a judge, took the presidency of the Federal Steel Corporation in Chicago in 1898, and retired from his law practice to lead the merged company as chairman of the board and the finance committee from its founding until his death in 1927, moving its headquarters to New York in 1900. When President Theodore Roosevelt said Gary was head of the steel trust, Gary considered it a compliment, and the two men communicated in a nonconfrontational way unlike Roosevelt's dealings with the leaders of other trusts. The steel town of Gary, Indiana, founded in 1906, was named for him. Supported by Morgan, Gary consolidated control of the board, which consisted primarily of bankers and lawyers, over the traditional competitive steelmakers dominated by Carnegie's men.

Pittsburgh Quarterly's January 2025 profile 'What Do I Know? Stanley Druckenmiller' framed the investor's career as a continuous exercise in humility about the limits of one's own information. Druckenmiller's repeated refrain across interviews - that the only questions worth asking are 'what do I know?' and 'what does the market think I know that I actually do not?' - is the discipline that allowed him to size positions when conviction was high and to cut them when new information disproved the thesis. The profile traced the philosophy back to his early years at Pittsburgh National Bank and his decision to leave for Soros's Quantum Fund. The Pittsburgh Quarterly piece emphasized Druckenmiller's distinction between contrarianism as a default attitude and contrarianism as the product of having done work the consensus has not done. He has said in many interviews that contrarianism is overrated as a standalone strategy - 'I do like it when I have extreme conviction and no one else believes it,' he told Morgan Stanley's Hard Lessons series, but without that extreme conviction contrarianism is just a way to lose money against the trend. The profile tied this view to his record: the trades for which he is famous - the 1992 pound short, the 2008 oil trades, the 2010 closure - were not contrarian postures so much as dispassionate readings of broken macro setups. For Druckenmiller, humility and conviction are complementary rather than opposite. Humility is what makes it possible to admit that the original thesis is wrong and cut the position fast; conviction is what makes it possible to size the position large enough to matter when the asymmetry is genuinely in your favor. The Pittsburgh Quarterly profile placed this synthesis at the heart of his career - a record built not on forecasting but on the discipline to wait for the few situations in which the macro picture was clear enough to bet aggressively.

The Pujo Committee was a United States congressional subcommittee in 1912 and 1913 convened to probe the so-called money trust, the community of Wall Street bankers and financiers whose grip on the nation's finances had become the era's political obsession, its Wikipedia article records. After Congressman Charles August Lindbergh Sr. asserted in July 1911 that a banking trust existed and should be investigated, the Democratic Money Trust Caucus passed House Resolution 405 on February 7, 1912, and Arsene Pujo of Louisiana, chairman of the House Banking and Currency Committee, submitted a resolution that passed by a vote of 268 to 8. The lawyer Samuel Untermyer, who as early as December 1911 had advocated the investigation and encouraged Lindbergh to keep fighting for it, became the committee's counsel. The inquiry examined clearing houses, the New York Stock Exchange, and the concentration of wealth, though its scope was hampered when the Comptroller of the Currency furnished only a fraction of the requested loan data. Witnesses were first examined on May 16, 1912.

Born in India, Bahl completed school at Delhi Public School R.K. Puram before being admitted to the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned dual bachelor's degrees from the Wharton School and the School of Engineering and Applied Science through the Jerome Fisher Program in Management and Technology, plus a Kellogg executive marketing program.

In a session at Masters' Union, Ghazal Alagh traces Mamaearth's origin to her son's skin allergies and her frustration at the absence of safe, toxin-free baby care products in India. She frames the founding moment as the conversion of a personal pain point into a category-defining brand proposition.

The International Mercantile Marine Company, which grew out of the International Navigation Company, was a trust of the early twentieth century conceived as J. P. Morgan's bid to monopolize the shipping trade, its Wikipedia history records. The magnates behind it were Clement Griscom, whose interests included the American and Red Star lines; Bernard N. Baker of the Atlantic Transport Line; J. Bruce Ismay, who headed the White Star Line; and John Ellerman of the Leyland Line; J.P. Morgan and Co. bankrolled the project. After negotiations that absorbed the Atlantic Transport Line, concluded in December 1900 after six months of talks, the Leyland Line was revealed as a trust member in April 1901, and the prestigious White Star Line was bought by Morgan's team after long negotiations in April 1902. On October 1, 1902, the Morgan firm announced the founding of IMM, incorporated in New Jersey. The trust alarmed the British shipping industry, and its formation led directly to government subsidies in Britain for Cunard's new liners, the Lusitania and the Mauretania, built to compete.

In his 2021 pledge letter, Gates grounded his philanthropy in childhood ritual: his parents gave him a weekly allowance he could spend freely, but at the dinner table they asked how much of it he planned to give to the Salvation Army at Christmas. The message was that if you are in a position to help somebody, you should do it, and his parents taught generosity through how they used their time and resources. When the time came to decide what to do with his Microsoft wealth, he followed their example, resolving that the vast majority would go toward helping as many people as possible, mostly through the foundation. He measures the results in lives: more than eight hundred million children supported with vaccination, and American schools helped to keep more kids on track to graduation. His giving beyond the foundation has grown in climate mitigation and Alzheimer's research, and he invokes his father's maxim that there is no problem bigger than they are.

Swiggy was incorporated in 2013 and is headquartered in Bengaluru; by 2025 it operated food delivery in more than 700 Indian cities and quick-commerce under Instamart in 100 cities, with Sriharsha Majety as CEO and Phani Kishan Addepalli as CEO of Instamart — a structure that signals how the founders have split operational responsibilities between verticals.

By 1900 Morgan's collection had outgrown his residence, with his son-in-law describing the basement as packed with objects and part of the holdings stored at the Lenox Library, the Morgan Library's Wikipedia history records. In January 1900 he bought a plot on 36th Street for a library, and in 1902 two more lots; between his house and a new limestone house for his daughter Louisa, Charles McKim of McKim, Mead and White designed a classical marble library. Morgan rejected Warren and Wetmore's baroque proposal and McKim's Greek temple variant, telling the architect he wanted a gem; he insisted on marble despite his family's brownstones, and switched from white to pinkish-gray Tennessee marble after a neighbor warned that white would make the building look like a mausoleum. He prohibited workers from talking to the press, paid an extra fifty thousand dollars for dry masonry construction without mortar joints, and completed the library in 1906 at a cost of 1.2 million dollars. The Wall Street Journal reported he wanted the most perfect structure human hands could erect, at whatever cost.

On 1 December 2025 Mathrubootham formally stepped down as executive chairman of Freshworks, closing a fifteen-year chapter that began in Chennai in 2010 and ended with the firm as a Nasdaq-listed global SaaS business — an unusually clean handoff in an Indian context where founders often linger in operational roles.

Fundsmith LLP is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. Registered in England & Wales: OC354233. Registered office: 33 Cavendish Square, London, W1G 0PW. January 2026 Dear Fellow Investor, This is the eighth annual letter to owners of the Fundsmith Stewardship Fund (‘Fund’). The table below shows performance figures for the last calendar year and the cumulative and annualised performance since inception on 1st November 2017 and various comparators. % Total Return 1st Jan to 31st Dec 2025 Inception to 31st Dec 2025 Sortino Ratio6 Cumulative Annualised Fundsmith Stewardship Fund1 -6.0 +86.3 +7.9 0.31 Equities2 +12.8 +145.0 +11.6 0.49 IA Global Sector3 +10.8 +98.9 +8.8 0.35 UK Bonds4 +6.1 -1.2 -0.1 n/a Cash5 +4.2 +18.4 +2.1 n/a The Fund is not managed with reference to any benchmark, the above comparators are provided for information purposes only. 1 I 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 31.12.25, 3.5% risk free rate, source: Financial Express Analytics. The table shows the performance of the I Class Accumulation shares which fell by 6.0% in 2025 and compares with a rise of 12.8% for the MSCI World Index (‘Index’) in sterling with dividends reinvested.

© 2025 Oaktree Capital Management, L.P. All Rights Reserved Follow us: Memo to: Oaktree Clients From: Howard Marks Re: A Look Under the Hood Over the last 56 years, I’ve spent a lot of time making suggestions to clients regarding their investment processes and portfolios, and I’ve been on the client side as a member of various investment committees. But seldom have I been able to bridge the two, serving as an active participant in clients’ investment processes. I had an opportunity to do just that the other day, when I met with the board and senior staff of a U.S. state pension fund. I was asked to listen in and provide feedback on the results of a board-member survey their consultant had recently conducted and would be reporting on during the meeting. The content of the consultant’s session impressed me so much that I decided to write a memo about it. I’m not disclosing the names of the state and its consultant, for obvious reasons, but I’m very pleased that they agreed to let me use the content of the meeting as raw material for this memo. In the meeting, the consultant covered many of the things I consider “the most important thing” and often came down on the same side I would (admittedly, that might’ve contributed to why I was so impressed!) I’m going to sum up below the consultant’s assessment of the board survey and my reaction. My hope is that this is as informative for you as it was for me.

During 1889 Thomas Edison held business interests in many electricity-related companies, General Electric's Wikipedia history records: the Edison Lamp Company, a lamp manufacturer in East Newark; the Edison Machine Works, a maker of dynamos and large electric motors in Schenectady; Bergmann and Company, a manufacturer of electric lighting devices; and the Edison Electric Light Company, which held the patents and financed Edison's lighting experiments with backing from J. P. Morgan and the Vanderbilt family. Henry Villard, a longtime Edison supporter and investor, proposed consolidating these interests, a proposal supported by Samuel Insull, who served as Edison's secretary and later became a financier. In 1889 Drexel, Morgan and Co., the firm founded by Morgan and Anthony Drexel, financed Edison's research and helped merge several of the separate companies under one corporation, forming the Edison General Electric Company, incorporated in New York on April 24, 1889, which also acquired the Sprague Electric Railway and Motor Company in the same year. Morgan's backing of Edison dated to 1878, when he financed the Edison Electric Illuminating Company.

Delivered at Stanford Stadium on June 12, 2005, Jobs's commencement address is remembered by the Steve Jobs Archive as one of the most influential commencement speeches in history, watched more than 120 million times and reproduced in media and school curricula around the world. The Archive's twentieth-anniversary essay notes the talk's improbable afterlife: LeBron James played a clip of it in the Cleveland Cavaliers locker room before a critical game of the 2016 NBA Finals comeback. Its ingredients were unpromising — a fifteen-minute address by a college dropout to graduates of a top research university, a talk aimed at twenty-two-year-olds that warns they will gradually become the old and be cleared away, a text shadowed by the speaker's cancer diagnosis. Yet the speech became the canonical statement of the Jobs philosophy of work and mortality, endlessly quoted for its closing admonition to stay hungry and stay foolish.

The National Monetary Commission was created by the Aldrich-Vreeland Act of 1908 after the Panic of 1907 and chaired by Senator Nelson Aldrich, a Republican Senate leader, its Wikipedia article records. Aldrich personally led a team of experts to the major European capitals, where they were stunned by how much more efficient the European financial system appeared and how much more important than the dollar the pound, franc, and mark were in international trade. The commission issued thirty reports between 1909 and 1912, a detailed and authoritative survey of the era's banking systems published by the Government Printing Office. Its plan provided for local associations of banks grouped into regional associations and a national reserve association headquartered in Washington, holding the country's bank reserves, issuing an elastic currency based on commercial assets, and rediscounting commercial paper. The plan failed to win strong public support because of its resemblance to a central bank and popular suspicion of Aldrich, but many of its features were incorporated in the Federal Reserve Act, enacted December 23, 1913.

In late November 1910, Senator Nelson W. Aldrich, joined by Assistant Secretary of the Treasury A. Piatt Andrew, brought five leading financiers to a private meeting at the Jekyll Island Club, off the Georgia coast, to draft recommendations for a central banking system able to answer panics like that of 1907, the island's Wikipedia history records. The invited group comprised Frank Vanderlip, Henry P. Davison, Arthur Shelton, Benjamin Strong, and Paul Warburg. Davison was the senior partner of J. P. Morgan and Company; Strong, who represented the Morgan-influenced Bankers Trust, would become the first head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Their plan called for fifteen self-governing branches spread across the country under a national commission that would coordinate policy. Aldrich put the proposal before the National Monetary Commission without acknowledging where it came from, and the Federal Reserve Act carried a similar federated structure. Disclosure waited until 1930, when Carter Glass claimed credit for the Federal Reserve's design and drew rebuttals from Warburg and other banking experts.

Junius Spencer Morgan, born April 14, 1813, in Holyoke, Massachusetts, was the American banker and financier who built the London house that became the base of the Morgan banking empire and the patriarch of the family, his Wikipedia biography records. Apprenticed at thirteen and trained for five years as a clerk under the Boston merchant banker Alfred Welles, he was bought a partnership in Hartford's largest wholesale dry goods house, Howe Mather and Co., by his father in 1836, and spent the depression years after the Panic of 1837 traveling the South to collect the firm's debts, often in payments of cotton. On May 15, 1853, at the recommendation of James Beebe, he visited the American banker George Peabody in London; Peabody, in poor health, offered him a junior partnership, with the promise that Morgan would be made senior partner upon Peabody's retirement within ten years. Morgan joined the firm in October 1854, strengthened its American accounts with firsthand knowledge Peabody lacked, and on Peabody's retirement took control of the house, renaming it J. S. Morgan and Co. in 1864.

In a fifteen-year retrospective, Kamath reports that risks he had been flagging since 2021 finally materialised: an increase in securities transaction tax on options, the removal of exchange transaction-charge rebates, a reduction in weekly expiries, and a broad decline in market activity hit the firm together, contributing to an approximately forty-percent drop in broking revenues for the year.

Anthony Joseph Drexel, the Philadelphia banker instrumental in modern global finance's rise after the American Civil War, entered at thirteen the banking house his Austrian-born father Francis Martin Drexel had founded, his Wikipedia biography records. After his father's death in 1863, he closed the firm's Chicago and San Francisco offices and, in 1867, founded the Paris-based banking partnership Drexel, Harjes and Co. Junius Spencer Morgan's urging from London produced the 1871 arrangement by which Drexel took Junius's troubled son as his protege and formed a new partnership with him, Drexel, Morgan and Co. The new merchant banking partnership, based in New York rather than Philadelphia, served initially as an agent for European investment in the United States; over the next generation it assumed the leading role in financing America's railroads, stabilized Wall Street's chaotic securities markets, and created a national capital market for industrial companies, one previously reserved for railroads and canals. Drexel also founded Drexel University in Philadelphia in 1891.

The Erie Railroad, which emerged from its 1893 bankruptcy reorganization in 1895, began obtaining financial support from J. P. Morgan in that era, the railroad's Wikipedia history records. In 1898 the Erie obtained the New York, Susquehanna and Western as a subsidiary after Morgan purchased the majority of its shares on the Erie's behalf, gaining access to anthracite coal mines south of Scranton to compete with the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western's coal operations. The Morgan partner George W. Perkins brought Frederick D. Underwood into the Erie in 1910 to run it. During the eastern railroad strike of 1913, when Erie employees demanded a twenty percent wage increase that management resisted, the union leader W. G. Lee asserted that the only way to deal with the Erie was through J. P. Morgan and Company, or the banks; Underwood retorted from his home in Wisconsin that he, not George W. Perkins, not J. P. Morgan, nor anybody else, was running the Erie Railroad. The exchange shows how completely the Morgan firm was understood to stand behind the properties it reorganized.

Jean Strouse's 1999 biography, Morgan: American Financier, won praise for portraying Morgan's personality realistically and for explaining complex financial topics clearly, its author's Wikipedia biography records. Strouse, a Radcliffe graduate, had won the Bancroft Prize for her 1980 biography of the diarist Alice James, served as a book critic at Newsweek from 1979 to 1983, and ran the New York Public Library's Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers from 2003 to 2017; she received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2001 and held Guggenheim and National Endowment fellowships. The biography's reputation rests on joining the psychological portrait to the mechanical explanation: the man whose nose, temper, and collecting mania were Victorian legend, rendered alongside the mechanics of the gold loan, the railroad reorganizations, and the 1907 rescue in language a lay reader can follow. For the founder-thesis reader, it is the bridge between the Morgan of caricature and the Morgan of the balance sheet, the standard account of how the private man produced the public financier.

The Amazon flywheel, the self-reinforcing virtuous cycle that has anchored Bezos's strategy since the early 2000s, describes a closed loop in which lower prices draw more customer visits, more visits attract more third-party sellers, more sellers expand selection and lower per-unit costs, and those lower costs feed back into still lower prices. Feedvisor's analysis of the model traces its popularization to internal Amazon documents sketched during the early marketplace era, and positions it as the operational engine behind Bezos's claim that price-led growth compounds rather than trades off with margin. The flywheel is the connective tissue between the 1997 letter's emphasis on scale and the 2005 Prime launch: each turn of the wheel raises switching costs, deepens selection, and makes the next turn cheaper. The model also explains Amazon's willingness to operate retail at thin margins indefinitely, because every dollar of foregone margin funds the next turn of the wheel and widens the moat against competitors.

Ford framed the Model T as a single, repeatable product engineered for ordinary Americans rather than for the wealthy few. He publicly committed to building a motor car large enough for a family yet simple enough for one person to operate and maintain, priced so that no man earning a decent salary would be unable to own one. Introduced on October 1, 1908, the Model T is generally regarded as the first mass-affordable automobile, the machine that made car travel available to middle-class Americans. The relatively low price reflected Ford's efficient fabrication, including assembly-line production instead of individual handcrafting. Over nineteen years, through May 26, 1927, the company produced approximately fifteen million Model Ts, with Ford himself designating the last unit as the fifteen millionth vehicle built. The Model T became the founding artifact of mass consumer mobility and the template for every low-cost car program that followed.

The Ford River Rouge complex in Dearborn, Michigan, was Ford's bet on complete vertical integration in automobile production. Built between 1917 and 1928 and designed in part by architect Albert Kahn, the Rouge was engineered as a continuous work-flow from iron ore, coal, limestone, rubber, and sand at one end to a running vehicle at the other, with its own electricity plant and integrated steel mill on a single nine-hundred-acre site. The Wikipedia account describes the complex as a prime example of vertically integrated production, a place able to turn raw materials into running vehicles without leaving the property. At its peak the Rouge employed as many as one hundred thousand workers. The plant manufactured most of the components of Ford vehicles, starting with the Model T, and shipped knock-down kits by railroad to branch assembly locations across the United States.

A government suit was looming in November 1904 when Gary took a proposal to President Roosevelt, his biography records: cooperation traded for preferential treatment. The company would lay open its books to the Bureau of Corporations, and where the Bureau turned up evidence of wrongdoing, U.S. Steel would receive private warning and an opportunity to set matters right. Roosevelt accepted what became known as a gentlemen's agreement because it accommodated his interest in the modern industrial order while preserving his public image as slayer of the trusts. Gary then pursued stability through what historians describe as price leadership and orderly practices of competition: publicly announced fixed prices, wage stability, an unusual amount of information for stockholders in annual reports, and conservative technological progress. Starting in 1906 he built the world's largest fully integrated steel plant on the shore of Lake Michigan, in the area duly named Gary, Indiana, on which the company had expended seventy-eight million dollars by 1911. The posture reflected the thesis that industrial stability protected both profits and the public peace.

The Pittsburgh Quarterly profile gave significant weight to Druckenmiller's philanthropy, which he runs through the Druckenmiller Foundation with the same intensity he brought to trading. The Foundation's largest commitments have been to medical research, particularly neuroscience - Druckenmiller's father and brother both suffered from schizophrenia, and he has directed hundreds of millions of dollars toward understanding and treating brain disease. The profile described the gift strategy as a deliberate parallel to investment: concentrated, conviction-driven, and patient. Equally prominent in the profile is Druckenmiller's work with Geoffrey Canada on generational equity - a campaign of public speeches and a USC documentary arguing that current US fiscal policy is shifting the costs of present consumption onto future generations through debt accumulation and unfunded entitlement promises. The Druckenmiller-Canada partnership, which began in the early 2010s, fused two operating styles: Canada's on-the-ground work in the Harlem Children's Zone and Druckenmiller's macro framing of intergenerational balance sheets. The Pittsburgh Quarterly article noted that Druckenmiller treats the fiscal trajectory of the United States as the most important macro variable of his post-Duquesne career. The Pittsburgh Quarterly piece drew an explicit line between the discipline of trading one's own money and the discipline of giving it away. By closing Duquesne to outside capital in 2010, Druckenmiller removed the conflict between generating returns for limited partners and deploying his own wealth toward long-horizon philanthropic bets. The profile noted that the Foundation's grantees - medical research consortia, anti-poverty programs, and select policy work - are funded with the same patient capital orientation that Druckenmiller brought to macro trades: large commitments, multi-year horizons, and a willingness to be wrong in pursuit of asymmetric upside.

Kingswell asked Lynch about the folly of forecasting macro events, and his answer was that the consistent failure of macro forecasts — across decades, across forecasters, across regimes — is itself the strongest evidence that the activity does not pay. Lynch's Magellan record was built without a single correct macro call: he owned stocks through the 1979 oil shock, the 1981-82 recession, the 1987 crash, and the savings-and-loan crisis. In each case the macro forecasters were divided, and in each case the right action was to own businesses whose operating economics survived the macro event. Lynch's framing was that the macro economy has too many variables for any forecaster to model, and that the forecasts that turn out correct are usually correct for the wrong reasons. The forecasters who predicted the 1987 crash did so on the basis of a U.S. trade-deficit argument that turned out to be unrelated to the actual cause (portfolio-insurance mechanics). Being right for the wrong reason is no better than being wrong, because the rightness cannot be repeated. Lynch's Magellan compounding came from refusing to bet on macro forecasts and concentrating on the micro — the businesses whose cash flows he could underwrite from primary research. The article also touched on Lynch's view of 'Future Man' — his phrase for the contemporary habit of treating technological change as a foregone conclusion. Lynch's argument was that technology adoption curves are uncertain, that the beneficiaries of any given technology shift are usually not the companies the headlines mention, and that the investor who buys 'the future' at a hundred times earnings is paying for a forecast that has historically been wrong more often than right. He preferred to find the established businesses that the future, when it arrived, would benefit — and to buy them at prices that did not require the future to arrive on schedule.

The foundation's origin story, as Gates tells it, begins with his parents and a newspaper article. The core belief that every life has equal value came from lessons his mother and father taught early, and as Microsoft wealth grew in the late 1990s, he and Melinda began looking for ways to give back, starting with expanding technology access in American public libraries. Then he read an article reporting that millions of children in poor countries were dying annually of diseases that rich nations had long since learned to prevent, and he sent it to his father with a note asking whether they could do something about it. That moment redirected his life. He began meeting scientists, health workers, and community leaders to learn where philanthropy could matter, and the foundation born in 2000 co-founded Gavi with a $750 million pledge and helped create the Global Fund, with Warren Buffett's extraordinary 2006 pledge of more than $30 billion enabling bigger, longer bets.

The original 2010 pledge letter that Gates signed with Melinda opened with rotavirus, a highly preventable disease killing half a million children every year while airplane crashes dominated front pages and most people could not name the killer. The couple committed the vast majority of their assets to the foundation to stop such deaths and dismantle barriers to health and education, animated by the principle that all lives have equal value. Vaccines, they wrote, are miracles, tiny vessels of hope, and the letter pressed for both wider delivery of existing vaccines and the development of new ones, alongside a parallel push in American education. The pledge itself grew out of gatherings with other givers, comparing what had worked in philanthropy and what had not, and the letter closes on inheritance values passed from their parents: work hard, show respect, keep a sense of humor, and use whatever talent or treasure life grants as wisely as possible.

Stanford was not Jobs's audience's first choice; the students had wanted comedian Jon Stewart, who had given a popular address the year before, with Arnold Schwarzenegger third. The Archive recounts that in the six months between president John Hennessy's invitation and commencement, Jobs sent himself notes, outlines, and drafts; he ignored the suggestions of Apple's public-relations staff, requested ideas from the four senior class co-presidents and never replied, and asked friends for advice. In the final weeks before graduation he wrote the speech himself, working in close consultation with his wife Laurene. On a scorching day, in jeans, a black shirt, and Birkenstocks under his robe, he showed one sign of nerves only to those who knew him well: he read the text verbatim. Days afterward the class co-presidents emailed their thanks, and Jobs replied that it had been really hard to prepare for, and that he had loved it, especially when it was over.

Morgan was born in Hartford, Connecticut, to Junius Spencer Morgan, then a partner in the city's largest dry goods wholesaler, and Juliet Pierpont, daughter of the poet John Pierpont; his uncle James Lord Pierpont composed Jingle Bells. He preferred to be called Pierpont rather than John. His grandfather Joseph Morgan died in 1847, leaving the family a large fortune, and had been a co-founder of Aetna. Educated in New England public and private schools, Pierpont passed the entrance examination for the English High School of Boston, which specialized in mathematics for commercial careers. In April 1852 he suffered rheumatic fever so severe that its worsening symptoms eventually left him unable to walk, and his father sent him to the Azores to convalesce for nearly a year. In 1856 Junius enrolled him at Bellerive, a Swiss school in the village of La Tour-de-Peilz, where his French became fluent, and then at the University of Gottingen to sharpen his German, finishing an art history degree in six months in 1857.

The panic's opening act was a stock manipulation scheme aimed at cornering F. Augustus Heinze's United Copper Company, the article records. Heinze had made a fortune as a copper magnate in Butte, Montana, moved to New York in 1906, and formed a close relationship with the notorious Wall Street banker Charles W. Morse; together they gained control of many banks, sitting on the boards of at minimum six national banks, ten state banks, five trust companies, and four insurance firms. Augustus's brother Otto devised the corner, believing the Heinzes already controlled a majority of the company and that speculators had sold short borrowed shares that could be squeezed at any price. On Monday, October 14, he began aggressively purchasing; United Copper rose in one day from 39 to 52 dollars a share. But short sellers found plenty of shares from other sources, the stock closed at 30 on Tuesday, and it fell to 10 by Wednesday. Otto Heinze was ruined, and his brokerage house, Gross and Kleeberg, went into bankruptcy.

The year 1907 brought the acquisition of its largest competitor, the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company, an emergency purchase arranged during that year's panic to save the brokerage Moore and Schley and calm the markets; Tennessee Coal was replaced on the Dow Jones Industrial Average by General Electric, the company's Wikipedia history records. The following March, chairman Elbert H. Gary formed the Committee on Safety of United States Steel after meetings with the safety managers of the operating companies, an initiative that led to the introduction of the modern Safety First movement, intended to reduce worker accidents and to safeguard the company against criticisms and legal liability. The sequence illustrates the merged firm's posture under the Morgan bankers: stabilize competition through acquisition, then manage public and political exposure through institutionalized reform. In 1911, the same year the federal government broke up Standard Oil, prosecutors also turned antitrust law on U.S. Steel, without success.

The Pujo Committee's report, concluded in 1913, found that a community of influential financial leaders had gained control of the major manufacturing, transportation, mining, telecommunications, and financial markets of the United States, the article records. The investigators documented that 180 individuals holding 341 directorships in 112 corporations possessed 22.245 billion dollars in aggregate resources, that the twenty largest banks held 42.9 percent of America's total banking resources, and that a cartel headed by J. P. Morgan, George F. Baker, and James Stillman controlled at least eighteen major financial corporations, commanding an estimated 2.1 billion dollars through seven banks and trust companies. The report further found that interlocking directorates and a system known counterintuitively as banking ethics restricted competition among banks and firms, and that a handful of men held manipulative control of the New York Stock Exchange. It also singled out individual bankers including Paul Warburg, Jacob Schiff, Felix Warburg, and Benjamin Strong.

IMM was structured as a holding company over subsidiary corporations that had subsidiaries of their own, and Morgan's plan, its history records, was to rule transatlantic shipping through interlocking directorates and railroad contracts; the plan failed against the unscheduled character of sea transport, American antitrust law, and the British agreement. As an American he could not hold British ships directly, though he could hold the company that held them. Immigration swelled the combine's 1902 traffic to 64,738 passengers, and a partnership concluded in New York on February 20, 1902 linked it with Germany's two greatest shipping companies, Norddeutscher Lloyd and HAPAG. The competitive response came in 1908, when Harland and Wolff was authorized to build the White Star Line's Olympic-class trio of liners: the Olympic, the Titanic, and the Britannic. An agreement with Lord Pirrie dating from 1902 routed all of the company's shipbuilding to his Belfast yard.

Around the library's completion, Morgan hired Belle da Costa Greene as his personal librarian, and she remained in charge of the collection for more than four decades, the history records. Greene cataloged and researched the history of each item and aggressively expanded the collection, hunting rare volumes in back alleys, though she initially avoided auctions and rarely spent more than ten thousand dollars on a book without permission. She tended to acquire items created before the sixteenth century, since Morgan believed other libraries were able to adequately care for newer material. In one recorded episode, Morgan bought a Vermeer painting minutes after learning about the artist; in others he refused works he judged too expensive, sometimes buying whole collections and sometimes only a few pieces. The Wall Street Journal wrote in 1911 that Morgan bought books as some financiers buy a thousand shares of stock, and in some years he spent half his income on the collection. Larger late acquisitions included a cache of rare American authors' manuscripts from the merchant S. H. Wakeman in 1909.

General Electric took shape in the 1892 merger that fused the Edison General Electric Company with the Thomson-Houston Electric Company, a consolidation the company's Wikipedia history credits to the conception and orchestration of financier J. P. Morgan. Thomson-Houston, led by Charles Coffin, traced its origins to the American Electric Company of New Britain, Connecticut, formed in 1880. Incorporation took place in New York, the Schenectady works serving as headquarters long afterward, with both companies' original plants continuing under the GE banner. Steinmetz came aboard in 1893 through the purchase of a smaller New York company, a genius in mathematics and electronics who accumulated over two hundred patents and proved a major force in advancing the company. In 1896 General Electric was one of the original twelve companies listed on the newly formed Dow Jones Industrial Average, where it remained for 122 years, though not continuously. The merger became a template for Morgan's method: combine competing manufacturers, then capitalize the combination at a scale no rival could challenge.

Junius Morgan's London house survived its gravest test in the Panic of 1857, when the railway boom ended, prices collapsed, and London rumors spread that Peabody and Co. was on the verge of failure, with major clients suspending or failing and rivals including Barings demanding immediate payment, the biography records. Peabody declined a conditional bailout from the major London houses that would have closed the firm, instead securing an emergency line of credit of 800,000 pounds from the Bank of England. Junius became the active head of the firm in February 1859 and grew J. S. Morgan and Co., with his son's aid, into a trans-Atlantic financial empire dominant in government and railroad finance, with allied firms in New York, Philadelphia, and Paris. He died on April 8, 1890, five days after a fall left him unconscious with a broken wrist and concussion, leaving a fortune of 12.4 million dollars. His pallbearers included Anthony Joseph Drexel and Cornelius Vanderbilt II, and at his death the Morgan banks were the pre-eminent American banking house.

The Rouge was also the theater for the labor violence that defined Ford's late career. In March 1932, following mass layoffs, four to five thousand former employees marched on the plant in the Ford Hunger March. On May 26, 1937, members of the United Auto Workers arriving to hand out leaflets were attacked by Ford's Service Department in what became known as the Battle of the Overpass; the Wikipedia account records that the UAW was not officially recognized at the Rouge until June 20, 1941, with a signed contract. The same complex attracted outside admiration: in 1932 Edsel Ford invited Diego Rivera to study the facilities, work that informed the Detroit Industry Murals exhibited at the Detroit Institute of Arts, and Charlie Chaplin studied the Rouge for his 1936 film Modern Times. The complex was designated a National Historic Landmark District in 1978.

On September 26, 1855, at sixteen, Rockefeller started as a clerk at a Cleveland wholesale firm and later celebrated the anniversaries of what he called 'Job Day.' At nineteen he co-founded a wholesale firm selling beans, plaster, and other commodities. He spent most waking hours working except on the Sabbath, taught Baptist Sunday school, became a church trustee, shunned liquor, tobacco, and cards, and donated across denominations, races, and nationalities—partly to fund the purchase of enslaved people's freedom. He hired a substitute for the Civil War. In 1864 he married Laura Celestia Spelman, an old schoolmate from a prominent abolitionist family; she became a founding member of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, and together they knelt at saloons praying for the gathered sinners. He also backed a school for Black women that became Spelman College, named for her family. The early life established the disciplined, abstemious personal regime that the Standard Oil years would later amplify at industrial scale.

Vanderbilt died at eighty-two in his Manhattan home on January 4, 1877, and lies buried in the Moravian Cemetery on Staten Island, leaving the bulk of a fortune estimated above one hundred million dollars to his son William. Unlike the Gilded Age titans who followed him, Andrew Carnegie with his libraries and John D. Rockefeller with his foundations, he owned no grand homes and gave away little of his wealth; the only substantial philanthropic donation of his life came in 1873, near its end, when he gave one million dollars to build and endow Vanderbilt University in Nashville. The mansion era belonged to his descendants: the Breakers in Newport and the 250-room Biltmore in Asheville were built by later Vanderbilts, and Biltmore remains the largest privately owned home in the United States. In a nod to its founder's nickname, the university's athletic teams are called the Commodores.

By March 1987, Schultz and Olsen had opened three Il Giornale locations when the decisive opportunity arrived: Starbucks' founders were ready to sell the company's name, its roasting plant, and its six Seattle stores. Schultz spent the spring raising money, and by August he had assembled the 3.8 million dollars the purchase required. Just two years after its inception, Il Giornale acquired Starbucks' assets and adopted the Starbucks name, folding the espresso-bar concept and the original retailer into a single company that kept the older and more resonant brand. The transaction is the true founding event of the modern Starbucks, marrying the bean merchant's sourcing credibility and roasting infrastructure to Schultz's beverage-led café model. Within months the combined company was opening stores outside Seattle, and within two years it was roasting more than two million pounds of coffee annually for a chain racing to outrun the modest ambitions of its original owners.

The renaming of employees as partners was the philosophical core of Schultz's people model, and Bean Stock was its instrument. In the letter announcing the program, Schultz wrote that his hope was that the reality of partnership would deepen partners' sense of pride, mutual support, and shared vision for the company, language that treated equity as a cultural device rather than a compensation line item. The company's retrospective frames Bean Stock as bringing value to the business at large, not merely to the grantees, by aligning frontline behavior with long-term company performance and making every hiring decision an admission of a new owner. The program's durability is its strongest evidence: more than three decades later, the company still describes it as a key part of its benefits package and its way of investing in what it calls its most important asset, its people, a formulation that has survived the IPO, multiple crises, and a procession of chief executives.

Attitudes Toward Risk As you can imagine, I was very glad to see the consultant start with a discussion of how the board members think about risk, and especially do it in a way that was new to me. They led off with a simple two-by-two matrix that I found thought-provoking and useful, as it put one of the most important decisions into perspective. On the horizontal axis is the plan’s ability to bear risk. When I first read that, I thought it referred to the skillfulness of its board and staff in managing risk. But then it became clear that the reference was to the plan’s financial capacity to accept risk, defined by its financial health and that of its sponsor, the state.

reporting period, and outperforming the market was challenging once again in 2025. Before I turn to the reasons for the performance I should explain that contrary to the suggestion of some commentators I am not seeking to ‘blame’ anyone or anything for our Fund’s relative performance. What I am seeking to do is explain it so that our investors have a clear understanding of what has happened and why. An explanation is not an excuse. I wonder how those commentators or our investors would view it if we offered no explanation. I see three main issues at play. 1. Index Concentration The domination of returns by a small group of major ‘technology’ stocks became so pronounced by 2023 that it gave rise to one of those snappy descriptors that market commentators favour with the so-called Magnificent Seven: Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, Meta (Facebook), Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla. This continued in 2024 after Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, made several public appearances at which he extolled the upcoming transformation of computing by Artificial Intelligence (‘AI’), powered of course by Nvidia’s chips. The result was akin to firing the starting gun in a race in which capital expenditure on semiconductor chips and data centers by the major tech companies — the so-called hyperscalers — spiralled upwards in an arms race matched only by the performance of their shares.2025

Majety and Reddy originally designed an e-commerce site called Bundl in 2013 to facilitate courier service and shipping within India; Bundl was halted in 2014 and rebranded to enter food delivery, with the duo bringing in Rahul Jaimini — formerly of Myntra — and formally launching Swiggy in August 2014.

Ghazal emphasises consumer-centric innovation as a discipline rather than a slogan — actively engaging with customers, listening to feedback, and iterating products against real-world needs. The community-driven approach, she argues, is what built the brand trust that powered Mamaearth's rapid scaling to unicorn status within roughly five years.

Poonawalla founded the Serum Institute of India in 1966 and built it into the world's largest vaccine manufacturer by volume, supplying over 140 countries. Wikipedia notes the company produces more than 1.5 billion doses annually of vaccines for measles, polio and the flu. The scale of this single private company is what later enabled India to anchor the global COVID-19 vaccination response.

Murthy's pre-Infosys career was technically rich but commercially frustrating. As a young engineer he helped build India's first time-sharing computer system at IIM Ahmedabad, wrote a BASIC interpreter for ECIL, then tried his hand at a venture called Softronics which collapsed within eighteen months before he landed at Patni Computer Systems in Pune.

His parents, a schoolteacher father and a homemaker mother, drilled into him that becoming respectable in society was the central life goal. That early emphasis on values, learning and reputation became the operating software he later installed inside Infosys's culture, long before the company had scale or revenue to enforce it.

Nilekani's father was General Manager of Mysore and Minerva Mills and subscribed to Fabian socialist ideals, which shaped his son's early worldview. The family is Konkani-speaking, originally from Sirsi, and his elder brother Vijay works in the United States at the Nuclear Energy Institute — a transatlantic family footprint that mirrors Nilekani's later global roles.

Nilekani argued that lack of basic identity — birth certificate, licence, any proof — had historically oppressed ordinary Indians: they could not board buses or trains, could not satisfy a policeman, could not open a bank account. DPI was framed as a structural fix to that everyday exclusion, not as a tech showcase.

The brand itself predates Chauhan's ownership. In 1966, Italian doctor Cesari Rossi and Indian businessman Khushroo Suntook introduced Bisleri bottled water in India by setting up a Thane factory, naming it after a 19th-century Italian alcohol remedy drink created by inventor Felice Bisleri.

Premji was born into a Gujarati Ismaili Khoja Muslim family. His father Muhammed Hashem Premji was a noted businessman called the Rice King of Burma, and famously turned down Muhammad Ali Jinnah's invitation to move to Pakistan after Partition, choosing to remain in India — a family decision that anchors Premji's Indian nationalist identity.

As the first Indian to sign the Giving Pledge in 2013, Premji has endowed the foundation he launched nearly twenty-five years earlier with over twenty-nine billion dollars in Wipro shares, per TIME's 2025 accounting — an updated cumulative figure that reflects subsequent top-ups beyond the 2019 twenty-one-billion transfer.

Returning to India, Mazumdar was told that being a master brewer was 'a man's work' and no domestic brewery would hire her. Just as she was about to leave for a Scotland position, she met Leslie Auchincloss of Ireland's Biocon Biochemicals, who was seeking an Indian partner to supply papain. She agreed to manage an Indian subsidiary on the condition that if she chose to leave after six months she would get a comparable brewmaster's post —.

In April 2025, Dong was re-elected to a fifth three-year term as chairwoman but stepped down as president, handing that role to 49-year-old Zhang Wei, who had joined Gree in 1999; Dong stated in a prior February television interview that three to four potential successors had been identified and were being rotated through roles to assess suitability.

Wang developed toy lines in partnership with artists including Hong Kong-based Kenny Wong, took Pop Mart public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in December 2020, and held approximately 48.73% of Pop Mart's issued shares through controlled corporations and a trust as of December 31, 2024.

HCL was founded in 1976 with an initial investment of roughly INR 187,000 — a small sum even in the India of the licence raj — pooled together by Nadar and six colleagues (including Ajai Chowdhry and Arjun Malhotra) who had previously been building and selling teledigital calculators through a partnership venture called Microcomp.

Forbes reports HCL Technologies' annual revenue at roughly US$13.8 billion, placing it among India's largest software-services providers and employing about 223,000 people across 60 countries — a scale built by Nadar over 48 years of continuous operation from the 1970s computing era into the cloud-and-AI era.

Kohli's father died during his final college year; after a planned Indian Navy commission fell through, he won a scholarship to Queen's University in Canada, completed a BSc (Honours) in Electrical Engineering in 1948, then an MS at MIT in 1950 — an academic trajectory rare among mid-century Indian engineers and central to the global perspective he later brought to TCS.

Ltd. over disputes tied to financing failures on a major Wanda development project in Wuhan; Caixin reported Wang's name was later removed from the public version of the order.

After a brief Microsoft stint, Bahl returned to India in 2007 because of a visa issue — a chance administrative event that re-routed his career from US corporate life back into Indian consumer internet at a moment when the country's e-commerce market was barely forming.

Kamath began trading stocks at seventeen, initially handling his father's account, and through his twenties ran a proprietary book while moonlighting at a call centre to fund himself — a years-long apprenticeship in markets that preceded any formal company he would later build.

He frames Zerodha as perhaps the only broker in the world with the luxury of thinking long-term through such a cycle precisely because it carries no external investors — a direct argument that the bootstrapped structure is a structural resilience advantage, not merely a funding preference.

Lead independent director Roxanne Austin — a board member since May 2021 with directorships at CrowdStrike and Verizon — took over as board chair, signalling an institutional handoff to an external, professionalised board rather than a continuation of promoter-led governance.

In July 2026, Bloomberg News reported Liang had become the world's wealthiest founder of an AI-model company, with a net worth of $36 billion per the Bloomberg Billionaires Index; in 2025 he was named to Time's list of 100 Most Influential People in AI and Fortune's Most Powerful People in Business.

Poonawalla's son Adar Poonawalla is CEO of Serum Institute, having taken operational leadership of the family business. Wikipedia records that Poonawalla was married to Villoo Poonawalla, who died in 2010, and that he has two grandchildren. The succession — moving the founder's son into the CEO role while the founder remains chairman and managing director of the group — is the classic Indian family-business promoter-succession pattern.

Although Pujo left Congress in 1913, the committee's findings inspired public support for ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment authorizing a federal income tax, for passage of the Federal Reserve Act that same year, and for the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914, the article records. The findings were also widely publicized in Louis Brandeis's book Other People's Money and How the Bankers Use It, which gave the money trust diagnosis its permanent literary form. Morgan himself, though suffering ill health, testified before the committee in December 1912 and faced several days of questioning from Untermyer; the exchange between the two men on the fundamentally psychological nature of banking, an industry built on trust rather than on money or property, is often quoted in business articles to this day. Morgan's associates laid his continuing physical decline at the hearings' door: he fell ill in February 1913 and died on March 31, with the Federal Reserve still nine months from officially displacing the money trust as lender of last resort.

After attending Bishop Cotton Boys' School in Bangalore and St Joseph's in Dharwad, Nilekani completed his Pre-University at Karnatak College before taking a bachelor's in electrical engineering from IIT Bombay. The technical education plus early exposure to a Fabian household framed his eventual pivot from private-sector technologist to public-infrastructure builder.

Forbes notes that HCL Technologies hires high-school graduates and trains them on the job, a recruitment practice that broadens the talent funnel beyond engineering campuses and ties workforce capacity to training throughput rather than degree supply.

In 1969 the Jayantilal Chauhan family of Parle Group acquired the struggling Bisleri brand for Rs 4 lakh (then about US$50,000), as the Italian founders looked to exit the Indian market. The acquisition was a strategic rescue of a brand whose Italian name, in Ramesh Chauhan's later telling, 'added a dash of class to it' — a soft intangible-asset purchase that decades later would become the umbrella brand for an entire category in India.

In the Panic of 1907, the institution's history records, the city's bank and trust company presidents spent the night locked inside the library and were not released until they had agreed on a plan to stop the financial crisis, making the new building the physical stage for the rescue that capped Morgan's career. He had first used his office there in November 1906, hosting the Metropolitan Museum of Art's purchasing committee, with the decorative details completed in January 1907 and the collection relocated into the library later that year. Morgan frequently met foreign bankers in the library's study and often opted to work there rather than in his downtown office, so the crisis found him already conducting the firm's business among his books and manuscripts. Afterward, to allow people to see the library from Madison Avenue, he demolished the neighboring Dodge house in 1907 and 1908 and replaced it with a garden designed by Beatrix Farrand. He had bought two hundred cases of books, temporarily stored at the Lenox Library and moved into the new building beginning in December 1905.

The early 1910s marked the turning point for the shipping trust. On April 15, 1912, the Titanic, flagship of its fleet and property of the White Star subsidiary, sank during her maiden voyage. Beyond the toll of lives and money, the sinking unsettled the trust's organization: Senator William Alden Smith, through the American commission of inquiry into the disaster, attacked the combine's very principle and Morgan's combination itself, the history records. Ismay's retirement as IMM president, arranged before the Titanic went down, took effect in 1913 with Harold Sanderson succeeding him; Morgan died that March 31. Analysis of the company's financial records shows that IMM was overleveraged and suffered from inadequate cash flow, defaulting on bond interest payments in late 1914 and entering a friendly receivership in 1915, from which it emerged in 1916. The combine never managed to dominate the bulk of the North Atlantic trade, and its corporate remnants eventually re-emerged as the United States Lines.

In 2023-2024 the foundation disbursed traditional grants of about one hundred and nine million dollars to 940 organisations focused on education, health and related areas. Alongside grants, it runs 59 field offices and 263 teacher-learning centres across India, working directly with teachers and rural child-care workers — the operating-organisation model Premji committed to in his pledge letter.

By 2015, Swiggy expanded from Bengaluru to eight Tier-1 cities, a moment when competitors like Foodpanda (later acquired by Ola), TinyOwl (later acquired by Zomato) and Ola Cafe (closed) were struggling — the founders entered a fragile market and outlasted rivals who had more capital but weaker operational focus.

Sustainability is positioned as a structural brand choice, not a CSR add-on. Mamaearth's commitments to recycling more plastic than it consumes and to planting a tree with every order are cited as examples of integrating environmental responsibility into the operating model — a positioning that aligns the brand with global consumer trends favouring responsible companies.

Between 2004 and 2010, he operated as a sub-broker under a Reliance Money franchise called Kamath Associates, offering portfolio advisory services and trading on his own account — a period that exposed him to the frictions, opaque pricing and poor service that traditional brokerages forced on Indian retail investors.

Despite the revenue decline, he insists he has never tracked quarterly or even annual growth, deliberately: the absence of investor pressure is what permits the firm to keep doing what is right for customers during periods of short-term business volatility, even where that means absorbing a real hit to top-line.

Bahl and his school friend Rohit Bansal co-founded Snapdeal in 2010 — originally as a coupon-based discount venture — a product they would later abandon for a full marketplace model as the Indian online retail opportunity revealed itself.

Pittsburgh Quarterly's profile traced the long arc of Druckenmiller's record back to his earliest lessons, including his famous dot-com mistake of early 2000. As he has retold the story in numerous interviews, in late 1999 he had correctly identified the tech bubble and reduced his gross exposure to the sector. But in early 2000, watching the mania continue for months, he violated his own discipline and bought roughly $6 billion of tech stocks at the peak - then liquidated them within six weeks at a loss of approximately $3 billion. He has called it the worst mistake of his career and the one that taught him most about respecting the discipline of patience. The Pittsburgh Quarterly article placed that mistake in the broader context of compounding and career survival. Druckenmiller's record - 30 percent annualized for three decades without a down year - is the rare case in which compounding was not interrupted by a single catastrophic drawdown. The article noted that this record depended not on avoiding mistakes (the $3 billion dot-com loss is the most cited example) but on the discipline to cut losers fast, size winners large, and refuse to average down on a broken thesis. Compounding for Druckenmiller was less a mathematical fact and more a behavioral practice - the refusal to let any single mistake compound against him. The profile closed on the question of what Druckenmiller has learned across four decades of markets. The answer that surfaced across the article was that the discipline does not get easier with age. Humility about one's own edge, the patience to wait for fat pitches, the willingness to act on conviction when others do not, and the courage to cut losses immediately when wrong - these are practices rather than skills, and they must be renewed every cycle. The Pittsburgh Quarterly profile framed Druckenmiller's post-Duquesne work as the same discipline applied to philanthropy, fiscal policy advocacy, and the family office: a lifetime of asking 'what do I know?' and acting on the answer.

At UIDAI, Nilekani launched Aadhaar — the world's largest biometric ID system — and UPI, India's real-time payments interface. Together they built the rails for an India-scale digital economy, reaching even the poorest villages through a deliberately interoperable open architecture.

His father had incorporated Western Indian Vegetable Products Ltd in 1945 at Amalner, in Maharashtra's Jalgaon district, manufacturing Sunflower Vanaspati cooking oil and a laundry soap called 787 that was a byproduct of the oil trade. That single-product, small-town family company would, over five decades, become the global IT services firm Wipro.

The failed corner sent contagion through the banking system, the article records. The State Savings Bank of Butte, owned by Augustus Heinze, announced its insolvency, and depositors rushed the Mercantile National Bank in New York, of which Heinze was president; the New York Clearing House, afraid of the tainted reputations of Heinze and Morse, forced both men to resign all their banking interests. The contagion then reached the trust companies, whose assets had grown 244 percent in the decade before 1907, against 97 percent for national banks. On Monday, October 21, the Knickerbocker Trust's board asked its president, Charles T. Barney, to resign over his associations with Morse, and the National Bank of Commerce, a Morgan-dominated bank, announced it would no longer serve as clearing house for the Knickerbocker. The next day a classic run withdrew nearly eight million dollars in less than three hours, forcing suspension before noon. Call money rates on the exchange soared to seventy percent, and runs spread to the Trust Company of America and the Lincoln Trust.

Kingswell's interview returned to Lynch's view of the Magellan record itself, and to the question of how much of the outperformance was skill and how much was circumstance. Lynch's own answer was that the Magellan years were the conjunction of a particular fund, a particular market structure, and a particular research method that has not been replicable since. The fund was small enough in its early years that Lynch could take meaningful positions in small companies without moving the price; the market structure of the late 1970s and early 1980s had thin sell-side coverage of small-caps, which left Lynch's scuttlebutt method with a wide-open opportunity set; and the research method — primary visits, competitor interviews, retail-store observation — was a discipline that few institutional desks were applying. Lynch was candid that the same method, applied to the much larger Magellan of the late 1980s, would have produced a smaller edge because the small-cap names could no longer move the portfolio. The $14 billion Magellan was structurally forced into large-cap names whose coverage was already crowded, and the Lynch-style returns were no longer available at that scale. The implication Lynch drew was not that his method had stopped working in the small-cap segment, but that the Magellan franchise had outgrown the segment where the method produced its edge. The honest conclusion is that the Magellan record was, in part, the product of running a small fund in a small-cap market — conditions that the post-retirement Magellan could not reproduce. The retrospective closed with Lynch's observation that the most durable lesson of the Magellan record is not the specific returns but the methodological discipline. Primary research, a long measurement window, asymmetric position sizing, and a refusal to bet on macro forecasts remain the core ingredients. Any investor applying the method to the small-cap segment today should, in Lynch's view, still find an edge — provided they are willing to do the unglamorous primary work that the institutional desk has abandoned.

Mathrubootham had already handed the CEO seat to Dennis Woodside — former COO of Dropbox and ex-CEO of Motorola Mobility — in May 2024, retaining only the executive chairman title; the December 2025 move completed a two-stage professionalisation that the firm had been planning since the public listing.

The Archive frames the address as Jobs's humanist manifesto delivered as something disarmingly plain — three stories drawn from his own life. Beneath the plain structure — dropping out of Reed, being fired from Apple, facing a cancer diagnosis — the essay finds fundamental truths that make us human: love, death, fear, authenticity, hope. It observes that the speech is by a technology founder who scarcely mentions technology, and connects this to an interview Jobs gave a few years earlier, in which he complained that the whole computer industry wants to forget about the humanist side, insisting that people forget they are unique, with unique feelings and perspectives. The three stories, culminating in the report of his diagnosis and the reflection that remembering death is the best defense against the trap of living someone else's life, form the closest thing Jobs left to a written credo.

Following Gree's 2019 mixed-ownership reform, the company no longer has a controlling shareholder; its largest stakeholder is a Hillhouse Capital-managed investment fund with a 16% stake, while Dong herself holds 1.8% and is the sixth-largest owner, with influence extending beyond her direct equity stake.

Wanda has been selling assets and renegotiating debt to manage a severe liquidity crisis, having raised billions of yuan in 2023 through such measures, per Caixin's reporting.

After finishing his education, Morgan went to London in August 1857 to join his father, then a partner in the merchant banking firm George Peabody and Co., and for the next fourteen years served as his father's American representative through a series of affiliated New York houses: Duncan, Sherman and Company, his own J. Pierpont Morgan and Company, and Dabney, Morgan. Junius reinforced the apprenticeship with religious discipline, writing his son to remember that an Eye above watched every act, word, and deed for which he would one day give account. The Peabody house was struggling in the wake of the Panic of 1857, surviving only after George Peabody defied creditors, including Baring Brothers, and secured an emergency loan from the Bank of England in November of that year. Morgan spent months in the South learning the cotton trade from New Orleans, and he considered an unauthorized but profitable coffee trade his first fully independent transaction, though it drew a stern warning from Duncan Sherman.

Biocon India was started in 1978 in the garage of Mazumdar's rented Bangalore home with seed capital of Rs 10,000. Indian FDI rules capped the foreign partner at 30%, leaving 70% in her hands — a constraint that effectively forced her to be the majority Indian entrepreneur rather than a country manager.

Working in Paris for a French software firm in the 1970s prompted Murthy to re-examine his socialist instincts. He chose to return to India specifically to test whether entrepreneurship could improve Indian society, rather than chase a comfortable European career — a decision he frames as a duty of entrepreneurs to invent products and create jobs.

It continued in 2025 and as a consequence, the top ten stocks were 39% of the value of the S&P 500 Index (‘S&P’) at the end of 2025 and provided 50% of the total return it delivered in USD. Is this different to the past? US Market Concentration Over Last 125 years Source: UBS Global Investment Returns Yearbook 2025 This second chart shows that the last time the US market value was this concentrated was in 1930. What happened next? It took until 1954 for the S&P to regain its 1930 high. Although this is regarded as prehistoric by most investors today it is wise to remember that the S&P (not the NASDAQ) did not regain its 2000 high until 2007 and then promptly lost it again in the Credit Crisis until 2013. When bubbles burst they can cause many lost years or even decades. It was difficult to even perform in line with the index in recent years if you did not own most of these stocks in their market weightings, and we would not do so even if we became convinced that they were all good companies of the sort we seek to invest in, which we are not. It would in our view represent too much of a portfolio risk to own them all, just as we would not own all five of the drinks companies we have in our Investible Universe even if we thought that prospects for the sector were good. Our Fund is a portfolio, not a sectoral bet. 2. The Growth of Assets in Index Funds The rise of the Magnificent Seven and the AI stocks also had a strong tailwind from the increase in assets held in index funds.

© 2025 Oaktree Capital Management, L.P. All Rights Reserved Follow us: On the vertical axis is the plan’s willingness to bear risk – its attitude toward taking on risk and readiness to withstand the losses that might result. In other words, is the board relatively risk-tolerant or risk- averse? Will it assume more risk in pursuit of above average returns, or will it shun risk, knowing that doing so is likely to limit the returns it enjoys? Importantly, “more risk” and “less risk” are considered relative to the maximum amount of risk that the plan’s “ability” might allow it to bear. The labeling of the matrix’s four cells is very informative: • If an investor has a high financial ability to bear risk and a high willingness, it is described as “capitalizing” on, or taking advantage of, its financial strength and risk-tolerance. • If it has a high ability to bear risk but a low willingness, it is said to be “defensive.” It could take on more risk than it does, but it has chosen to operate at a lower risk level. • If it has a low ability to bear risk and a low willingness, it is described as being “protective,” which seems appropriate given its circumstances. However, it should be recognized that this is likely to limit returns in the short run, and thus to create a need to shoulder more risk and/or increase contributions in the out years. • Finally, if it has a low ability to bear risk but a high willingness, it is described as “naive.

Pop Mart gained widespread attention starting in 2023 with the popularity of its Labubu toy line, later endorsed by celebrities including Blackpink's Lisa; this drove Wang's rise to become China's 10th richest individual by June 2025 and an estimated net worth of $19.6 billion as of February 2026 per Forbes.

A pivotal 1974 episode on the Yugoslav-Bulgarian border — where Murthy was detained and expelled by communist-era authorities without clear cause — converted him, by his own account, from a confused leftist into what he labelled a compassionate capitalist. The experience convinced him that entrepreneurship, not ideology, was the practical route out of Indian poverty.

After MIT, Kohli trained in power system operations at Ebasco International, the Connecticut Valley Power Exchange and New England Power Systems before returning to India in 1951 to join Tata Electric Company, where he set up a load dispatching system — an early instance of applying Western utility-grade engineering practice to Indian infrastructure.

Nadar's first international foray came in 1980 through Far East Computers in Singapore, a vehicle to sell IT hardware abroad; it clocked roughly INR 1 million in revenue in its maiden year and established the template of pairing Indian engineering talent with foreign demand — a model the entire Indian IT industry would later scale.

The foundation's own timeline records an unbroken escalation. The William H. Gates Foundation formed in 1994 to fund scientific research, global health, and local causes; the Gates Library Foundation followed in 1997, helping United States public libraries offer free internet access before going global and reaching more than fifty countries and 280 million lives. In 1999 the epidemiologist William Foege joined as senior advisor to craft the global health strategy, and the Gates Millennium Scholars program began, ultimately benefiting more than twenty thousand low-income students of color. The merged Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launched in 2000 alongside Gavi's creation at the World Economic Forum and the Sound Families homeless-housing effort in Puget Sound. In 2002 came a $100 million founding pledge to the Global Fund, in 2003 the Grand Challenges program and an India office whose HIV prevention work halved infection rates within a decade, and in 2006 the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, which has since reached more than twenty million smallholder farmers.

In 1978 Nilekani started his career at Mumbai-based Patni Computer Systems, where he was interviewed by N.R. Narayana Murthy. Three years later, he, Murthy and five others left Patni to launch Infosys — a sequence that turned a job interview into the founding partnership of India's most globally visible IT firm.

In 1966, at age twenty-one, Premji dropped out of Stanford on news of his father's sudden death and returned home to take charge of the family business. He would finally complete his Stanford electrical engineering degree only in 2000 — a thirty-four-year detour that underscored how completely the family business consumed his early adulthood.

In the 1970s, Jayantilal Chauhan split his soft drinks business between sons: Prakash Chauhan obtained control of Parle Agro, while Ramesh Chauhan received Parle Exports (now Bisleri International). In 1976, Parle Exports launched Maaza, a mango-pulp fruit drink — building a portfolio of beverages alongside the still-nascent mineral water business.

The institution's later history pairs programmatic ambition with planned obsolescence. The Gates Notes-era initiatives piled up: the 2011 challenge to reinvent the toilet, the 2012 London family-planning summit that set a goal of reaching 120 million more women with contraceptives, the London Declaration on neglected tropical diseases the same year, India and Southeast Asia certified polio-free in 2014, and $1.75 billion committed to COVID-19 response in 2020, the year Africa was certified free of wild poliovirus. Governance followed: Bill Gates Sr., the foundation's north star and strategic guide, died in September 2020; Warren Buffett stepped down as trustee in 2021 after fifteen years, having contributed $43 billion to date; an independent governing board was appointed in 2022; Melinda French Gates left in 2024; and in May 2025 the $200 billion, 2045 sunset was announced. Gates insists the goal is not innovation itself but the impact it makes possible.

Active vs Passive Fund Share of US Equity Fund Assets Source: Research Affiliates, Data as at 31st Dec 2024 The financial services industry sometimes does not aid understanding with the labels it employs. Index funds and index ETFs are often labelled ‘passives’ in contrast with ‘active’ funds, like Fundsmith Stewardship Fund, which have a fund manager making investment decisions. The ‘passives’ mostly track the index they invest in by holding the stocks in proportion to their market value. Far from being passive in any normally accepted sense of the word, this makes them a momentum strategy. A momentum investment strategy is one in which the investor buys stocks which are performing strongly. If you redeem money from an active fund like Fundsmith and invest it in an S&P 500 Index tracker fund your new fund will buy the index stocks in proportion to their market value. Currently about 7% of it will go into Nvidia which we do not own. About 35% will go into the Magnificent Seven of which we own only three stocks — Alphabet, Meta and Microsoft. This gives added momentum to those stocks we do not own which are a major part of the index. John Bogle, the pioneer of index investing who founded Vanguard, the index fund manager, was asked at the 2017 Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting if there was a level of assets in index funds which would distort markets and he agreed that there was, although he had no method of determining that level. We may already have reached it.markets

In 2022, Snapdeal adopted the group corporate identity of AceVector, a holding structure that bundled Snapdeal with Unicommerce and Stellaro Brands — a reorganisation that distanced the e-commerce brand from its failed-unicorn past and reframed the founders as portfolio operators rather than single-business builders.

Pursued large-scale real estate and cultural-tourism development projects (including in Wuhan) financed substantially through trust and other debt instruments.

In August 1861 Morgan loaned twenty thousand dollars to Simon Stevens, a well-connected New York attorney, who used it to buy five thousand Hall carbines at 11.50 dollars each from an arms dealer and immediately resell them to General John Fremont at 22 dollars. The rifles had earlier been sold off by the government for 3.50 dollars each; after the Union defeat at Bull Run placed a premium on arms, the resale became a scandal. Morgan held title to the carbines during the thirty-eight-day loan, having their barrels replaced with rifled ones before shipment, and received fifty-five thousand dollars from the Army in September, deducting the loan's face value plus expenses and interest. An 1863 report by a House select committee examining government contracts branded the profiteers worse than traitors in arms. The debate over Morgan's knowledge persisted for decades: Gustavus Myers accused him in 1910, public-relations chief R. Gordon Wasson found no evidence he knew, and historian Vincent Carosso concluded that Stevens had used Morgan's name to cover his own greed.

In January 2017 the firm launched its cloud kitchen chain The Bowl Company, followed by Swiggy Access in November 2017 — a kitchen-incubator network of ready-to-occupy facilities for restaurant partners that had grown to over 1,000 kitchens by 2019.

At Tata Electric, Kohli became a general superintendent in 1963 and deputy general manager in 1967, and introduced the use of digital computers for power system design and control — including the CDC 3600 mainframe at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research — making Tata Electric one of the first utility companies anywhere to deploy computers for grid management.

In 2010, the brothers launched Zerodha and introduced India to the discount-broking model: a flat twenty-rupee fee per executed trade, irrespective of size, replacing the percentage-based commissions that had long been the industry default and that disproportionately penalised active traders.

In March 2025, Nadar transferred a chunk of shares in the investment companies that hold the listed flagship to his daughter Roshni as part of his succession plan — a continuation of the 2020 chairmanship handover that Forbes frames as a multi-stage promoter-equity transfer rather than a single event.

In December 2024, prior to his full exit, he sold approximately $40 million of Freshworks stock in two tranches on 18 and 19 December, framing it as personal financial planning while publicly reaffirming his confidence in the firm's long-term trajectory — a calibrated promoter sale that avoided signalling distress.

On scaling, Ghazal identifies four deliberate levers: a digital-first approach leveraging e-commerce and social media marketing to reach consumers directly; data-driven decision-making through analytics; strategic partnerships with influencers and investors; and a phased retail expansion from online-only to a physical-store presence to enhance accessibility.

Recognition listed by Wikipedia includes the Padma Shri in 2005 for contributions to medicine, the Padma Bhushan in 2022 for contribution in production of vaccines during COVID-19 in the field of Trade and Industry, Ernst & Young's Entrepreneur of the Year for Healthcare & Life Sciences in November 2007 and Entrepreneur of the Year for India in February 2015. The awards trace a two-decade arc that culminated with the COVID-era honor.

Founded DeepSeek in July 2023, funded and owned by High-Flyer, to pursue AI research building on High-Flyer's existing computing infrastructure.

” I think that might be a generous description. What could be more foolish than taking risk that entails potential consequences you might not be able to survive? The consultant’s survey described the board as having a moderate willingness to accept risk despite the plan’s above average ability to bear it (stemming from the plan’s solid funding status and the state’s strong economic performance). This suggests returns will be constrained, but also that the plan and its constituencies won’t be exposed to the greater range of outcomes that increased willingness would bring. I found this an organized way to approach risk bearing, in which the most important thing is that it’s done explicitly and intelligently. It reminded me of the conditions that existed when I was asked to chair the University of Pennsylvania’s investment committee in mid-2000. Penn’s endowment performance had lagged that of its peers because of its having been severely underweighted in growth, tech, venture capital, and private equity investments in the roaring 1990s, and people were asking whether it should take on increased risk in an effort to narrow the gap. Penn ranked very low at the time in endowment per student, a crucial metric. Should Penn turn aggressive to make up the shortfall, or should it remain conservative to safeguard the limited resources it had? In the spirit of the consultant’s matrix, should it increase its “willingness” despite the limits on its “ability”?

The Padma Bhushan was conferred on Nadar in 2008 for his role in building India's IT industry, an honour that recognised both HCL's commercial longevity and the broader ecosystem of software-services employment that companies like his helped create.

Infosys was launched in 1981 with Murthy and six co-founders pooling Rs 10,000 of capital, with the sum borrowed from his wife Sudha Murty. The seed money was the entire war chest for a venture that would, four decades later, employ well over a hundred thousand people and earn the label of father-figure of Indian IT.

Stepped down as Gree's president in April 2025 while remaining chairwoman, handing the president role to Zhang Wei as part of a management rejuvenation effort, after having identified and rotated several potential successors through various roles.

As the chaos began shaking the confidence of New York's banks, their most famous practitioner was away at a church convention in Richmond, Virginia, the article records. Morgan returned to Wall Street late on the night of Saturday, October 19, and the following morning the library of his brownstone at Madison Avenue and 36th Street had become a revolving door of bank and trust company presidents seeking help. Morgan and his associates examined the Knickerbocker's books, judged it insolvent, and declined to intervene; its failure, however, triggered runs on healthy trusts, prompting Morgan to take charge of the rescue. After an overnight audit showed the Trust Company of America to be sound, Morgan declared this was the place to stop the trouble, then assembled the other trust companies' presidents and held them in meeting until midnight, when they agreed to provide 8.25 million dollars in loans to keep it open. On Thursday Treasury Secretary Cortelyou deposited around twenty-five million dollars in New York banks, and John D. Rockefeller deposited ten million more.

Murthy argues that respect must be earned separately from each stakeholder class: customers want on-time, on-budget, higher-quality delivery; employees want fair, transparent conduct and dignity; investors want transparency and no related-party transactions; vendor partners want honest dealing; and society wants a clean environment and decent conduct.

Morgan's estate was valued at 128 million dollars, over half of it the worth of his collection, and he bequeathed all except one piece to the library, asking that his son make it permanently available for the instruction and pleasure of the American people, the institution's history records. Jack Morgan sold off much of the overseas collection rather than importing it, but kept what was already in his father's library, and in 1924 he incorporated the Pierpont Morgan Library as a public institution with a 1.5-million-dollar endowment, retaining Belle da Costa Greene as director. The library was not a public lending library and initially admitted only researchers, ten at a time; Jack's warning that one soiled thumb could undo the work of nine hundred years expressed its standard of custody. The collection, more than 350,000 objects by the early twenty-first century, includes three Gutenberg Bibles, the manuscript of A Christmas Carol, and the only significant music manuscript Morgan bought in his lifetime, Beethoven's Violin Sonata in G major, Opus 96, acquired in 1907.

Within a year of founding, Biocon India was manufacturing enzymes and exporting them to the United States and Europe — Wikipedia notes it was the first Indian company to do so. Mazumdar used first-year earnings to buy an eight-hectare property for future expansion.

TIME reported that the foundation's educational programs have so far helped over eight million children, and that it also plays an advocacy role on education policy — including helping to shape national curriculum. That dual operating-plus-advocacy posture makes it an institutional actor, not just a charity.

He told Stanford that economic inequity of this scale cannot be solved by traditional spending: India has to do a lot more with a lot less money, and do it faster. DPI is, in his framing, the only practical lever to deliver large-impact inclusion without bankrupting the state.

The regulatory tightening he describes — STT on options, fewer weekly expiries, the end of exchange rebates — represents a coordinated policy push to cool speculative retail derivatives trading in India, and Zerodha's disclosure that it absorbed a material revenue drop is itself a window into how exposed discount brokers are to incremental changes in the market microstructure regime.

Kingsoft Office confirmed Lei's continued honorary-chairman role in reporting as of June 2025, indicating no full separation from the Kingsoft corporate family despite his focus on Xiaomi's smartphone/EV/chip businesses.

I convinced the people who mattered that (a) it was too late to start chasing a horse so long after it had left the barn and (b) the risk of continuing to underperform from such an elevated market level paled relative to the risk of participating in a bust after having missed the boom. The consultant’s matrix might have been of help in that effort. Moving on from the matrix, the consultant described some other interesting facets of the board’s attitude toward risk: • 100% of the board members agreed – half “strongly agreed” – that exposure to risk is necessary if the plan wants to meet its objectives. • The consensus among board members was that they would feel worse about adopting an aggressive strategy and experiencing a market collapse than they would about being conservative and missing out on strong gains.

Despite the cash infusions, New York banks were reluctant to make the short-term loans that facilitated daily stock trades, and prices crashed for lack of funds, the article records. At half past one on Thursday, October 24, Ransom Thomas, the exchange's president, rushed to Morgan's offices to say he would have to close early; Morgan was emphatic that an early close would be catastrophic. He summoned the city's bank presidents, informing them that as many as fifty stock exchange houses would fail unless twenty-five million dollars was raised in ten minutes. By 2:16 p.m., fourteen bank presidents had pledged 23.6 million dollars; the money reached the market at 2:30, and nineteen million had been loaned by the close. Friday brought renewed panic, and Morgan raised only 9.7 million in pledges. The New York Clearing House then issued one hundred million dollars in loan certificates to settle interbank balances, and Morgan contracted to purchase thirty million dollars of city bonds to keep New York from bankruptcy.

At the request of J.R.D. Tata, Kohli helped set up Tata Consultancy Services in 1969, after Tata Electric installed a computer system to control the Mumbai-Pune power lines — only the third such utility deployment globally — and TCS initially served Tata Group companies before signing its first external contract with Burroughs Corporation in 1972 for software services.

In 1984 Mazumdar built a dedicated R&D team at Biocon focused on novel enzymes and solid substrate fermentation. A pivotal external injection came in 1987, when Narayanan Vaghul of ICICI Ventures backed Biocon with a US$250,000 venture fund that financed a new plant built around a semi-automated tray culture process inspired by Japanese techniques. In 1989 Biocon became the first Indian biotech firm to receive U.S.

Murthy held the CEO chair at Infosys for twenty-one years, from founding in 1981 until 2002, before handing the role to co-founder Nandan Nilekani. He remained chairman until 2011 and briefly returned as executive chairman in mid-2013 during a difficult leadership transition, before reverting to chairman emeritus later that year.

Bahl co-founded Titan Capital, an early-stage venture firm that invests his and Bansal's personal capital; the firm's portfolio includes Ola, Urban Company, Mamaearth, Credgenics, Shadowfax, Razorpay and Giva, with reported returns of over 100x on several positions like Ola, Urban Company and Mamaearth.

After The Coca-Cola Company exited India in 1977, Parle Exports entered the carbonated drinks segment with Thums Up (cola), Limca (lemon-flavoured) and Gold Spot (orange-flavoured). To complement its soft drinks portfolio, Parle launched mineral and carbonated water under the Bisleri brand name — the first time the water business was commercially pursued, in PVC bottles initially, switching to PET in the mid-1980s.

hypothesis’. You may not have heard of this as it is not the sort of thing to take for a read on a long flight. However, it has some startling revelations which are relevant to the current market. It starts with the seemingly uncontroversial assertion that $1 (or $1m or $1bn) switched between either stocks or bonds (or any other switch) does not affect the intrinsic value of either. If you redeem funds from an active fund like Fundsmith to place them in an index fund it does not alter the valuation of the stocks we have to sell to fund the redemption or the stocks that the index fund buys. However, the NBER paper shows that in reality such a switch has a multiplier effect of anything from 3:1 to 8:1, an average of about 5.5:1. The inflow from such switches pushes up the value of the stocks purchased by an average of five times the amount invested. To say this flies in the face of fundamental investment theory would be a masterly understatement. The NBER paper attributes this to the inelasticity of demand and supply for equities. Over 50% of equities are in index funds which have no discretion over what they buy. Moreover, some portion of the so-called active funds which are left are managed in a way that makes them unlikely to bet against what is happening in the index. Apart from any mandate restrictions, fund managers have long realised the career preserving nature of so-called closet indexation in which they do not stray far from the index weightings.

Forbes records that Nadar has donated about US$1.1 billion to the Shiv Nadar Foundation, which backs education-related causes — placing him among the most generous philanthropists in Indian business history in absolute terms, not just as a percentage of wealth.

The note doubles down on Rainmatter's mandate to back Indian founders building for India, with Kamath arguing that current geopolitical conditions make homegrown startup support more important than ever — a thesis that repositions the firm's incubation arm as a national-strategy lever, not merely a corporate venture fund.

The flat-fee structure was central to how Zerodha scaled without meaningful advertising spend or venture funding, because the price point itself became the marketing channel and word-of-mouth among active traders did the rest.

In 1871, at the behest of Junius Morgan in London, the Philadelphia financier Anthony Joseph Drexel became Pierpont's mentor, and the two formed Drexel, Morgan and Co. in New York, his biography records. The merchant banking partnership acted as agent for European capital moving into the United States, took the leading role in financing American railroads, and stabilized and revitalized the nation's securities markets. Most critically, it built a national capital market for industrial companies, an arena that before then had existed for railroads and canals alone. In government finance, Drexel, Morgan underwrote the pay of the entire United States Army in 1877 to restore investor confidence when Congress refused to act, and bailed out the federal government during the aftermath of the Panic of 1893. Drexel's Philadelphia capital and reputation steadied the younger Morgan, whom his father considered temperamentally speculative, and the partnership gave Morgan what his father's London house alone could not: a New York base from which to dominate American corporate finance for the next four decades.

Dong began her fifth three-year term as chairwoman in April 2025 while Zhang Wei took over as president, with succession planning ongoing.

Failed repayment on the Wuhan project financing led Everbright Xinglong Trust to seek court intervention, resulting in high-consumption restrictions on Wang and Wanda entities as of September 2025.

Swiggy moved from 16 Indian cities in mid-2018 to 500 cities in 2019, matching rival Zomato's scale, and in early 2019 extended into general product delivery with Swiggy Stores and a package service called Swiggy Go, later rebranded as Swiggy Genie in April 2020.

Nilekani served as Infosys CEO from March 2002 to April 2007, during which the firm's revenue grew roughly sixfold to about three billion dollars. He then handed the CEO role to colleague Kris Gopalakrishnan and moved to co-chairman of the board — an early example of the planned, founder-led succession pattern Infosys institutionalised.

His earlier Softronics failure in 1976, Murthy told McKinsey, was simply because there was no domestic software market — few computers existed in India and the government refused to outsource. The lesson he took was that timing the demand-side environment matters as much as having engineers and ambition.

By mid-2025, 1.4 billion Indian residents had Aadhaar, 750 million had opened bank accounts using it, and electronic money transfers had moved without fraud at population scale — figures Nilekani presents as proof that the inclusion thesis works in practice, not just in policy papers.

As a female founder, Ghazal addresses what she sees as the unique challenges women face in business — including the need to actively seek support, balance family responsibilities, and pursue leadership opportunities. She positions her own trajectory as a reference point for aspiring women entrepreneurs looking to break barriers and build impactful businesses.

In the 1980s, after IBM was expelled from India, Premji changed the company name to Wipro and entered high technology by manufacturing minicomputers through a technology tie-up with the American Sentinel Computer Corporation. From there he made a deliberate pivot from soaps to software, eventually turning Wipro into one of India's flagship IT services exporters.

Nadar's nickname among friends — Magus, Old Persian for wizard — captured a reputation for contrarian problem-solving that defined HCL's pivots across hardware, software and services through four and a half decades of technological change.

Wikipedia notes honorary doctorates from the University of Massachusetts Medical School in June 2018 and the University of Oxford in June 2019, the ICMR Lifetime Achievement Medal for contribution in healthcare conferred by Bill Gates in November 2019, the Lokmanya Tilak National Award in August 2021, and the Dean's Medal from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in May 2022.

Freshworks listed on 22 September 2021 at $36 per share, above the marketed $32–34 range, but by 5 September 2025 the stock had fallen to $13.01 — a sharp drawdown that contextualises the founder's exit and frames a SaaS valuation reset rather than a single-founder issue.

DeepSeek's R1 release was described as 'upending AI' due to its comparatively low training cost and compute usage relative to established Western rivals, and was noted as geopolitically significant given ongoing US semiconductor trade restrictions on China.

Among recent initiatives cited by TIME: a third campus for Azim Premji University with programs aligned to the foundation's mission (public health, education, sustainability), a scholarship programme for college-bound girls, and over 480 child-care centres for children aged six months to three years — extending the foundation's reach from school age down to early childhood.

In 2022, Poonawalla was ranked the 4th richest person in India on the Forbes India rich list with a net worth of $24.3 billion, and was ranked number 1 on the Hurun Global Healthcare Rich List 2022. By October 2024, Forbes listed Poonawalla and his family as the ninth-wealthiest in India with a net worth of $22.1 billion. The wealth trajectory — driven by COVID-era vaccine scale — places him as one of India's richest promoters.

On Saturday, November 2, with the brokerage Moore and Schley near collapse under loans collateralized by Tennessee Coal and Iron stock, Morgan called an emergency conference at his library, proposing that U.S. Steel acquire TCI, the article records. That evening, with runs still threatening the Trust Company of America and the Lincoln Trust, forty to fifty bankers gathered, the clearing-house presidents in the East room and the trust executives in the West room. Around midnight Morgan informed a leader of the trust presidents that saving Moore and Schley would require twenty-five million dollars he would not commit unless the trusts also rescued their weakest members. As discussion stalled, the bankers realized Morgan had locked them in and pocketed the key. At three in the morning about one hundred twenty officials assembled for a full report, and by 4:45 a.m. Morgan had persuaded the trusts' leader to sign, the rest following. Next day Elbert Gary and Henry Clay Frick won Roosevelt's assent to the TCI purchase less than an hour before the exchange opened, and the final crisis was averted.

In July 2009 Nilekani left Infosys to chair the Unique Identification Authority of India at cabinet-minister rank, accepting the invitation of then-Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. The move swapped a corporate CEO career for a state-building assignment to roll out biometric identity for every Indian resident — what observers called the biggest social project on the planet.

For the quarter ended June 2025, the firm reported an 18% year-on-year revenue rise to $204.7 million with the net loss narrowing from $20.1 million to $1.7 million, and guided to 11–12% revenue growth for the September quarter at $207–210 million — the operational turnaround underway during the transition window.

Given our experience in recent years, who can blame them? The NBER research could in one sense be regarded as a statement of the blindingly obvious impact of the rise of index funds, but what is far from obvious is the scale of that impact. Nor does the fact that something may seem obvious, once it is explained, mean that it should then be ignored. It may make no fundamental sense to buy Tesla shares on a Price Earnings Ratio (‘PE’) of 327 (which is its current rating) but it is the ninth largest company in the S&P 500 Index by value so not holding it is a perilous position to take when money is flowing into index funds. John Bogle was right. The increasing proportion of equities held by index funds are invested without any regard to the quality or valuation of the shares bought which produces dangerous distortions. Contrary to popular belief, the stock market is not a substitute for online casinos but rather a mechanism for valuing companies, raising capital and providing liquidity. When this becomes distorted the result is often a major misallocation of capital.

Wikipedia records that India's 1991 liberalization saw Coca-Cola return to the country, and in 1993 Parle Exports sold its carbonated drinks brands Thums Up, Limca, Gold Spot, Citra and RimZim to The Coca-Cola Company for between Rs 125 crore (about US$40 million) and Rs 200 crore (about US$60 million).

A new hundred-crore rewilding fund, with the first project taken up in Maharashtra, marks an extension of the Rainmatter Foundation's remit from climate philanthropy into hands-on ecological restoration — evidence that the promoters are willing to deploy personal capital into long-horizon, low-returns work the conventional market will not fund.

Decision — Liquidated Scion Asset Management; returned capital. Context: “With a heavy heart…” letter; SEC deregistration ~Nov 10, 2025. Outcome (known): Final 13F Q3 2025 (filed Nov 3, 2025); firm terminal.

In August 2025 the foundation committed around one hundred and seventy-five million dollars to expand school-meal coverage for more than five million children, taking its nutrition work to population scale. Premji's philosophy, as TIME framed it, draws on Mahatma Gandhi's notion of holding wealth in trusteeship for the betterment of society.

At Infosys, Murthy is credited with articulating and operationalising the global delivery model — the practice of executing software work from India against overseas client requirements. This model, with its time-zone arbitrage and cost discipline, became the structural backbone of the entire Indian IT services industry.

Began selling assets and renegotiating debt from 2023 onward in response to Wanda's liquidity crisis.

Wikipedia records that Unilever acquired Biocon Biochemicals of Ireland from Leslie Auchincloss in 1989, bringing Biocon India into a Unilever orbit and exposing it to global quality systems. In 1997 Unilever sold its specialty chemicals division, including Biocon, to Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI). Mazumdar's future husband, Scotsman John Shaw, personally raised $2 million in 1998 to buy the outstanding Biocon shares from ICI —.

By 2020, Zerodha had self-assessed its valuation at roughly one billion dollars during an ESOP buyback — an internally-derived unicorn status that did not require a priced venture round and underlined the firm's insistence on validating worth from cash flow rather than from external marks.

Murthy spotted in the late 1970s that inexpensive super-minicomputers, capable of running relational databases and online transaction monitors, would let mid-tier US firms computerise commercial applications for the first time. That, he predicted, would create an explosion in demand for software developers that India's underemployed engineering graduates could supply.

Nilekani cited the vegetable vendor with a roadside cart as proof of real-life benefit: digital payment increases her safety, with money going straight to a bank account rather than cash that can be stolen. He frames adoption as driven by utility at the bottom of the pyramid, not by coercion as critics allege.

He has held governance positions across Indian industry: board of governors at ICRIER, member of the NASSCOM executive council, chairman of the CII National Committee on E-commerce, and a seat on the National Startup Advisory Council that advises the Indian government on startup ecosystem building.

Under Premji, the original hydrogenated cooking-oil business was progressively diversified into bakery fats, ethnic ingredient-based toiletries, hair-care soaps, baby toiletries, lighting products and hydraulic cylinders — a portfolio reshaping exercise that anticipated and funded the eventual IT pivot rather than replacing it overnight.

During the COVID-19 pandemic the company laid off 1,100 employees and shut down over three-fourths of its cloud kitchens, while also initiating doorstep alcohol delivery in Jharkhand, West Bengal and Odisha — a moment of simultaneous contraction and category-stretch that tested the founders' crisis management.

Her five key takeaways for aspiring founders frame her broader playbook: identify a real consumer problem; engage actively with the audience as a product-development input; integrate sustainability as a brand value, not an afterthought; leverage digital platforms for visibility and growth; and embrace the journey of resilience, learning and continuous adaptation that entrepreneurship demands.

A Forbes-side detail: Nadar's schooling was primarily in Tamil and he did not begin speaking much English until age 22, an unusual trajectory for someone who would go on to build a global IT-services multinational — and a recurring proof-point that linguistic background is not destiny in Indian entrepreneurship.

Kohli became TCS's first chief executive and also served as its deputy chairman, leading the company for nearly three decades before stepping down in 1996 — a tenure long enough to span the era of mainframe-era software exports through the early years of Y2K-driven outsourcing.

In August 2020 Nadar handed the chairmanship of HCL Technologies to his daughter Roshni Nadar Malhotra, making her the first woman to chair a listed Indian IT company; in July 2021 he stepped down as managing director, succeeded by chief executive C. Vijayakumar for a five-year term.

Morgan's ascent to power ran through America's largest business enterprises, the railroads, his biography records. He led the syndicate that broke Jay Cooke's government-financing privileges, raised large sums in Europe through the American rails section of the London Stock Exchange, and developed a national railroad empire through reorganization and consolidation. Instead of acting only as a financier, he took an active hand in managing and reorganizing the railroads themselves, raising efficiency in a practice labeled Morganization and described by his biography as pioneering private equity investing. The year 1883 saw him successfully place a large block of William H. Vanderbilt's New York Central stock with investors. In 1885 he reorganized the New York, West Shore and Buffalo line and leased it to the New York Central. After the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, he convened unprecedented conferences of railroad presidents in 1889 and 1890, bringing together competitors to write agreements for the maintenance of public, reasonable, uniform, and stable rates, creating a community of interest among rival lines.

© 2025 Oaktree Capital Management, L.P. All Rights Reserved Follow us: • The board expressed a strong preference for bearing the “normal” risks stemming from market participation as opposed to the risks associated with an innovative but opaque approach that is projected to deliver returns accompanied by risk below the normal level. • All board members recognized that having true diversification means there may well be some laggards within the portfolio at all times. In my opinion, the consultant covered the most important aspects of risk bearing, and the board members’ views were reasonable. Importantly, they recognize that their conservative bent may lead to under- performance in strong markets, but they explicitly prefer that to a more aggressive posture with its attendant risks. This is probably the most important real-world consideration under the heading of risk attitudes. Not everyone can live happily with the performance lags that conservatism can bring, but this board has had the opportunity to see that in action during the last two bullish years, and it seems to be sticking to the plot. The board members accept that risk isn’t something to be avoided. They’re not looking for the illusive black box that others say will give them return without risk. And they understand that caution limits return potential – and that the staff shouldn’t be criticized for the presence of underperformers when the board says it wants diversification.

Bahl serves as an independent director on the board of Piramal Enterprises — the conglomerate led by Ajay Piramal — and is also a mentor at The Foundery, a venture by Nikhil Kamath and Kishore Biyani that supports early-stage founders, indicating how his post-Snapdeal identity bridges India's traditional promoters and new-age tech founders.

Sir John Templeton, who founded the eponymous investment management group, once said, ‘The four most dangerous words in investing are: This time it’s different’. He was pointing out that there are always people who are willing to rationalise outbursts of investment mania but they are always proven wrong when the bubble bursts and investment fundamentals reassert themselves. We have seen this before, not only in the Dotcom boom and bust, but in other examples such as the Japanese market in the late 1980s. Then we were told that the PE of over 50 on the Nikkei Index was OK because Japanese accounting was conservative. In fact the market was just over-valued. After the subsequent fall in the Nikkei it took until 2024 for the index to regain the peak it attained in 1989. When companies and/or investors are encouraged by soaring share prices and valuations to believe that capital is almost free, some disastrous investment decisions follow. They seem to act as though the cost of the capital that companies are investing is to some degree the reciprocal of their PE ratio. So, a PE of 50 equates to a cost of capital of 2% (100÷50). This is utter nonsense. The cost of equity does not vary inversely with the valuation and is perhaps best estimated by the cost of so-called risk-free capital, being the yield on long-dated government bonds plus what is called an equity risk premium.

Decision — Launched Cassandra Unchained; AI-bubble thesis (circular financing, depreciation critique). Context: $400/yr paid tier; “Trading Post” series active through Aug 2026. Outcome (partial): Ongoing — outcome open.

In August 2020, Swiggy launched Instamart, an instant-grocery service built on a network of dark stores; by early 2021 the company had closed Swiggy Stores and consolidated its non-food operations under the Instamart brand — a clean strategic decision to kill a struggling vertical and double down on quick commerce.

The session foregrounds the consumer-pain-point-to-brand formula — success flows from identifying genuine market needs rather than inventing categories in search of demand. That thesis reframes Mamaearth not as a marketing-led brand but as a problem-led brand that built marketing on top of an existing consumer pain.

Philanthropy listed by Wikipedia includes a May 2019 proposal, in partnership with Naum Koen, to supply Ukraine with 100,000 doses of measles vaccine for free vaccination during a measles outbreak. In April 2026 Poonawalla acquired Raja Ravi Varma's iconic painting 'Yashoda and Krishna' for a record Rs 167.20 crore at Saffronart's Spring Live Auction in Mumbai —.

In 2015, Kamath set up Rainmatter as a fintech fund and incubator backing startups in financial services, using Zerodha's own balance sheet to seed founders aligned with the broader goal of widening India's capital markets.

Beyond Infosys, Murthy has served as an independent director on HSBC's board and on the boards of DBS Bank, Unilever, ICICI and NDTV. He has advised institutions including Cornell, INSEAD, the Ford Foundation and the Rhodes Trust, signaling his post-executive pivot to global governance and education advisory roles.

A leader who deeply shaped him, Murthy said, was Mahatma Gandhi — not for ideology but for leading by example. Murthy internalised that the most effective way to instill values is to walk the talk, so rather than lecture employees about punctuality or process, he simply did what he expected of them.

Under Nilekani, UIDAI built Aadhaar, a biometric ID system with demographic and address data. By April 2017 about 1.14 billion Indian residents had been issued a number; World Bank chief economist Paul Romer called it the most sophisticated ID programme in the world in 2016, though privacy and data-protection critics have dogged the project throughout.

He stressed that the DPI stack was designed to work with or without phone access — inclusion was a core principle, not an afterthought. Open architecture meant any payment app could talk to any other, and Nilekani credits this regulatory-design choice, not technology alone, for UPI's interoperability.

In 1998 Ramesh Chauhan sold Delhi Bottling Company and Coolaid — the bottling companies for the five carbonated drink brands — to Coca-Cola, completing a multi-stage exit from the soft drinks business he had built in the 1970s.

Premji set up PremjiInvest as his family office in 2006, formalising the investment vehicle through which the family deploys capital beyond Wipro. The office has since become one of India's most active family-office investors in venture and public markets, anchoring Premji's reputation as a serious allocator, not just an operator.

Premji is the chancellor of Azim Premji University in Bangalore, an institution founded in 2010 that offers programs in education and related human-development domains. The university is the academic-institutional arm of his education thesis, training the practitioners his foundation deploys in the field.

After seeking advice from Narayana Murthy of Infosys, Mazumdar-Shaw took Biocon public in 2004 — the first Indian biotechnology company to issue an IPO. The offering was oversubscribed 33 times and closed its first trading day at a market value of $1.11 billion, making Biocon only the second Indian firm to cross the $1-billion mark on Day One. Her stated reason for listing was to fund the research pipeline rather than to cash out.

By publicly posting a year of decline rather than dressing it up, Kamath models the under-promise-over-deliver posture he advocates for listed companies — a case of a founder running a private firm with the disclosure discipline of a public one.

Together Fund, the VC firm he co-founded with Manav Garg of Eka Software, launched in 2021 with an $85 million corpus focused on early-stage software startups built in India or by Indian founders; a second fund of $150 million was announced in July 2023, with 31 investments made and a plan to back 19–20 AI startups from the second vehicle.

Through the Shiv Nadar Foundation, established in 1994, Nadar has channelled more than a billion dollars into education-related philanthropy, founding SSN College of Engineering in Chennai, the Shiv Nadar University, and the VidyaGyan schools for rural students in Uttar Pradesh — a transfer of capital from the for-profit engine to institution-building that he has framed as his most durable legacy.

At the depths of the Panic of 1893, around 1895, the United States Treasury nearly depleted its gold reserves, Morgan's biography records. Morgan proposed that the federal government purchase gold from his own and allied European banks; when Washington declined in favor of public bond sales, he demanded a meeting with President Grover Cleveland, warning that the government could default that same day absent action. Morgan then reached for an old Civil War statute under which he and the Rothschilds sold 3.5 million ounces of gold straight to the Treasury for a thirty-year bond issue. The Treasury was saved, but Cleveland's standing with the populist agrarian wing of his party was ruined, ending his political career. Bankers faced William Jennings Bryan's withering attacks in the 1896 election, and Morgan donated heavily, like many of his peers, to the Republican William McKinley.

Forbes notes that since 2020 Nadar has served as chairman emeritus and strategic advisor to HCLTech, with operational control transferred to professional management — a governance posture that distinguishes HCL from peers whose founders remained hands-on executives into their seventies.

Kohli served as president and chairman of NASSCOM between 1995 and 1996, using that role and later positions on its executive committee to shape global partnerships and showcase the India-delivered IT-services opportunity — a critical bit of institutional advocacy at the moment Indian IT was scaling into a global export industry.

As of the September 2025 reporting, Wanda's debt and liquidity difficulties remained unresolved despite asset sales and debt renegotiation; the Straits Times separately reported Wang's paper wealth loss at approximately $43 billion from its peak.

I found this discussion realistic and constructive. Setting Objectives The starting point for the consultant’s discussion of objectives was the ranking provided by the board members: 1. Determine the correct asset allocation. 2. Hire managers that outperform. 3. Beat the assumed rate of return. 4. Increase risk at the right time. 5. Outperform peers. I was very impressed to see that the members ranked beating peers last among the plan’s possible objectives. And they strongly disagreed with the idea that it’s okay to lose money when others do as long as you do well when others do. When I heard this, I wrote down that we have to be careful when we think of investing as being like golf, in which it matters little what your score is – just whether it’s better than your opponent’s. Although it’s common practice in the investment world to assess short-term investment performance in terms of how you’ve done relative to your peers and your benchmarks, in the long run (more on this later), the success of an entity like a pension plan isn’t reckoned in terms of whether it did better than others. Success for a defined benefit pension plan means being able to pay benefits and minimize the cost to the plan sponsor. Period. If a plan is unable to pay promised benefits, it’s scant comfort that peer plans can’t either.

It is not a bad starting point when trying to estimate a cost of equity capital to look at the long-term return on equities as it is in effect an opportunity cost: what return should an investor expect from equity investment over the long term? That is what they should demand as a cost of supplying equity by owning shares — the cost of equity capital. US equities have averaged a return of about 9% p.a. over the past century. It certainly isn’t 2%. If companies or investors start making decisions which deviate much from that assumption based upon soaring share valuations the outcome will be disastrous. In 2000 Vodafone, the UK based mobile phone operator which was one of the leaders in the Dotcom boom, bid for Mannesmann, the German mobile operator. At the time Vodafone was on a PE of 54 and Mannesmann was on a PE of 56. That points to another fallacy — managements often justify what they are paying for assets in booms and bubbles by the fact that they are paying by issuing over-valued or highly-valued shares. Hang on a minute, what does that imply for investors? We can see the results insofar as Vodafone’s shares peaked at a value of 570p in 2000 when it bid for Mannesmann and they are now trading at 99p. When value is destroyed by bad capital investment decisions there is always a reckoning.

Mazumdar-Shaw's 'affordable innovation' philosophy is framed by Wikipedia as her driving strategy. When the lovastatin patent expired in 2001, Biocon moved aggressively into statins and expanded to a portfolio of cholesterol-lowering drugs, signing long-term supply contracts to lock in a market base. Statins eventually generated over 50% of company revenue, taking Biocon from Rs 70 crore in 1998 to Rs 500 crore by the 2004 IPO year —.

It’s the job of the board and staff to consider likely macro environments, establish an investment approach and strategy, and choose tactics and managers to create a portfolio that maximizes the probability of success over a reasonable range of possible scenarios. There’s not a word there about doing it better than others. If an unforeseeable macro environment unfolds in a way that renders the plan unable to pay benefits, that failure, even if an understandable one and shared by others, is still a failure.

Rural farmers can now use Aadhaar and the broader DPI stack to access loans, then accept payment via UPI — an end-to-end economic flow built on top of identity plus payments plus credential storage, what Nilekani describes as paths for growth that did not exist before DPI.

Bisleri re-entered carbonated drinks in 2016 with Bisleri Pop — four soft-drink variants including Limonata, Fonzo, Spyci and Pina Colada — exploiting the expiry of the 2008 non-compete clause that had kept Parle out of carbonates since the Coca-Cola sale. The re-entry illustrates how a non-compete's expiry can reopen a category for an incumbent brand, and how Chauhan used Bisleri's water-distribution moat as a launchpad for adjacent beverages.

Kohli played an important role in Indian technical education, helping IIT Kanpur's founding director P. K. Kelkar with faculty selection in 1959 and chairing the Board of Governors of the College of Engineering, Pune — pushing it to autonomous status, an early example of the founder-as-institution-builder pattern that would recur across Indian IT.

In 2022 Swiggy acquired the dining and table-reservation platform Dineout from Times Internet in an all-stock deal valued at $120 million, and in 2023 sold its Swiggy Access kitchen network to Kitchens@ in a share-swap — a portfolio rebalancing that moved the firm out of asset-heavy kitchens and into consumer-facing discovery.

TIME highlighted Premji's Gandhian framing of wealth: he holds it in trusteeship rather than as owner, and the foundation's scale, field presence and policy advocacy all flow from that framing. The conviction explains why he has chosen to give during his lifetime rather than via a bequest — control and accountability matter.

He founded the Azim Premji Foundation in 2001 to improve India's public school system in disadvantaged regions. The foundation is now the operational vehicle for nearly all his giving, deliberately structured as an operating organisation rather than a grant-making trust so it can deploy people on the ground in tandem with government.

Murthy says fairness is his god: in any transaction, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. He insisted on data-driven decisions, courtesy toward dissenters, and an environment where people could disagree without being disagreeable — a cultural norm he views as central to keeping bright people aligned.

The Forbes relational summary lists HCLTech as the primary company stake Nadar holds, with his daughter Roshni now holding the controlling stake transferred in 2025 — a clean holding-company diagram of the family's listed and unlisted interests.

He also co-founded True Beacon, an investment management firm, with his brother Nikhil — extending the family-partnership model into asset management and reinforcing how the brothers have treated personal capital, trading acumen and product-building as parts of one continuous portfolio.

Ghazal's masterclass positions the Mamaearth playbook — purpose-driven brand building, digital-first distribution, data-led iteration, community feedback loops — as transferable rather than company-specific. The implicit argument: the framework can be re-applied to other D2C categories, which is also the strategic premise of Honasa's house-of-brands expansion.

Late in 2023, Murthy sparked a national controversy by suggesting Indian youth should work seventy hours a week to lift national productivity, explicitly rejecting work-life balance. He refused to retract the comment and a year later pushed the Chinese 996 schedule as a model, drawing pushback given its known health costs and 2021 prohibition by the Chinese Supreme Court.

Nilekani also played a key role in creating the Unified Payments Interface, the real-time digital-payments rail that has reshaped Indian retail transactions. He chaired the committee that framed the digital-payments architecture after demonetisation, and has repeatedly invoked UPI as a template for what he calls the next great Indian infrastructure wave — likely in energy.

In 1900 Nikola Tesla persuaded Morgan that a trans-Atlantic wireless communication system, built on his theories of electrical conduction through the earth and atmosphere, would outperform the short-range radio apparatus Guglielmo Marconi was then demonstrating, his biography records. In what may have been a philanthropic investment, Morgan gave Tesla one hundred fifty thousand dollars, and Tesla offered him fifty-one percent control of the resulting patents. The letter of agreement was scarcely signed before Tesla resolved to enlarge the facility, eventually sited at Wardenclyffe, to incorporate terrestrial wireless power transmission, which he believed would sharpen the system's competitiveness. Morgan refused to give any further money toward the project, and with Tesla unable to secure other capital, development stalled and the site was abandoned by 1906. The episode displays the classic Morgan pattern: full backing for a founder's defined thesis, and none at all for a scope change.

Forbes estimated Nadar's net worth at about US$34.1 billion as of March 2025, ranking him among India's richest individuals; his philanthropic giving in FY25 reportedly ran to roughly INR 2,708 crore via the Foundation, among the largest annual donations by any Indian.

He champions what he calls 'Indicorns' — profitable, sustainable Indian companies — over massive, loss-making unicorns, an explicit reframing of the success metric away from headline valuation and toward durable unit economics, a position shaped directly by Snapdeal's own experience of being valued at $6.5 billion and then collapsing.

The post's tone is reflective rather than defensive: he closes with the Chinese curse about living in interesting times, signalling that the firm intends to treat the regulatory shift as a permanent new environment to operate in, not a transient shock to be waited out.

Mathrubootham frames his post-Freshworks mission as advancing India's ambition to become a 'product nation', explicitly positioning Together Fund and his mentorship of AI startups as a national-strategy lever rather than a personal investing sideline — a reframing that ties his next chapter to a broader Indian SaaS thesis.

The Northern Pacific Railway went bankrupt in the Panic of 1893, a bankruptcy that wiped out bondholders and left the property free of debt, and a complex financial battle for its control followed, Morgan's biography records. In 1901 Morgan, the New York financier E. H. Harriman, and Minnesota railroad builder James J. Hill reached a compromise. They formed the Northern Securities Company to combine three of the Midwest's most important railways under one holding company: the Northern Pacific, the Great Northern, and the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy. Unexpected opposition came from President Theodore Roosevelt, who judged the combination harmful to consumers and a breach of the seldom-enforced Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890; in 1902 he directed Attorney General Philander Knox to sue for its breakup. The Supreme Court dissolved the Northern Securities Company in 1904. Morgan did not lose money in the episode, but his all-powerful political reputation suffered.

Her emphasis on resilience as a non-negotiable founder trait echoes themes from her other public commentary — progress as 'everyday effort,' the non-linear nature of results, and the importance of consistency through periods where outcomes lag inputs. This resilience framing positions Ghazal as a philosophical founder rather than a pure operator.

In 1996 Nadar founded SSN College of Engineering in Chennai in his father's name and gifted roughly INR 1 million of HCL shares to the institution, an early instance of transferring promoter equity into a philanthropic trust — a model he would later scale dramatically.

Wikipedia notes Bisleri holds about a 32% market share in the organized bottled water segment, competing with PepsiCo's Aquafina, The Coca-Cola Company's Kinley, Parle Agro's Bailley and IRCTC's Rail Neer. Bisleri is often used as a generic term for bottled water in India, and knockoff brands with similar spelling and branding (Belsri, Bislleri, Bilseri) have emerged —.

Murthy's daughter Akshata is married to Rishi Sunak, who served as UK Prime Minister from 2022 to 2024. The family tie has placed the Infosys founding family at the intersection of Indian business and British politics, occasionally surfacing in media scrutiny of Akshata's tax arrangements and Infosys's Russia exposure during the Ukraine war.

© 2025 Oaktree Capital Management, L.P. All Rights Reserved Follow us: Finally, I think it’s important to note that if, on the other hand, the plan does end up with enough money to pay benefits, that doesn’t necessarily mean its board and staff did a good job. Before coming to that conclusion, one would need to gauge how the portfolio would have done if a different environment had unfolded – that is, to consider “alternative histories” in the way proposed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in Fooled by Randomness. If the portfolio wouldn’t have done well under other scenarios, the plan’s ability to pay benefits might be attributed solely to the fact that the one that unfolded did so. In that case, the plan’s success might be more a matter of luck than skill. But this isn’t an easy analysis to perform. On the Subject of Volatility I was very glad to hear that the board members ranked the Sharpe ratio last among six possible performance metrics and on average considered avoiding volatility in the sponsor’s contributions less of a priority than the ability to pay benefits or attain fully funded status. Most of the members thought it was important to balance stable contributions and the pursuit of high returns, although some did rank contribution stability higher than the level of return. Obviously, this is a challenging question for a board concerned with both the need to pay benefits and the desire to limit the cost to the sponsor.

Perhaps the executives running some of the leading AI companies have a clear view of the future and can foresee that AI will produce not just a transformation in our lives and the way we work but also incremental cash flows such that the returns on the humongous amounts of capital they are investing will be adequate or better than adequate. But if not, we can expect Sir John Templeton’s adage to be proven to be right once again, albeit maybe after a longer period and larger scale of irrational exuberance than we have seen in the past, driven by the momentum of index investing. However, even if we are right in diagnosing this move to index funds as one of the causes of our recent underperformance and it is laying the foundations of a major investment disaster, I have no clue how or when it will end except to say badly. With sincere respect to the late Sir John Templeton whom I quoted earlier, I think this time it may be different. Not in the sense that the Magnificent Seven/AI boom is different but rather in the scale it may attain and how long it may persist. When we had the Dotcom boom the proportion of AUM which was in index funds was under 10%. The dominance of index funds now makes the rise of these large stocks a self-fulfilling prophecy. 3. Dollar weakness Just to add to the headwinds, the US dollar fell against the pound from about $1.25/GBP at the start of the year to $1.35 at year end: USD vs GBP Exchange Rate Source: Bloomberg

Nikhil Kamath, the younger brother, runs financial planning at Zerodha and is described internally as an astute and experienced investor; his trading skill was what originally pushed the two to formalise the brokerage rather than continue trading only their own book.

The giving pace escalated over a decade: in December 2010 Premji transferred 8.7% of Wipro (about two billion dollars then) to the foundation; in February 2013 an additional 12%; in July 2015 another 18%, taking his total contribution to 39%; and in March 2019 an additional 34%, taking the cumulative endowment to about twenty-one billion dollars and making him India's top philanthropist.

In March 2014 Nilekani joined the Indian National Congress and contested Bangalore South in the Lok Sabha election, losing to BJP incumbent Ananth Kumar by roughly 228,575 votes. His affidavit declared assets of about Rs 7,710 crore, making him the richest candidate in that election cycle.

The primary task of a leader, in Murthy's framework, is to be a transformation agent who sets a noble vision, breaks it into subgoals, and ensures each is winnable so that people rally. He explicitly invoked Infosys's byline — Powered by intellect, driven by values — to argue that no professional succeeds without learnability and values together.

Wikipedia describes Biocon as Asia's largest insulin producer and credits the company with pioneering a Pichia-derived recombinant human insulin now sold in over 40 countries. Major research areas today include cancer, diabetes and auto-immune conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis and psoriasis. Biocon directed roughly 10% of revenue into R&D as of 2014 — a higher proportion than most Indian pharmaceutical peers —.

Kohli was on the board of directors of IEEE between 1973 and 1974 and chaired the India Council; he was also president of the Computer Society of India and chaired the 1976 Southeast Asia Regional Computer Conference in Singapore — a portfolio of professional-society roles through which he championed Indian computing on the international stage.

Forbes headlines Nadar's giving as one of India's top philanthropic trajectories — the 2010 sale of HCL shares to fund the Foundation prefigured a decade-plus pattern of treating promoter equity as a renewable source of philanthropic capital.

Ahead of the IPO, Swiggy laid off 400 employees or about 6% of its workforce in January 2024, then converted to a public limited company in April 2024 and confidentially filed for an IPO — a sequence that bundled cost discipline with listing preparation, a pattern now standard among Indian consumer-tech listings.

Backing the identity and payments layers is an MEITY initiative that securely stores credentials — driver's licences, vaccination records, academic certificates — in the cloud. More than half a billion people use it, holding around nine billion documents, an astonishing density of verified personal data at population scale.

Assembling the right team, Murthy argues, means finding people with mutually exclusive but collectively exhaustive competencies who share the same value system. The founder's job is then to be the safety net in each person's weak spots, rather than to micromanage their strengths.

During COVID-19, the Azim Premji Foundation, Wipro and Wipro Enterprises together committed Rs 1,125 crore (about one hundred and forty million dollars) in April 2020 to relief, and a further Rs 1,000 crore in June 2021 to support universal vaccination — among the largest single philanthropic commitments by any Indian business family during the pandemic.

He was appointed non-executive chairman of Infosys on 24 August 2017 in the wake of Vishal Sikka's exit. On return he moved the centre of power back from California to Bangalore and oversaw the resignation of several Sikka-era directors including Jeffrey Lehman and John Etchemendy, re-stabilising founder control over the board.

Mazumdar-Shaw dislikes the word 'philanthropy', preferring 'compassionate capitalist' — the view that properly applied business models can produce sustainable social progress. In 2015 she joined The Giving Pledge, committing at least half her wealth to philanthropy.

Talks to buy out Andrew Carnegie's steel business and fold it together with other steel, coal, mining, and shipping firms began in 1900, his biography records. After financing the creation of the Federal Steel Company, he merged it with Carnegie Steel and several other steel and iron businesses in 1901, forming the United States Steel Corporation, the world's first billion-dollar company, with an authorized capitalization of 1.4 billion dollars, larger than any other industrial firm and comparable in size to the largest railroads. Its goals were economies of scale, reduced transportation and resource costs, expanded product lines, and improved distribution to compete globally with Britain and Germany. President Charles M. Schwab and others claimed the company's size would make it more aggressive in distant international markets, while critics regarded it as a monopoly seeking to dominate bridges, ships, railroad cars, rails, wire, and nails. With U.S. Steel, Morgan captured roughly two-thirds of the steel market, and Schwab was confident the company would soon hold seventy-five percent.

In 2017, years after stepping back from executive duties, Murthy publicly raised concerns about alleged governance lapses at Infosys under then-CEO Vishal Sikka. The episode culminated in Sikka's departure and Murthy's renewed influence over the board, underscoring the founder's ongoing grip even from an emeritus title.

The 'university masterclass' format itself is notable: by sharing the Mamaearth playbook with student audiences at institutions like Masters' Union, Ghazal has explicitly positioned herself as a teacher of the next founder cohort, extending her influence from operator and investor to educator — a role expansion that complements her Shark Tank visibility.

Through the VidyaGyan schools initiative, launched via the SSN Trust in 2008, Nadar targeted rural talent from Uttar Pradesh's poorest districts, offering free scholarships and boarding education — explicitly a leadership-pipeline bet rather than a charitable school programme.

Swiggy launched its IPO in November 2024 at ₹390 per share, valuing the company at $11.3 billion — a relative discount to its 2022 private mark given the intervening two years, and a public-market test of the founders' hyperlocal and quick-commerce thesis.

A 2011 Forbes feature on Nadar's VidyaGyan schools framed his education philanthropy as a multi-generational leadership pipeline — taking the brightest children from India's poorest villages and placing them in boarding schools — rather than a short-cycle charity programme.

After retirement, Kohli remained engaged with technology advocacy — driving efforts in adult literacy, water purification and regional language computing, and advising TCS — explicitly framing his post-CEO decades as the time to deploy computing for India's social problems rather than for export revenue alone.

I doubt this reflects relative strength of the UK economy or satisfaction with government policy. The Trump administration is obviously keen to see interest rates lower and to reduce the trade deficit. Neither of these aims is compatible with a strong dollar. Dollar weakness can also be seen in the price of gold which is at a 50 year high of $4319 per ounce. There is lots of speculation about the reasons for the strength of the gold price but to some extent I view it as an expression of weakness in the currency in which gold is priced. This affects the GBP value of our Fund since the majority of the companies are listed in the United States and more importantly that is their biggest single source of revenue. I hope that all of this may go some way towards explaining what we have been facing in terms of competition from index funds and the performance of large tech companies in particular in recent years with the added handicap of dollar weakness. These events have convinced me that Tommy Docherty was an optimist. In the week when he was fired as manager of Manchester United and his wife filed for divorce he said, ‘In life when one door closes, another slams in your face’. I think I know how he felt. Perhaps a more pertinent question is what are we going to do about it? We could: 1. Start buying stocks in all the large companies which dominate the indices, and/or 2. Become momentum investors who buy shares which are performing strongly irrespective of their fundamental merits.

Kamath sits on the SEBI Secondary Market Advisory Committee and the Market Data Advisory Committee, positions that put a bootstrapped founder inside the regulatory conversation around Indian markets and signal the firm's standing with the supervisor despite its unconventional funding path.

In future memos, I’m likely to harp on my view that investors pay too much attention to volatility. It’s absolutely essential for investors to think about limiting their risk, but I don’t think volatility is the risk they should be most concerned with. Regardless, much of the investing community has accepted volatility as the best indicator of risk – primarily, I think, because it’s the only way to come up with a number for risk – and that has led to excessive attention being paid to it. I’ll make a controversial statement here: in pure investment terms, there’s no intrinsic reason for long-term investors to be concerned with volatility (as distinguished from the risk of permanent loss). Warren Buffett famously says he’d “rather earn a lumpy 15% return than a smooth 12%.” Why wouldn’t everyone? In my opinion, the main reasons for concern over fluctuating market prices are situational, institutional, political, career-related, psychological, and emotional. I call these things “externalities,” and because they’re external to the investment process, a potentially volatile investment can be risky for some investors and not for others.

As co-chair of the G20 taskforce on Digital Public Infrastructure, Nilekani is pushing the DPI concept globally. Estonia and Nigeria have already adopted real-time payment systems and digital IDs on the model; he hopes to build a global coalition around the idea to help countries leapfrog development trajectories in a resource-scarce world.

In 2013 Premji became the first Indian to sign the Giving Pledge, the Buffett-Gates-led campaign encouraging the wealthy to give most of their wealth to philanthropic causes. He was only the third non-American after Richard Branson and David Sainsbury to join, signalling that Indian business wealth was beginning to plug into a global philanthropic infrastructure.

Kohli was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 2002 for his contribution to the Indian software industry, and received honorary doctorates from institutions including Shiv Nadar University, the University of Waterloo, IIT Bombay, IIT Kanpur and Queen's University — recognition from the very engineering ecosystems he had helped nurture.

Murthy recounted a 1991 episode when Infosys had just 150 employees: he held the firm's first innovation conference, and days later the janitor in charge of hotel arrangements suggested a process improvement that saved the company money. He uses this to argue that innovation must be demystified and pushed down to every department, every day.

Nadar joined the executive board of the Indian School of Business in 2005 and chaired the board of governors of IIT Kharagpur until 2014, using those positions to push a research-and-curriculum agenda that mirrored the engineering-and-R&D emphasis inside HCL itself.

The shareholder mix disclosed by Wikipedia shows SoftBank holding 7.6% and Majety 4.9% — a structure where the largest single shareholder is a financial investor rather than a promoter, which the founders explicitly framed as a 'professionally managed' company posture ahead of the listing.

Nilekani has served as president of NCAER and on ICRIER's board of governors, and sits on advisory boards of the World Economic Forum Foundation and the Bombay Heritage Fund — keeping one foot in policy research even during his corporate years. He also chairs EkStep Foundation, a non-profit focused on literacy and numeracy for millions of children via a tech platform.

We are not going to do either. If you want an index fund you can buy one with much lower costs than we or any other active investment manager apply. Nor are we momentum investors and there are better exponents of this investment strategy than us. I would just offer one note of caution if you are thinking of taking this approach. Good momentum investors in my experience buy shares which are going up and sell them when they start going down. They do not convince themselves, for example, that because they have bought Nvidia shares when they are going up, they know what is going to happen with AI or GPUs.

In 1902 J.P. Morgan and Co. financed the creation of the International Mercantile Marine Company, an Atlantic shipping trust that swallowed several major American and British lines in a bid to monopolize the carrying trade, his biography records. Morgan's design was mastery of transatlantic shipping through interlocking directorates and railroad contracts, an ambition defeated by the unscheduled nature of sea transport, American antitrust law, and an agreement with the British government. He had reserved a luxury suite with private promenade deck aboard the RMS Titanic, property of the trust's White Star Line subsidiary, and planned to sail on the ill-fated maiden voyage before changing those plans. The famous sinking became a financial disaster for the combine: its financial records show over-leveraging and inadequate cash flow, which drove a default on bond interest payments. Morgan purportedly responded that monetary losses amounted to nothing in life, and that it was the loss of life that counted.

He flagged DPI Climate as a new frontier — including a digital energy grid that would let homes with solar panels and batteries sell surplus power back to the grid. Nilekani calls energy the next UPI, signalling his ambition to extend the same open-architecture, interoperable thinking into electricity markets.

For example: • An AI stock can be a risky holding for the manager of a mutual fund that’s priced daily and subject to daily withdrawals – or for an investor who’s likely to panic during a market crash and sell at the bottom – but much less so for a sovereign wealth fund where the money is unlikely to be withdrawn and there’s no requirement to publish financials and satisfy public opinion. • An investor whose compensation is based on metrics that penalize volatility may consider a publicly traded bond riskier than a private loan from the same issuer that doesn’t mark to market, even though the risk of default is the same for both. If it’s true that an asset’s volatility can bring risk for some investors but not others, then clearly the risk doesn’t lie in the investment, but in something in the investor’s environment. While I think the risk of permanent loss is the most important investment risk, I recognize that volatility can be a material real-world risk for some investors. My experience with the pension fund session reminded me that rapidly fluctuating portfolio values can require fluctuating contributions from pension plan sponsors.legitimate

Murthy has been decorated with the Padma Shri in 2000, the Padma Vibhushan in 2008, France's Legion of Honour in 2008, and an honorary CBE from the UK in 2007. The award arc tracks Infosys's own trajectory from a small Bangalore startup to a globally recognised Indian multinational.

In 2009 Mazumdar-Shaw established the 1,400-bed Mazumdar-Shaw Medical Foundation cancer care center at Narayana Health City in Bangalore, adding a center for advanced therapeutics with a bone marrow transplant unit in 2011. The initiative was motivated by the cancer deaths of her best friend, husband John Shaw and her mother — a personal stake that turned Biocon's commercial oncology pipeline into a tangible hospital and research footprint.

The proposed 2025 merger of SSN College of Engineering with Shiv Nadar University consolidated Nadar's education philanthropy under a single institutional roof, mirroring the holding-company logic that had organised his commercial interests at HCL Enterprise.

We won’t be buying shares in companies simply because they are large and dominate the index weightings and performance unless we become convinced that they are good businesses of the sort we wish to own which have long term relatively predictable sources of growth and more than adequate returns on the capital they invest. Whilst we are going to stick to our investment strategy we will of course seek to do it better. We are fans of many of the late Charlie Munger’s pronouncements but the one which best applies here is ‘Any year that you don't destroy one of your best-loved ideas is probably a wasted year.’ More to follow. Looking at individual stock contribution to performance in 2025 as usual I prefer to start with the problems. The bottom five detractors from the Fund’s performance in 2025 were: Stock Attribution Novo Nordisk -2.0% Greggs -1.7% Church & Dwight -1.5% Zoetis -1.2% Procter & Gamble -1.0% Source: State Street Novo Nordisk managed to reaffirm my belief that you should never say ‘Things can’t get any worse’. The company has parlayed a market leading position in what is probably the most exciting drug development for about three decades into a secondary position and has failed to prevent illegal generic competition in its core US market. One of our mantras has been that we should always invest in businesses which could be run by an idiot so that performance is not heavily reliant upon management.

© 2025 Oaktree Capital Management, L.P. All Rights Reserved Follow us: consideration for people with responsibility for pension plans. It’s absolutely internal to them and their process. And, of course, pension funds are but one example of the type of investor who may consider volatility a risk. University endowments are another example. Typically, universities rely upon an annual “draw” from the endowment to fund a material portion of their operating expenses. Volatility in the value of the endowment can affect the amount of that draw and require unplanned changes to a university’s operations. We saw this very clearly when the Global Financial Crisis hit in 2008. Choice of Investment Approach The consultant did a good job of covering questions regarding strategies and tactics, and the board gave good answers. Here are a few of the areas they touched on: • All board members agreed that it’s impossible to foresee the future, and thus that the portfolio should be built to prepare for “all environments” rather than base performance expectations on the ability to time markets. Of course this is the right attitude, even though it’s impossible to (a) specify “all environments” or (b) build a portfolio that entails the risk inherent in investing but is capable of performing well in all environments. • A substantial majority of the members said they’re comfortable with using leverage at 15-20% of the plan’s assets. I think this is reasonable.

During the Panic of 1907, with major New York banks on the verge of bankruptcy and no mechanism in existence to rescue them, Morgan stepped in to help resolve the crisis, his biography records. Treasury Secretary George B. Cortelyou earmarked thirty-five million dollars of federal money for deposit in New York banks, and Morgan summoned the nation's leading financiers to his New York mansion, compelling them to work out a rescue plan, with James Stillman, president of the National City Bank, at the center of the effort. A team of bank and trust executives that Morgan organized shifted money from bank to bank, opened further international lines of credit, and purchased the plummeting shares of healthy corporations. When the brokerage Moore and Schley, deeply invested in the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company, threatened a larger collapse, Morgan proposed merging TCI into U.S. Steel; President Roosevelt promised legal immunity, U.S. Steel paid thirty million dollars for the stock, and by November 7, 1907, the panic was over.

Mazumdar-Shaw became the first woman to head the board of governors of IIM Bangalore in February 2014, sits as an independent director on Infosys's board, and was named EY World Entrepreneur Of The Year 2020. Wikipedia notes that as of 2025 she is India's 93rd-wealthiest person with a net worth near $3.42 billion — a long way from the Rs 10,000 she started Biocon with.

Kohli died of a heart attack on 26 November 2020 at the age of 96, leaving a TCS that had become the largest Indian IT services company by market capitalisation and the most valuable company within the Tata group — a $190 billion industry footprint the Wikipedia article credits him with having personally midwifed.

Premji has been honoured with the Padma Bhushan in 2005 and the Padma Vibhushan in 2011, France's Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur in 2018, EY's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2018, and an honorary doctorate from Wesleyan University in 2009 — a recognition arc that mirrors the rise of Wipro itself from a single-product family firm to a global IT services powerhouse.

His first venture, Softronics, closed around 1976 because India simply had no software market at the time — few computers existed and the government refused to outsource. The failure taught him that demand-side conditions mattered as much as engineering talent, a lesson he carried into the timing of the Infosys launch five years later.

Murthy told McKinsey that Indians, conditioned culturally not to speak unless elders ask, tend to be passive observers. Infosys's management had to consciously build an environment that overcame this apathy by giving employees ownership and tying their work to the betterment of the company, so that proactivity became a structural habit rather than an exception.

Summing up, Nilekani told Stanford that the only way to change society is to think at scale, in a thoughtful, inclusive, interoperable way — making everyone participate and driving change through community rather than decree. The DPI playbook is, in his words, ready to be taken to the world.

In mid-2026 the Government of India constituted a high-powered task force headed by Nilekani to recommend making the country's examination system leak-proof and technology-driven — extending his DPI playbook into education assessment, another large-scale public-sector reform brief handed to him directly by Prime Minister Modi.

He is the author of Imagining India, co-author with Viral Shah of Rebooting India: Realizing a Billion Aspirations, and co-author with Tanuj Bhojwani of The Art of Bitfulness (2022), a tract on calm digital habits — a body of writing that anchors his reputation as a public intellectual rather than merely a technocrat.

From 2020 onwards Premji faced a series of lawsuits filed through the NGO India Awake for Transparency alleging illegal asset transfers; the Karnataka High Court dismissed them as frivolous and jailed two complainants for contempt, and the Supreme Court closed the remaining matters in March 2022 after the principal complainant apologised. The episode tested but ultimately vindicated his governance record.

In December 1912, though his health was failing, Morgan appeared before the Pujo Committee, the House Banking and Currency subcommittee, his biography records. Its final conclusion was that a few financial leaders wielded considerable control over many industries. Aggregate resources of 22.245 billion dollars stood under the control of the J.P. Morgan partners together with First National and National City directors, a sum Louis Brandeis likened to all the property in the twenty-two states west of the Mississippi. The statistic became the emblem of the money trust era. Conservatives had hailed Morgan for civic responsibility after the 1907 rescue, but critics attacked the terms of his 1895 gold loan to the Treasury, and writers including Upton Sinclair attacked his handling of the Panic of 1907 itself. The hearings coincided with, and by his associates' account accelerated, Morgan's final physical decline.

We have been made painfully aware that the range of businesses which can be run by an idiot is much more limited than we thought and hereafter we will aim to be more aware of the impact that poor management can have. Our experience also suggests that when we encounter poor management, engagement to change it is less effective than selling the shares. Meanwhile Novo Nordisk has appointed a new CEO and made wholesale board changes and the present rating (a PE of 13) appears to us to be expecting very little. If we did not already own it I suspect we would contemplate buying it as a good business which has been depressed by a ‘glitch’, albeit a rather large glitch. Greggs has suffered in the general malaise surrounding the UK hospitality sector. Although the shares look cheap to us on a PE of 11 with still growing units and sales, they have become cheaper whilst we held them.

A well-funded plan that’s sponsored by a financially strong employer and invested conservatively should be able to withstand the uncertainties associated with this level of leverage. While most public plans may not use leverage, I think it makes sense for this one. However, (a) it’s still essential to deal with the risk of the lender pulling the leverage at a bad time in the investment and capital markets and (b) paying interest to borrow makes it even more important that the plan not hold a lot of assets whose only merit is a highly dependable low return (or, in this case, a return below its borrowing cost). • A slimmer majority backed putting 25% of the portfolio into illiquid assets “assuming all benefit payments and foreseen funding requirements can be met.” However, a few thought a higher promised return isn’t a good reason for surrendering flexibility. Clearly, some part of a well- funded plan’s assets can reasonably be illiquid, but getting that percentage right is no simple matter. • Slightly more members were in favor of focusing exclusively on expected returns net of fees, while a few thought minimization of fees should be a goal in itself. This is a tough area. No one wants to pay high fees and not get above average performance. But when you sign up for a fund with stiff fees, the performance is hoped for while the fees are a sure thing. All you have to do is figure out which high-fee funds are likely to deliver and which aren’t. Not an easy task.

Church & Dwight, the consumer staples business, seems to be suffering from the fact that the mixed fortunes of different groups of consumers in the US economy, far from driving consumers towards its discount products, is instead impoverishing those consumers who naturally gravitate towards them. Zoetis is the leading maker of veterinary pharmaceuticals. We began buying after concerns had surfaced about side effects from its drug for pain in osteoarthritis in dogs. The shares have continued to be weak but we feel sure that the secular tailwinds from increased spending on pets’ medical care will support the business. Procter & Gamble was caught up in the general malaise surrounding consumer staples which have been adversely affected as the air has been sucked out of the room by the race to invest in AI. In an age in which analysts rely on spoon fed forecasts in the form of ‘guidance’ and there is limited liquidity as the NBER paper suggests, results which fall short of optimistic guidance can produce spectacularly bad share price movements. For the year, the top five contributors to the Fund’s performance were: Stock Attribution Alphabet +2.3% IDEXX +2.1% L’Oréal +0.9% Microsoft +0.6% Mettler-Toledo +0.4% Source: State Street Alphabet makes its third appearance.

© 2025 Oaktree Capital Management, L.P. All Rights Reserved Follow us: beating peers and popular indices like the S&P 500 were deemed relatively unimportant. I think they have their priorities right. When it was my turn to speak, I got more questions on how to assess the performance of the investment operation than anything else. This is one of the toughest questions in our business. I’ll summarize below what I said and add a lot that I should have said. It’s absolutely true that the thing that matters most is whether the plan achieves the rate of return the actuaries accurately project is necessary: that is, for today’s capital and the expected capital contributions to reach the sum needed to pay future benefits. So, if the plan’s actuarial assumption is 6¼%, what matters most is whether the board and staff can achieve that over the long term. But the board and staff have to assess whether the investment approach is working over much shorter periods and, in particular, they have to decide on raises, promotions, and personnel retention every year. The challenge in assessing performance in this regard stems from the fact that making 6¼% may be the only thing that matters in the long run but absolutely irrelevant in the short run. If the 60/40 balanced portfolio, the policy portfolio, or the peer average is up 20% next year, achieving 6¼% can’t be described as success. And if those relative benchmarks are down 20% next year, making 6¼% is probably an unreasonable criterion.

Morgan often had a tremendous physical effect on people; one contemporary said that after a Morgan visit he felt as though a gale had swept through the house, his biography records. He was physically large, with massive shoulders, piercing eyes, and a purple nose deformed by rhinophyma, a condition that can result from rosacea. Self-conscious about the deformity, he disliked publicity and hated being photographed without permission, and as a result all his professional portraits were retouched; the condition inspired the schoolyard taunt about Johnny Morgan's nasal organ and its purple hue. Surgeons could have shaved away the growth during his lifetime, but his son-in-law Herbert Satterlee speculated that he avoided the operation because the infantile seizures of his childhood left him afraid they would return. His social and professional self-confidence was too well established to be undermined by the affliction, which he seemed to dare people to face squarely, and he smoked dozens of large Havana cigars a day, dubbed Hercules' Clubs by observers.

In other words, achieving the actuarial assumption in any given year or even over a few years isn’t a useful standard for performance assessment over those periods. Ironically, the appropriate standard for performance measurement in the short or perhaps the intermediate term has to be a relative one, not absolute. In the short term, we have no choice other than to assess performance in light of what reasonably could have been accomplished in the environment that unfolded. The key question is “should we have done better?” and the best way to answer it is probably by looking at how others did who were similarly situated. So, again ironically, the right standard is likely, “how did our peers do?” After all, if they’re really our peers, they probably have similar goals, are subject to similar constraints, and were presented with a similar menu of potential investments as we were. For this reason, their performance may be the best short-term benchmark against which to measure ours. But this isn’t a perfect standard either. For example, if our portfolio goes up as much as our peers’ portfolios in a bubblish market, that may merely mean our portfolio was as imprudent as theirs. Similarly, if everyone else loses a lot in bad times, going down almost as much probably means we screwed up also, and that’s no reason for congratulations and raises.

Morgan was a wide-ranging collector of books, manuscripts, decorative arts, bronze statuettes, ivories, and clocks, with less interest in paintings than most collectors of his rank, his biography records. He turned seriously to collecting after his father's death in 1891, and as a so-called collector of collections built what ranked among the world's largest and most notable private holdings. A founding member of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he served as trustee from 1888 to 1913, became vice-president and then president of the museum in 1904, and directed its emphasis toward the pursuit of important, original works. After the passage of a favorable tariff bill, his collection was shipped from London to the United States and exhibited at the Metropolitan in 1913, filling the second floor of a new wing in 1914; his son Jack donated roughly forty percent of the total to the museum in 1917. Morgan also assembled America's most important gem collections with Tiffany's George Kunz and funded Edward Curtis's photography of American Indians.

IDEXX, the veterinary diagnostic equipment business, makes its fourth appearance having resurrected its position from being a detractor last year when it was suffering from the ebbing of the Covid era mania for pet adoption. L’Oréal appears for the second time and benefitted from the recovery in the China market and outperformed the beauty category in sales performance, as usual. Microsoft enters the top five contributors for the six time. Whilst we gratefully accept this performance we remain wary of the impact of the AI hype/boom.

Mettler Toledo has begun to bounce back for the effects of it its logistics problem in Europe and the downturn in China. We continue to apply a simple four step investment strategy: • Buy good companies • ESG screen • 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 Stewardship 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 Index. This also shows you how the portfolio has evolved over time. Year ended Fundsmith Stewardship Fund Portfolio S&P FTSE 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 2025 2025 2025 ROCE 29% 23% 28% 31% 34% 32% 30% 17% 17% Gross Margin 65% 61% 61% 61% 60% 60% 60% 45% 43% Operating Margin 26% 21% 25% 26% 29% 27% 26% 18% 17% Cash Conversion 99% 102% 97% 88% 93% 92% 94% 89% 99% Interest Cover 17x 16x 20x 19x 20x 24x 34x 9x 8x 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 Stewardship 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.

Morgan was a lifelong member of the Episcopal Church and by 1890 one of its most influential lay leaders, his biography records. A founding member of the Church Club of New York, he sat among the first laymen appointed to the committee behind the 1892 revision of the Book of Common Prayer, petitioning for a special limited collectible printing that he later financed. In 1910, impressed by Bishop Charles Brent's proposal for a world conference of churches, he contributed one hundred thousand dollars to finance the commission's work. His club life showed the same force of character: when his friend, Erie Railroad president John King, was blackballed by the Union Club, Morgan resigned, organized the Metropolitan Club of New York, donated land on Fifth Avenue that cost one hundred twenty-five thousand dollars, and instructed Stanford White to build a club fit for gentlemen and forget the expense, serving as its president from 1891 to 1900. He was also a benefactor of museums, hospitals, and trade schools.

But if we can beat our peers in bad times and do almost as well or better in good times, that may be the most solid reason for awarding high marks. Of course, we can use the policy portfolio for these assessments instead of peer performance, but then the people who set the policy portfolio are let off the hook. The policy portfolio is a possible standard for assessment, but what’s to say it’s a good one? If the policy portfolio excludes alternatives when they should have been considered for inclusion, as in the Penn endowment example above, you might beat the policy benchmark but fail to keep up with what the environment afforded. In the end, I think what this discussion proves isn’t that one standard for assessment is better than the others, but that there is no standard that’s free of deficiencies. And that leads to the question of the proper period for assessing performance. The trouble with using the actuarial assumption as the criterion is that, in the short run, too many factors are in play for performance versus the assumption to be a clear indicator of whether a portfolio was managed skillfully.or

© 2025 Oaktree Capital Management, L.P. All Rights Reserved Follow us: weak, and especially by whether the investors driving it were mindlessly optimistic or panicked. Further, the market’s performance might have been dictated by a single unforeseeable event. Is it reasonable to hold staff responsible for not having foreseen it? We all know a single year isn’t a reasonable basis for determining investment skill. But what should the period be? In asking this question, most people want to be given a number of years: perhaps three, five, eight, or ten. But the correct answer can’t be a fixed number. Given the large number of factors that influence performance, the assessment period has to be long enough for these things to even out, long enough for that one freak occurrence to dissipate, and long enough so that the performance of the portfolio in both bullish and bearish environments can be assessed. If performance is assessed over a period that includes only good times – like the last 16 years (save for a few relatively short dips) – the prize for performance is likely to go to those investors with the most risk- prone portfolios. In such an environment, keeping up with or surpassing the benchmarks may not be a sign of investment skill, but rather extreme risk tolerance.

2019 ratios are based on last reported fiscal year accounts as of 31st December and for 2020–25 are Trailing Twelve Months and as defined by Bloomberg. Cash Conversion compares Free Cash Flow per Share with Net Income per Share. In 2025 return on capital, gross margins and operating profit margins were all high and steady. 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 2025? The weighted median free cash flow (the cash the companies generate after paying for everything except the dividend, and our preferred measure) grew by 13%. From a fundamental perspective, which is what we seek to focus on, we are confident that our portfolio companies will continue to perform well over the business and market cycles.portfolio

In 1913, newspapers reported that Morgan had fallen into a long sinking spell marked by extreme weakness and nervousness, with a paralysis of the throat muscles preventing him from taking food, his biography records. He had been traveling abroad, and he died in his sleep on March 31, 1913, at the Grand Hotel Plaza in Rome, at seventy-five. His body came home aboard the French Line passenger ship SS France; Wall Street's flags hung at half-staff, and the stock market suspended trading for two hours as the coffin passed through New York City, an honor ordinarily reserved for heads of state, with the body lying the first night in his home and adjacent library. He was interred in Cedar Hill Cemetery in his birthplace of Hartford. His estate was worth 68.3 million dollars, of which about thirty million represented his share of the New York and Philadelphia banks, with the value of the art collection estimated at fifty million.

companies is as high as it has ever been and collectively they continue to grow free cash flow quicker than the historical average of the portfolio. The underlying business performance remains our primary focus. If we get that right then our Fund will emerge with the intrinsic value of its investments maintained or enhanced, as sooner or later, share prices reflect fundamentals, not the other way around. Encouragingly, the average year of foundation of our portfolio companies at the year-end was 1926. Collectively they are a little under a century old. 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 94% in 2025, this is still below its historical level of around 100%. This was due to a sharp rise in capital expenditure at a small group of companies: Alphabet and Microsoft. The tech companies are in a race to build capacity for AI in the form of GPU chips and data centres. Whether this arms race produces adequate profits and returns for the amounts expended remains an open question. As we can see, our tech companies are ramping up of capital expenditure along with Amazon and Meta: Capex For Major Tech Companies And this table does not include some companies which have major capex commitments like Oracle which has announced it will spend some $50 billion in 2025/6 or CoreWeave which is predicting around $25 billion of capex in 2026.

Morgan's son, John Pierpont Morgan Jr., known as Jack, took over the business at his father's death, but he was never as influential as the founder, the biography records. The Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 broke the House of Morgan into three parts: J.P. Morgan and Co., which became Morgan Guaranty Trust and ended up merging with Chase Bank; Morgan Stanley, the investment house formed in 1935 by his grandson Henry Sturgis Morgan with Harold Stanley; and Morgan Grenfell in London, the overseas securities house. The gemstone morganite was named in his honor, and the Cragston Dependencies of his Highland Falls estate were listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982. From 1890 to 1913, forty-two major corporations were organized, or had their securities underwritten in whole or part, by J.P. Morgan and Company, the institutional residue of a single banker's judgment acting as the American economy's allocator of capital.

Likewise, beating the benchmarks or the peers in a declining market may only be a sign of above average risk aversion, not the ability of a portfolio to achieve a superior risk-adjusted return over the long run. So, the answer is that an appropriate performance assessment period has to include both good times and bad. In other words, it should cover a full market cycle. That’s the only way to distinguish investment skill (including the ability to tilt conservative or aggressive at the right times) from a mere bias toward aggressiveness or defensiveness. On this subject, this is by far the most important thing. Defining a full cycle can be problematic, particularly as economic cycles seem to have lengthened recently, but it should be possible to have a sense for whether a given period includes both good times and bad. Finally on the subject of performance assessment, I suggested that the board consider the level of personnel turnover. It’s not that personnel turnover is always a black mark; some is completely understandable. For example, no hiring process can be expected to work perfectly, meaning every organization will have to weed out subpar performers. Further, we know compensation is limited in the public plan arena, so good performers are likely to be given opportunities to move to the private sector; in this way, losing employees can be a sign that the hiring process identified good performers.

But above average personnel turnover may be indicative of a poor hiring process, an unreasonable performance assessment process, or poor management practices. At minimum, these possibilities must be considered. The Bottom Line In general, I very much liked what I heard in the session, and I think these are the most important observations: • The board members are happy to take less than 100% of the risk the plan’s finances might permit. • They prefer to forego some return potential in order to avoid the full force of market declines. • They have little concern for their ranking within their peer group. • They have relatively little interest in volatility-adjusted performance metrics. • They’re rightly concerned about how to assess the performance of the investment team and the portfolio they produce.

adequate return or that returns will gravitate to the present incumbents. One company which intrigues us in this respect is Apple. Depending upon your point of view it has either been left behind in the scramble to build Large Language Models (‘LLMs’) and hyperscale to provide AI infrastructure or it has opted out of the race. As a result, its capital expenditure in 2025 was a mere $12 billion which pales into insignificance in comparison with the companies in the table above. It may be making a virtue of necessity but maybe Tim Cook the CEO is working on an old adage, ‘You don’t have to own a cow to sell milk’. Apple has its devices and about a billion mostly high-end consumers locked into them and increasingly into its services. It seems unlikely that there will be a shortage of LLMs that the hyperscalers will want to offer Apple for iPhone users. If this is indeed the business model Apple is relying on it may not bode well for the LLM developers and/or hyperscalers’ profitability. The second leg of our strategy is to employ a negative sector-based sustainability screen, excluding companies operating in sectors with excessive sustainability-related risk (aerospace and defence, brewers, distillers and vintners, casinos and gaming, gas and electric utilities, metals and mining, oil, gas and consumable fuels, pornography and tobacco).

Decision — Named Ben Watsa successor chairman. Context: Two-stage: Fairfax India chairmanship Jul 2024; Fairfax transition announced Nov 13, 2025. Outcome (partial): In progress — gradual handover.

© 2025 Oaktree Capital Management, L.P. All Rights Reserved Follow us: What these observations tell me is that the board and its consultant are considering the right questions and reaching reasonable conclusions. The session was very informative for me, and I’m glad I had the opportunity to participate. I hope this recap was helpful for you, too. October 28, 2025

We then assess company sustainability in the widest sense, evaluating a business’s handling of risks and opportunities and their policies and practices covering research and development, new product innovation, dividend payments, and the adequacy and productivity of capital investment. One of the metrics we use to assess sustainability risks is RepRisk’s RepRisk Index (RRI), which measures a company’s current reputational risk exposure based on controversies over the last 24 months. At the end of December 2025, the weighted average RepRisk Index for our portfolio was 28.5, higher than the 27.3 at the start of the year and lower than the MSCI World’s weighted average of 34.5. This implies that, on average, our portfolio has a lower exposure to reputational risks relating to sustainability factors than the MSCI World. The portfolio’s RepRisk Index rose over the year, partly due to increases in the RRI at Marriott and IDEXX of 23 and 17, respectively. This was offset by the addition of Intuit, Wolters Kluwer, and EssilorLuxottica to the portfolio, all of which had lower RRIs than Mastercard, which was sold from the portfolio. Marriott’s RepRisk increased after a guest of its St.the

© 2025 Oaktree Capital Management, L.P. All Rights Reserved Follow us: Legal Information and Disclosures This memorandum expresses the views of the author as of the date indicated and such views are subject to change without notice. Oaktree has no duty or obligation to update the information contained herein. Further, Oaktree makes no representation, and it should not be assumed, that past investment performance is an indication of future results. Moreover, wherever there is the potential for profit there is also the possibility of loss. This memorandum is being made available for educational purposes only and should not be used for any other purpose. The information contained herein does not constitute and should not be construed as an offering of advisory services or an offer to sell or solicitation to buy any securities or related financial instruments in any jurisdiction. Certain information contained herein concerning economic trends and performance is based on or derived from information provided by independent third-party sources. Oaktree Capital Management, L.P. (“Oaktree”) believes that the sources from which such information has been obtained are reliable; however, it cannot guarantee the accuracy of such information and has not independently verified the accuracy or completeness of such information or the assumptions on which such information is based.

US. IDEXX’s increase is due to its inclusion in a PETA report on animal testing. IDEXX usually experiences very little negative news, which means the scale of the RRI increase is larger. IDEXX creates machines for vets to use to diagnose pets, so it shouldn’t be that surprising that they are involved in animal testing, given it’s their main business. At the end of 2025, the four companies with the highest RepRisk Index scores were: Stock RepRisk Alphabet 64 Microsoft 58 Marriott 52 Novo Nordisk 49 Source: RepRisk Alphabet and Microsoft are among the largest companies in the world, and their products and services are used by millions of people every day. As a result, both companies are subject to extensive media coverage. This inflates their RRI beyond what we would consider an accurate reflection of their negative impacts. Both companies faced continued antitrust scrutiny in the US and Europe in 2025, which contributed to their high RRIs. We expect the companies we invest in to manage this regulatory risk effectively and do not currently think that Microsoft or Alphabet are excessively abusing their market position. One reason Microsoft and Alphabet have such strong positions is their continued success in developing superior products and services compared to their competitors.

At the end of 2025, the four companies with the lowest RepRisk Index scores were: Stock RepRisk Waters 0 Mettler-Toledo 0 Wolters Kluwer 5 ADP 11 Source: RepRisk Waters and Mettler-Toledo remain on the list from 2024, and this year are joined by payroll company ADP and new holding Wolters Kluwer, which provides expert information and software to accountants, lawyers, doctors and other professionals. We use the RepRisk Index scores in two ways.investable

universe. Second, as a proxy for the absolute negative impacts a company has, particularly on society. While environmental impacts are relatively easy to measure (e.g., greenhouse gas emissions) and therefore assess, aggregate, and scrutinise both absolutely and relatively across companies, impacts on society are often qualitative and much more challenging to assess objectively. Hence, we use the RRI as a proxy for evaluating these negative impacts. However, it isn’t perfect as companies with larger public profiles, such as Alphabet and Microsoft, receive significantly more media coverage than many of the other names in the Fund’s investible universe, which inflates their RRI scores beyond what we would deem to be a fair reflection of their impact. Further, companies that are rarely subject to negative press experience excessively large RRI increases when news does appear. This ‘novelty’ factor makes sense for reputational risk but is imprecise for measuring the scale, both absolute and relative, of net negative impact, especially given that it doesn’t take account of any positive impacts of a company’s products and services. With this in mind, we have started using data from a Finnish company called the Upright Project (‘Upright’). It uses a science-based approach to calculate a business’s net impact by accounting for upstream and downstream impacts, based on the products and services it produces.

The company uses academic studies and proprietary modelling to quantify the net impact of over 150,000 products and services. Upright’s net impact model comprises two main parts: a macro model and a company model. The macro model uses a database of over 200m scientific articles and Upright’s own deep learning algorithm to calculate the negative, positive, and net impact of a product or service. The company model then aggregates the positive and negative impacts of all the products/services sold by a company, proportional to revenues, to calculate the net impact of the overall business. A company’s net impact ratio is expressed as a percentage, with a positive score indicating a net positive impact and a negative score indicating a net negative impact. A score of 10%, for example, would suggest that a company produces 10% more positive impacts from its products and services than negative impacts. The net impact of a product/service is measured across four dimensions: environment, health, society, and knowledge, which we think is a better reflection of the impact companies have.portfolio:

EssilorLuxottica Net Impact Breakdown Source: Data from Upright, as at 31st December 2025 This provides a much clearer breakdown of the company's impact across the different subcategories and greater transparency into what drives these scores. EssilorLuxottica makes the vast majority of prescription lenses worldwide, which is why it is rated as having a significant positive benefit on Physical Diseases. With 5.6 positive impacts and just -1.4 negative impacts it has an overall 75% net impact ratio (5.6-1.4)/5.6). We have been using data from the Upright Project for about a year to inform the net-negative impact assessment. We are also going to start using it in the annual sustainability summary and quarterly

Sustainability Factsheets instead of the RepRisk data, as we think it provides a more accurate proxy of a company’s impact on society and the environment. Overall, the Fundsmith Stewardship Fund performs similarly to the MSCI World in ‘Knowledge’ and ‘Environment’ but significantly outperforms in ‘Health’, mainly due to our higher exposure to healthcare companies. The Fund slightly underperforms the index in ‘Society’, largely due to underperformance in the societal infrastructure subcategory. The main topics considered in societal infrastructure are energy, transportation, water and sanitation, and industrial infrastructure, areas in which we do not invest. The result is that our companies’ positive contribution to these areas is lower than that of the MSCI World, not because the companies in which we invest have a higher negative impact. Overall, the Fundsmith Stewardship Fund has a net impact ratio of 23% compared to 10% for the S&P 500 and 7% for the MSCI World, with the scores split by category as below: Net Impact Ratio Source: Data from Upright, as at 31st December 2025 The companies held in the Fundsmith Stewardship Fund also continue to show their commitment to reducing their contribution to climate change. At the end of 2025, companies which are responsible for 94% of the Fund’s emissions had already set 1.

MSCI All Country World Index1 and 87% of the Fund’s emissions were covered by a company-wide target to reach net zero emissions by at least 2050. The third 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 2025 was 3.2% and ended the year at 3.6%. The year-end FCF yield of the S&P 500 was 2.8% and MSCI World was 3.1%. Our portfolio stocks have become a lot more lowly valued than the S&P as the free cash flow of many of the major stocks which now dominate the index has shrunk or disappeared in the face of massive capex spending on AI. Our portfolio consists of companies that are fundamentally a lot better than the average of those in the S&P 500, and in the past we have explained that it is no surprise if 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 but they are now significantly cheaper than the S&P. But it also raises an obvious concern about what will happen to the market. Turning to the fourth leg of our strategy, which we succinctly describe as ‘Do nothing’, minimising portfolio turnover remains one of our objectives and this was again achieved with a portfolio turnover of 4.6% during the period. It is perhaps more helpful to know that we spent a total of just 0.

002% (a fifth of one 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 one company, purchased three and received a holding in Magnum Ice Cream which was spun out from Unilever. 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 ten of the portfolio’s 27 companies since inception in 2017. 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 2025 for the I Class Accumulation shares was 0.95%. The trouble is that the OCF does not include an important element of costs — the costs of dealing. 1 https://www.msci-institute.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/MSCI-Transition- Finance-Tracker-Q3-2025-201125.pdf

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. 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 I Class Accumulation shares in 2025 the TCI was 0.98%, 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 0.03% (3 basis points) 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 stake in Mastercard and started purchasing stakes in EssilorLuxottica, Intuit and Wolters Kluwer during the year. We reduced the Fund’s exposure to payment processors by selling our stake in Mastercard ahead of the Trump administration proposals to cap rates on credit card lending. EssilorLuxottica arose from the merger of French and Italian companies which dominate the market for eyeglasses, both frames and lenses.

There is a tailwind for this business from people who do not yet have access to vision correction. In addition, it has some interesting innovations such as the Stellest lenses which help prevent deterioration for children with myopia and of course the Meta AI glasses. We previously sold a position we held in Intuit, the accounting and tax software company, after it acquired Mailchimp in 2021 because we felt that Mailchimp fell outside its circle of competence and they paid about three times the right price, something which they attempted to justify by pointing out that half the consideration paid was in Intuit shares. What this implied about their valuation seemed obvious to us. For a while after we sold the shares AI hype drove the price but latterly the poor performance of the Mailchimp acquisition has become evident and reflected in the share price. We have started to rebuild a stake in the hope that the management has learned from the debacle. Wolters Kluwer is the leader in technical publishing used by professionals in health, tax, accounting, risk & compliance and legal.but

this seems about as true as the now discredited view that Adobe and Intuit were AI beneficiaries. This view has driven the PE to <19x and it is still growing at c.5% p.a. with a ROIC of 18% and ROE of about 50%. We intend to continue holding a portfolio of good businesses in the hope and expectation that their strong fundamental returns will shine through into superior share price and fund performance over the long term and that in the interim our fund will prove relatively immune from any shocks which arise if or when the present extraordinary market conditions unwind. 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 Stewardship 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. The value of investments and the income from them may fall as well as rise and be affected by changes in exchange 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 2025 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 2025 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.

Decision — Completed mutual-fund→ETF conversion (AKRE, NYSE Arca). Context: ~$11.2B at conversion — one of the largest MF→ETF conversions ever; Form 485/425 on EDGAR. Outcome (known): Conversion completed; ETF trades as AKRE; John Neff CEO/CIO.

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. The Bloomberg Series-E UK Govt 5-10 yr Bond Index shows what you might have earnt if you had invested in UK Government Debt. The £ Interest Rate shows what you might have earnt if you had invested in cash. MSCI World Index is the exclusive property of MSCI Inc. MSCI makes no express or implied warranties or representations and shall have no liability whatsoever with respect to any MSCI data contained herein. The MSCI data may not be further redistributed or used as a basis for other indices or any securities or final products. This report is not approved, reviewed or produced by MSCI. The Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS) was developed by and is the exclusive property of MSCI and Standard & Poor’s and ‘GICS®’ is a service mark of MSCI and Standard & Poor’s.

Decision — Publicly declared “the golden age of value investing is over”. Context: Bloomberg Opinion op-ed: LLMs have obliterated the research edge he had. Outcome (known): Rare practitioner mea culpa; pairs with the wind-down.