2026

Pinocchio premiered at New York's Center Theatre on February 7, 1940, and went into general release on February 23. The film broke new ground in effects animation, lending realistic movement to vehicles, machinery, and natural elements including rain, water, lightning, smoke, and shadow, and it became the first animated feature to win competitive Academy Awards, taking Oscars for its original score and for its original song When You Wish Upon a Star, which later served as the Walt Disney Company's signature song. Critical response was strong, yet the film was initially a commercial failure, mainly because the outbreak of the Second World War closed the European and Asian markets that had accounted for so much of Snow White's earnings. It eventually turned a profit after its 1945 re-release and is now regarded as one of the greatest animated films ever made, holding a perfect critics' score on Rotten Tomatoes and selection for the National Film Registry in 1994.

Fantasia, released in 1940, was an animated anthology of eight segments set to pieces of classical music conducted by Leopold Stokowski, seven performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra, with Deems Taylor as master of ceremonies. The concept grew out of The Sorcerer's Apprentice, an elaborate Silly Symphony planned as a comeback vehicle for Mickey Mouse, whose popularity had declined; when production costs surpassed anything the short could earn, Disney expanded it into a multi-segment feature. The soundtrack was recorded using multiple audio channels and reproduced through Fantasound, a pioneering system developed with RCA that made the film the first commercial release exhibited in stereo and a forerunner of surround sound. RKO roadshowed the film in thirteen cities beginning November 13, 1940, at the Broadway Theatre. Critics acclaimed it, but it failed to make a profit: the war cut off European distribution, production costs were high, and building Fantasound equipment and leasing theaters consumed the margins. Its reputation compounded for decades, ending in National Film Registry selection in 1990.

Dumbo, released October 23, 1941, was produced to recoup the losses of Pinocchio and Fantasia, and its creation was a deliberate pursuit of simplicity and economy. At sixty-four minutes it is among the studio's shortest animated features. The story, created by Helen Aberson and Harold Pearl with illustrations by Helen Durney for a novelty toy prototype, follows an elephant ridiculed for his oversized ears who discovers he can fly by using them as wings; his sole companion besides his mother is Timothy the mouse, a relationship parodying the old antagonism between their species. The film met critical acclaim for its story, humor, visuals, and music, and won the Academy Award for Best Scoring of a Musical Picture. One voice was synthesized using the Sonovox system, an early experiment in processed vocal sound. In 2017 the Library of Congress selected Dumbo for the National Film Registry, and the character became a durable merchandising and theme park property, later adapted as a live-action feature.

Bambi had its world premiere in London on August 9, 1942, the first Disney film to debut abroad, and opened in American theaters five days later. Released during the Second World War, it did not perform as well as hoped; Roy Disney wired his brother after the New York opening that the film had fallen short of the studio's holdover figure and that night business was the problem. It earned RKO theatrical rentals of $1.27 million in the United States and Canada, and with European markets largely closed by the war, international rentals of $1.685 million brought the initial worldwide total to $2.955 million, the studio's third highest to that point behind Snow White and Pinocchio. The property compounded across re-releases in 1947, 1957, 1966, 1975, 1982, and 1988, eventually passing one hundred million dollars in cumulative North American rentals. The film was loosely based on Felix Salten's 1923 novel, whose European roe deer became a white-tailed deer for American audiences after illustrator Jake Day's argument, and it received Oscar nominations for sound, song, and score.

The 1941 Disney animators' strike grew from anger at pay inequities and privileges inside a non-union workplace whose animators nonetheless enjoyed the best pay and working conditions in the industry. Disney had originally directed twenty percent of short cartoon profits into employee bonuses, then suspended the practice. Snow White's success financed a new, larger studio in Burbank built with borrowed money, where a rigid hierarchy restricted the restaurant, gymnasium, and steam room to the studio's top writers and animators, who also received larger and more comfortable offices, while individual departments were segregated into separate buildings and heavily policed by administrators. The pay structure was disorganized, with some high-ranking animators earning three hundred dollars a week while other employees made as little as twelve; animator Willis Pyle recalled no rhyme or reason to the differences between men doing the same job side by side. Staff were also made to sign documents certifying a forty-hour week while their actual hours ran far longer, and they resented Disney taking credit for their work.

Founded in Chennai in 2010 as Freshdesk by former Zoho colleagues Girish Mathrubootham and Shan Krishnasamy, the firm was later renamed Freshworks Inc. in 2017 to signal the move from a single helpdesk product to a multi-product SaaS portfolio — a structural rebrand tied to portfolio strategy rather than a marketing refresh.

The Walton family remains the richest family in the world, and the structure of that wealth traces directly to the founder's estate planning. Sam Walton left his Walmart ownership to his wife Helen and their four children, and the family's stake is held in majority through the investment holding company Walton Enterprises. As of December 2014 the family collectively owned 50.8 percent of Walmart; after selling stock in 2018 it owns just under half. The three most prominent living members — Jim, Rob, and Alice Walton — have consistently appeared in the top twenty of the Forbes 400 since 2001, with individual fortunes recently estimated between one hundred ten and one hundred twenty billion dollars. The family held five spots among the ten richest Americans until 2005, and shares held by Bud Walton's two daughters through their own inheritances extend the family's reach further still.

In early 1941, before American entry into the Second World War, the State Department commissioned a Disney goodwill tour of South America under the Good Neighbor Policy, because several Latin American governments maintained close ties with Nazi Germany and Disney characters were enormously popular in the region. Nelson Rockefeller, the newly appointed Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, facilitated a journey that took Disney and roughly twenty composers, artists, and technicians through Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, and Peru. The resulting film, Saludos Amigos, premiered in Rio de Janeiro on August 24, 1942, mixing live-action travel footage with four animated segments starring Donald Duck, Goofy, and the newly created Brazilian parrot José Carioca. The production carried federal loan guarantees, granted because the studio had overexpanded just as European markets closed and labor unrest drained its finances. The film succeeded, launched Donald Duck's international popularity, prompted the 1944 government-funded sequel The Three Caballeros, and surprised American viewers with documentary images of modern Latin American cities.

By 1947 Walt Disney Productions was over four million dollars in debt and, having lost its European markets to the war and absorbed the commercial failures of Pinocchio, Fantasia, and Bambi, stood on the verge of bankruptcy. Disney and his animators returned to feature production in 1948 after a string of inexpensive package films, choosing Charles Perrault's Cinderella as the comeback vehicle. Released February 15, 1950, the film drew critical acclaim, became the studio's biggest hit since Snow White, and helped reverse its fortunes. It received three Academy Award nominations, among them its score, its sound recording, and its original song Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo, and it was followed by two direct-to-video sequels and a 2015 live-action remake; the Library of Congress selected it for the National Film Registry in 2018. The rescue established the pattern of the studio's decade: one animated tentpole whose theatrical, music, and merchandising returns underwrote the riskier ventures in television and theme parks that Walt increasingly favored.

The concept for Disneyland began when Disney sat in Griffith Park in Los Angeles watching his daughters Diane and Sharon ride the merry-go-round and imagined a place where parents and children could have fun together. The earliest documented draft was a memo to production designer Dick Kelsey on August 31, 1948, describing a Mickey Mouse Park, informed by notes from that month's Chicago Railroad Fair trip with Ward Kimball and a stop at Henry Ford's Museum and Greenfield Village, with its Main Street and steamboat rides. When letters from fans asking to visit the movie studio convinced him that a working studio offered the public little, the idea grew into a play park concept for a sixteen-acre plot across Riverside Drive from the Burbank studio, drawing on Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen, Knott's Berry Farm, Colonial Williamsburg, and the world's fairs of 1933 and 1939. The project quickly outgrew every site he could obtain in Burbank, and the search moved outward.

Ren Zhengfei — founder profiled in the Chinese Founder Ledger — is documented as follows: former People's Liberation Army engineer who founded Huawei in Shenzhen in 1987 with 21,000 yuan in capital and has served as its CEO continuously since 1988, building it into the world's largest telecommunications equipment maker. The profile is grounded in the 3 sources indexed for this founder.

David Glass, born on an Oregon County, Missouri farm in 1935 and educated at Southwest Missouri State College, built Walmart's operational machine. He joined the company in 1976 as executive vice president of finance, administered its financial and accounting responsibilities, and served as vice chairman and chief financial officer before being named president and chief operating officer in 1984. In February 1988 he succeeded Sam Walton as chief executive, a post he held until January 2000, presiding over the expansion from the one hundred twenty-three stores that existed when he arrived to more than four thousand nationally and internationally by 2005. The retail industry named him Retailer of the Year in both 1986 and 1991, and he sat on Walmart's board from 1976 until his death in 2020. His tenure compressed Walmart's regional dominance into national and then international scale, executing the logistics blueprint his founder-employer had drafted.

Samuel Robson Walton, born in Tulsa on October 27, 1944, the oldest of Sam and Helen Walton's four children, was prepared by temperament and training for the chairmanship he assumed two days after his father's death. A College of Wooster and University of Arkansas business graduate with a Columbia law degree, he practiced at the Tulsa firm Conner & Winters, which represented Walmart, before joining the company as a senior vice president in 1978; he became vice chairman in 1982 and was named chairman of the board on April 7, 1992. He held the chair until 2015, shepherding the family's control through decades of professional management, and with his siblings pledged roughly two billion dollars to the Walton Family Foundation between 2008 and 2013. A well-known collector of automobiles, he later led the family ownership group that purchased the Denver Broncos in 2022 for a record four-point-six-five billion dollars.

The Disney television anthology grew out of Walt Disney's hunt for Disneyland funding, with his brother Roy approaching all of the big-three networks and American Broadcasting-Paramount Theatres, which had merged with United Paramount Theatres in 1953, taking the deal. After rejections from CBS and NBC, Disney signed with ABC on March 29, 1954, and the resulting series, Walt Disney's Disneyland, contained teasers for the park alongside episodes representing life in each of its four lands: Adventureland, Tomorrowland, Fantasyland, and Frontierland. Walt Disney was the first major film producer to venture into television, a calculated risk for a studio built on theatrical exclusivity. The program moved among the Big Three networks in its first four decades, running as Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color on NBC from 1961 before settling on ABC, and across its entire history it has had only two hosts: Walt Disney himself and later Michael Eisner. It remains the second longest-running prime-time program in American television, behind only Hallmark Hall of Fame.

Davy Crockett, a five-part serial starring Fess Parker and Buddy Ebsen that aired on the Disneyland television series in 1954 and 1955, became the defining demonstration of the park-financing strategy's marketing power. The first three episodes, broadcast from December 1954 to February 1955, tracked the frontiersman from Indian fighter through Congress to the Alamo, and the five parts were later edited into two theatrical films. Historians Randy Roberts and James Olson concluded that three broadcasts made Parker famous, proved the selling power of television, and turned Crockett into the most famous frontiersman in the nation's history. By the end of 1955 the country had purchased over three hundred million dollars of Crockett merchandise, from coonskin caps to bubble gum cards, and the serial and its films remain known for the theme song, The Ballad of Davy Crockett. Disney followed with less successful miniseries on other historical American heroes. The one sour note was contractual: Parker later claimed he lost millions because his merchandising percentage contract was with Walt Disney personally rather than Walt Disney Productions and was voided.

In 1959 Walt Disney Productions began looking for land for a second resort, after market surveys showed that only five percent of Disneyland's visitors came from east of the Mississippi River, where seventy-five percent of the American population lived. Walt also disliked the roadside businesses crowding Disneyland and wanted control over a far larger area for the next project. After rejecting an indoor park concept for St. Louis, he flew over potential sites in November 1963 and chose a location near Bay Lake, southwest of Orlando, for its well-developed road network, the planned Interstate 4 and Florida's Turnpike, and McCoy Air Force Base to the east. The project was known internally as the Florida Project, and Walt's plans called for a self-contained destination resort whose heart would be EPCOT, the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, a planned community intended as a testbed for new city-living innovations rather than another theme park alone.

SolarCity began as a family venture with Musk as concept author and financier. His cousins Lyndon and Peter Rive founded the company in 2006 on the initial concept and financial capital Musk provided; by 2013 it ranked second among American installers of solar power systems. The next year he pushed a plan for an advanced manufacturing facility in Buffalo, New York, a plant triple the size of America's largest existing solar factory, whose construction began that year, was completed in 2017, and operated as a joint venture with Panasonic until early 2020. Growth masked fragility: headcount had grown 69 percent in 2015 to 15,273 employees, and in 2016 the company cut 20 percent of its workforce to preserve cash, its first reduction ever, trimming the co-founders' salaries from $275,000 to $1 per year. Nevada's retroactive net-metering changes, which gutted rooftop-solar economics in that state, eliminated more than 550 SolarCity jobs on their own.

Butler Brothers, the Chicago wholesaler founded in 1877 as a mail-order company, supplied the machine into which Sam Walton bought in 1945. Its Ben Franklin Stores, franchised five-and-dimes developed in the early 1930s, numbered twenty-six hundred by 1936 and stood mostly in small towns. The franchise's real service was logistical: weekly shipments from warehouses holding tens of thousands of items meant a store owner could order merchandise on Friday and see shelves restocked by Tuesday, while consolidated shipments cut freight costs and made inventory manageable. By the 1940s and 1950s Butler Brothers ranked among the largest wholesalers in the country. For a twenty-six-year-old franchisee learning the algebra of retail — assortment, turnover, freight, promotion — the system functioned as a correspondence course in mass merchandising, and Walton's later obsession with distribution and replenishment carried its imprint through every stage of Walmart's build-out.

EPCOT began as Disney's acronym for Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, a utopian city he described in 1966 as taking its cue from new ideas and technologies from American industry, never completed, and always introducing, testing, and demonstrating new materials and systems. His Progress City concept would have housed twenty thousand residents as a living laboratory showcasing urban planning, built in a circle with an urban center, community buildings, schools, and recreational complexes ringed by residential and industrial areas, all connected by monorail and PeopleMover lines, with automobile traffic kept underground and pedestrians safe above; the radial plan drew on Ebenezer Howard's Garden Cities of Tomorrow. Disney petitioned the Florida legislature for the Reedy Creek Improvement District to govern the land, but he could not obtain funding and permission until agreeing to build the Magic Kingdom first. After his death the company declined to run a city without him, and EPCOT Center opened October 1, 1982, at a cost of 1.5 billion dollars as a permanent world's fair of Future World and World Showcase rather than a working city.

The Reedy Creek Improvement District, established by the Florida legislature at Disney's behest during planning for Walt Disney World, gave the company governing authority over 39.06 square miles spanning Orange and Osceola counties, including the cities of Bay Lake and Lake Buena Vista. The Reedy Creek Improvement Act, signed by Governor Claude Kirk on May 12, 1967, created the district and its two cities, which handled land-use regulation, planning, building codes, drainage, waste treatment, utilities, roads, bridges, fire protection, and emergency medical services, answering to county and state authority only for property taxes and elevator inspections. The EPCOT city concept was the major selling point in the lobbying effort, but the governmental structure outlived the city it was built for by more than half a century. In 2022 the legislature moved to dissolve the district, an act widely read as retaliation for the company's opposition to a state education law, and in 2023 it was renamed the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District with governor-appointed supervisors, ending Disney's sole control of the jurisdiction.

Walt Disney formed Walt Disney, Inc. on December 16, 1952, with an engineering division tasked with designing Disneyland, then renamed it WED Enterprises in 1953 after objections from his brother Roy and from potential stockholders to a personal company carrying the Disney name; the initials stood for Walter Elias Disney. Formed to carry the park's design work outside the studio's formal structure, WED became the creative unit where a staff of illustrators, architects, engineers, lighting designers, show writers, and graphic designers planned the park, a group that became known as Imagineers. Headquartered in Glendale, California, the unit grew so integral to operations that Walt Disney Productions purchased it on February 5, 1965, acquiring the WED Enterprises name with it, and it was renamed Walt Disney Imagineering in January 1986. Disney filed for a trademark on the term Imagineering in 1989, claiming first use in 1962. The organization remains the research and development arm that designs and builds every Disney park and attraction worldwide.

The California Institute of the Arts was incorporated in 1961 as the first degree-granting American institution of higher learning created specifically for students of both the visual and performing arts, through a merger of the Chouinard Art Institute, founded in 1921, and the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music, founded in 1883. Both schools were in financial difficulty, and Chouinard's founder, Nelbert Chouinard, was terminally ill; Disney, a longtime friend of Chouinard and of conservatory chair Lulu May Von Hagen, had discovered and trained much of his studio's talent at the two schools, including Mary Blair, Maurice Noble, and several of the Nine Old Men. He coordinated the merger and expansion with his brother Roy, Von Hagen, and architect Thornton Ladd, and the process continued after his 1966 death. The institute's interdisciplinary concept traced to Richard Wagner's idea of Gesamtkunstwerk, or total artwork, which Disney had explored from Fantasia through WED Enterprises and finally a school where artists of different media would cross-pollinate.

Roy Oliver Disney, eight years older than Walt, co-founded the Disney Brothers Studio in October 1923 and ran the business side of the enterprise for the rest of his life. He was convalescing from tuberculosis at the Sawtelle Veterans Home in Los Angeles when Walt visited late at night to ask for help launching the cartoon studio after securing the Winkler distribution deal; Roy agreed, left the hospital the next morning, and never suffered a relapse. While Walt led the creative side, Roy guided business and finances as an equal partner in all facets of the production company, became the company's first chief executive officer in 1929, and shared the chairmanship with Walt from 1945 until Walt dropped the title in 1960 to concentrate on creative work. After Walt's death from lung cancer in December 1966, Roy postponed retirement to oversee construction of Disney World, renamed it Walt Disney World in tribute to his brother, and opened the resort five years later at a cost of about four hundred million dollars without additional debt, before dying weeks after the dedication.

Ub Iwerks met Disney in 1919 at a Kansas City art studio, animated the Laugh-O-Gram shorts, and followed him to Hollywood, where he drew much of the early Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphony output, including Steamboat Willie and The Skeleton Dance, and refined Disney's rough sketch into the recognizable Mickey. A falling out led to his resignation in January 1930 to run his own operation for Pat Powers, where the Flip the Frog and Willie Whopper series failed to rival his old employer. Iwerks returned to Disney in 1940 as head of the Special Processes and Camera department, developed visual effects for Song of the South, Mary Poppins, and Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, adapted the xerography process to photocopy animation pencil drawings onto cels, and contributed technical solutions to WED Enterprises for Disneyland, Walt Disney World, and the 1964 World's Fair attractions. He won two Academy Awards from three nominations, was named a Disney Legend in 1989, and is remembered as one of the greatest animators of all time.

Wilmot Reed Hastings Jr., born in Boston on October 8, 1960, is the American billionaire businessman who co-founded Netflix and built the eponymous streaming service. He served as chief executive from the company's founding until 2023, then moved to executive chairman, and he remains one of its largest individual shareholders. Before Netflix he founded and sold Pure Software, the debugging-tools company whose management struggles taught him the lessons in talent density that later defined Netflix's culture. Outside the company he served as president of the California State Board of Education, became a prominent advocate for charter schools, and joined the Giving Pledge in 2012. He sat on the boards of Microsoft from 2007 to 2012 and Facebook from 2011 to 2019, and later joined the boards of Bloomberg and the artificial intelligence company Anthropic. Forbes estimated his net worth at 6.6 billion dollars as of May 2025. In April 2026, Netflix announced he would step down from its board that June, closing nearly three decades on the board of the company he started.

The Boring Company began as infrastructure satire that incorporated. Musk founded the tunneling venture in 2017 and revealed plans for specialized underground high-occupancy vehicles traveling up to 150 miles per hour to circumvent surface traffic in major cities. The first digging required no permits because it happened on SpaceX property: a 30-foot-wide, 50-foot-long test trench at the company's offices. A Los Angeles tunnel, under two miles long, debuted to journalists in 2018 carrying Tesla Model X vehicles and was reported as a rough ride at suboptimal speeds; two tunnel projects announced that year in Chicago and West Los Angeles were later canceled. The Las Vegas Convention Center loop, completed in early 2021, became the surviving proof of concept, with local officials approving further expansions of the system. The corporate structure echoed Musk's other holdings: the company was spun out of SpaceX in 2018 with 6 percent of equity staying with SpaceX, under 10 percent going to early employees, and the remainder to Musk.

James Lawrence Bud Walton, Sam's younger brother, was the quieter co-founder of the enterprise. Born in Kingfisher, Oklahoma, in 1921, he delivered newspapers, worked as a lifeguard, and played varsity basketball at Columbia's Hickman High School before Navy flight training and wartime service as a pilot. The brothers entered retail together through the Ben Franklin stores franchised from Chicago's Butler Brothers, and Bud co-built the sixteen-store chain that stood behind Walmart's 1962 founding. The partnership held for life: Wal-Mart Stores opened the first Sam's Club — named for Sam — on April 7, 1983, in Midwest City, Oklahoma, with the family tie intact. Bud later gave fifteen million dollars for the University of Arkansas basketball arena that bears his name and, with Sam, one hundred fifty thousand dollars for a Columbia building honoring their father. He died in 1995 after aneurysm surgery.

Helen Robson Walton, born in Claremore, Oklahoma, to a homemaker mother and a prosperous banker-rancher father, graduated as her high-school valedictorian, earned a finance degree at the University of Oklahoma, and married Sam Walton on Valentine's Day 1943, after the two met in a bowling alley her father ran. She brought both capital and constitution to the enterprise: her father's loans financed the Newport store, and the couple agreed, as she recounted in a television interview, to avoid family squabbling at all costs. She was, by her husband's own account, the source of the idea for the profit-sharing plan with Walmart's associates — the policy most identified with the company's culture. The marriage lasted forty-nine years until Sam's death. In September 1945 the couple opened the Newport Ben Franklin together; in 1950 they moved the family to Bentonville; in 1962 the first Wal-Mart opened.

Hypermart USA was Walmart's late-1980s experiment with the European hypermarket — a format modeled on the French retailers Auchan and Carrefour and on the Midwestern chain Meijer — attempting to combine groceries and general merchandise under one roof at a substantial discount. At its peak the demonstrator project operated four locations, two in Texas and one each in Kansas and Missouri, each exceeding two hundred twenty thousand square feet, roughly forty-two thousand square feet larger than an average Walmart Supercenter three decades later. The stores packed in mini-malls, food courts, arcades, banks, and kiosk operations. The prototypes were originally to be named Wal-Mart Supercenter, but the name was shelved for Hypermart USA and later recycled for the smaller format. The Garland, Texas prototype opened December 28, 1987, and drew twenty thousand visitors on launch day, complete with an in-store tortilla factory, a supervised play area, a fifteen-cent coffee deli, and fifty-eight checkout stations.

Price Club's operating details explain exactly what Walton was copying. Sol Price and several friends invested two and a half million dollars to open the first club in July 1976 in San Diego, on a former Howard Hughes manufacturing site. Membership was initially restricted to business customers presenting resale certificates or professional licenses — a deliberately narrow audience that guaranteed volume — before it expanded to employees of local businesses, nonprofits, and governments. The twenty-five-dollar annual fee bought access to bulk products at discount prices sustained by no-frills merchandising, and the company's high sales volume enabled it to pay employees higher wages and better benefits than typical retailers. By 1992 Price Club ran ninety-four locations across the United States, Canada, and Mexico, generating six-point-six billion dollars in revenue — the proof of concept against which Walmart built its own club division.

Sol Price, the Bronx-born, San Diego-based lawyer turned retailer, founded FedMart in 1954 and Price Club in 1976, and is regarded as the father of the warehouse-store retail model that Costco, Sam's Club, and PriceSmart all descend from. The founding insight came from watching small San Diego businesses choose between ordering from a few giant distant wholesalers and buying locally from small cash-and-carry operators; Price Club fused the two into a volume-oriented membership format, charging twenty-five dollars a year for bulk goods at discount prices in a no-frills warehouse. He took the company public in 1980, expanded it to ninety-four locations, and merged it with Costco in 1993. For Walton, Price served as the standing tutorial in format invention — the single figure from whom, by Walton's own written admission, he borrowed as much as from anyone else in the business.

The first Sam's Wholesale Club opened under Walton's own first name on April 7, 1983, in Midwest City, Oklahoma — twenty-one years after he founded Walmart — a signal that he treated the division as a personal project rather than a committee product. The format sold nearly all merchandise in bulk directly off pallets in warehouse-style stores stocked in steel bins, with membership gating access and no-frills economics passing savings through to members. Renamed simply Sam's Club in 1990, the chain grew through conversion as much as construction: Walmart purchased twenty-four SuperSaver Wholesale Warehouse Club locations in 1987 and acquired the PACE clubs from Kmart in 1993, converting most of them to the Sam's banner. The division operates through a subsidiary incorporated as Sam's West, Inc., and now ranks second among American warehouse clubs by sales volume, behind only Costco.

The Wal-Mart name itself was an employee's invention: Bob Bogle, the assistant Walton tasked with buying and maintaining store signage, devised it as Walton opened his second store, in Harrison, Arkansas, and committed to the decision of achieving higher sales volumes by keeping prices lower than competitors while accepting reduced margins. That arithmetic — margin traded for volume — became the company's foundational pricing stance and never changed. By 1967 the company had grown to twenty-four stores across Arkansas with twelve-point-six million dollars in sales, and in 1968 it opened its first out-of-state stores, in Sikeston, Missouri, and Claremore, Oklahoma. The move followed his study of the early successes of other discount department store chains. The pattern set in those years — expansion through new construction rather than acquisition — fueled the chain's spread through the Southern United States in the 1970s and toward nationwide coverage by the mid-1990s.

Walmart, headquartered in Bentonville, Arkansas, was founded in 1962 by the brothers Sam and Bud Walton in nearby Rogers and grew into an American multinational retail corporation operating supercenters, discount stores, grocery stores, pharmacies, and gas stations across the United States and nineteen other countries. It is the largest private employer in the world, with roughly 2.1 million employees, it sits at the top of the Fortune 500, and it also owns and operates the Sam's Club retail warehouses. The defining governance fact is that it remains a publicly traded family-controlled business — the largest such business on earth — because Sam Walton's heirs own more than half the shares through the Walton Enterprises holding company and their individual holdings. The company listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1972, and it became the first traditional retailer valued above one trillion dollars in early 2026.

Samuel Moore Walton, born on an Oklahoma farm in Kingfisher on March 29, 1918, and raised through the Depression across a string of Missouri small towns, founded Walmart and Sam's Club and became the architect of modern American discount retail. He opened his first Walmart in Rogers, Arkansas, in 1962 at age forty-four and his first Sam's Club in Midwest City, Oklahoma, in 1983, and the combined enterprise grew into the world's largest corporation by revenue and its biggest private employer. Forbes ranked him the richest person in the United States from 1982 through 1988, and his heirs have held the standing of America's richest family ever since. He ran the business from Bentonville, Arkansas, for more than four decades, died of blood cancer in Little Rock on April 5, 1992, at seventy-four, and was buried in the Bentonville Cemetery near the town square where his second store still stands.

Principles: Life and Work grew out of a workplace crisis. In 1993 Dalio received a frank memo from his top lieutenants concerning his interpersonal performance as a manager, and in response he began building a distinctive culture founded on explicit principles and blunt feedback. A shorter version of Principles went online in 2011 and drew more than three million downloads, and the full book was officially released as Principles: Life and Work on September 19, 2017, by Simon & Schuster. The volume draws on principles developed while leading Bridgewater, and Times reporting noted that Bridgewater staff were involved in the writing. The book was a commercial phenomenon: it sold over five million copies worldwide, quickly hit number one on the Times list, was Amazon's top business book of 2017, and drew endorsements from Bill Gates and Arianna Huffington, while the Times described it as instructive and surprisingly moving. Despite that success, observers note few people actually implement the principles, a gap Rob Copeland's later book attacked, arguing the culture bred harassment, surveillance, and public shaming.

Dalio's most famous formulation about diversification is known as the Holy Grail: if you can find ten to fifteen uncorrelated return streams, you can cut your risk by roughly 80 percent without giving up any expected return. The teaching rests on a chart of portfolio risk against the number of investments, with one curve drawn for each level of correlation between them. At 60 percent correlation, adding investments barely dents risk, because highly correlated holdings move together anyway. At zero correlation, the curve drops steeply, and with ten to fifteen uncorrelated bets, each carrying a positive expected return, portfolio volatility drops to a fraction of the load any single bet would bear alone. The caveats matter as much as the headline. It would be very difficult in practice to run fifteen strategies with literally zero correlation to each other, and the decrease in volatility only works when each return stream has a positive expected return in its own right: adding near-zero-return positions for diversification's sake just dilutes returns for a volatility benefit that may not be worth it.

Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings founded Netflix as a DVD-by-mail rental service on August 29, 1997, in Scotts Valley, California. When the service debuted on April 14, 1998, it charged per disc rented; the monthly subscription concept arrived in September 1999, and per-rental pricing was gone by early 2000. The economics of that pivot defined the company: a flat monthly fee, no due dates, and no late fees, which removed the revenue stream that sustained Blockbuster's stores but bought Netflix unlimited customer intimacy. Scale followed quickly. By 2005 thirty-five thousand different films were available, and Netflix shipped one million DVDs out every day, a logistics operation built on regional distribution centers and the United States Postal Service. Through its Red Envelope Entertainment division the company also licensed and distributed independent films such as Born into Brothels and Sherrybaby, and briefly expanded into producing original content with filmmakers such as John Waters before closing the unit in 2008.

Neuralink, co-founded by Musk in 2016 with a $100 million investment, pursues the integration of the human brain with artificial intelligence through implanted devices intended to enhance memory or communicate directly with software, and to treat neurological conditions such as spinal-cord injuries. The development path has been as controversial as the ambition is grand. The company's animal trials on macaques at the University of California, Davis, including a 2021 video of a monkey playing Pong through a Neuralink implant, produced cruelty allegations from the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, employee complaints that Musk's pressure to accelerate development produced botched experiments and unnecessary animal deaths, and a 2022 federal probe into possible welfare violations. Clinical trials were promised for late 2022, and in September 2023 the Food and Drug Administration approved the initiation of six-year human trials, opening the regulatory gate the company had missed on its original schedule.

The Dalio family's philanthropy has an origin story that runs through China. In 1995 Ray and Barbara Dalio sent their eleven-year-old son Matt to spend a school year living in China; a visit to an orphanage there convinced him he could deliver lifesaving help to special-needs orphans. After Matt came home he founded the China Care Foundation, which raised nearly 15 million dollars and saved thousands of children with special needs. That journey with China Care inspired the establishment of the Dalio Foundation in 2003, which later became part of Dalio Philanthropies. The organization describes giving as a core Dalio family value and shared activity, notes their Giving Pledge commitment to give away the majority of their wealth, and explains its method: partner with closely aligned people and causes, focus on the leaders of the organizations it invests in because the who is more important than the what, and promote financial self-sufficiency across its focus areas so grantees achieve lasting impact. A board governs as a committee, and unsolicited proposals are not accepted.

Writing on his Principled Perspectives newsletter after more than fifty years leading Bridgewater from a New York apartment to the world's largest hedge fund, Dalio says his main objective is passing along the principles learned over sixty years, and among the most important concern the All Weather portfolio. His claims are blunt. Most investors need a portfolio that is well diversified and engineered to deliver the highest possible return with the least risk, and that requires little or no market timing, because almost all investors, including most well-established professionals, cannot time the market effectively even when they think they can. Cash feels safest, since short-term government debt will not default, but it delivers the lowest after-tax returns over time and loses a great deal of purchasing power in periods of high inflation. An All Weather portfolio is a passively held mix expected to return much more than cash-like assets with much less risk than stocks and bonds, in any environment, unlike the classic 60/40 that does well when times are good and badly when they are not.

On his Economic Principles website Dalio distributes the animated explainer How the Economic Machine Works, describing it as simple but not simplistic: roughly thirty minutes that lay out the basic driving forces behind the economy and explain why economic cycles occur by breaking down credit, interest rates, leveraging, and deleveraging. The site frames the knowledge as practical for everyone, as investors and as citizens, and calls the time a worthwhile investment. It situates the animation in Dalio's broader research catalog: a thought-provoking conversation with Larry Summers, president emeritus of Harvard and former Treasury Secretary; a study of his perspective on capitalism, where and why it is failing, and how it might be reformed; work on identifying the prevailing paradigm and visualizing how the shift will transpire; research on Monetary Policy 3 and modern monetary theory; an examination of how populism germinates, grows, and runs its course; and a briefing paper on universal basic income with his research team. The template, in the site's words, may be unconventional, but it throws strong light on the economy as it truly operates.

Before Bridgewater grew into one of the world's largest hedge funds, Dalio was solving a menu-engineering problem for McDonald's: how to price Chicken McNuggets without exposing the chain to swings in the cost of feeding chickens. In the early 1980s the chicken market was volatile, and sudden changes in feed costs made long-term menu pricing nearly impossible, so McDonald's hired the young consultant to hedge the cost. Chicken feed, primarily soy and corn, was the most costly ingredient in producing the snack, while the chicks themselves were cheap; as Dalio has put it on podcasts, the cost of a chicken has little to do with the price of the chick and everything to do with the price of the grain it eats. His suggestion was to combine the two grain exposures into a synthetic futures position, and it paid off: McDonald's launched Chicken McNuggets in 1983, and within months the onetime red-meat chain had a poultry hit on its hands.

By Bridgewater's own account, Ray Dalio founded the firm in 1975 out of a two-bedroom apartment and spent the next 47 years building it into today's global institution. Along the way he served as chief executive officer, chief investment officer, and chairman, shaping both the firm's investment approaches and its distinctive culture. He stepped down as CEO in 2017, as CIO in the summer of 2020, and as chairman at the end of 2021, and he has since focused on mentoring people at Bridgewater and beyond. The firm frames his biography in three phases: first becoming an investor, then starting and building Bridgewater, and finally entering a new stage of life after turning the firm over to the next generation of leaders, with his primary focus on passing along the principles he learned to help others succeed. Under his leadership Bridgewater became the largest hedge fund in the world and made more money for its clients than any other hedge fund.

Bridgewater Associates, founded by Ray Dalio in 1975, is an American investment management firm serving institutional clients, including pension funds, endowments, foundations, foreign governments, and central banks. The firm began as an institutional investment advisory service, graduated into institutional investing, and pioneered the risk parity approach in 1996. Its flagship Pure Alpha fund climbed 33 percent in 2025, its best full-year performance on record. The company moved its headquarters from New York City to Connecticut in 1981 and employs roughly 1,300 people. Its history is a catalog of industry strategies competitors later copied: currency overlay, alpha-beta separation, absolute return products, and risk parity. Financial News rated it the fastest-growing asset manager of 2000 to 2005, after which it closed its doors to new accounts, and its assets under management increased about 25 percent each year from 2001 to 2010 while headcount reached eleven times its 2000 level.

Raymond Thomas Dalio, born in the Jackson Heights section of Queens on August 8, 1949, is the American billionaire investor who founded Bridgewater Associates and built it into one of the world's largest hedge funds. The son of Italian-American parents, jazz musician Marino Dallolio and homemaker Ann, he moved with his family to Manhasset on Long Island at age eight and attended Herricks High School. He is the author of Principles: Life and Work, the 2017 volume on corporate management and investment philosophy, and of The Changing World Order on why nations succeed and fail. Bloomberg's billionaire index put his net worth at 21.5 billion dollars as of June 2026, ranking him 126th worldwide. His career falls into three phases he describes himself: building Bridgewater across nearly five decades, codifying its principles into public books and videos, and handing the firm to a new generation while managing his own family office.

The unionization campaign that defines Starbucks' current labor era began at a single store in Buffalo, New York, and grew into the largest retail organizing drive of its generation. By mid-2026, more than fifteen thousand workers at 706 United States stores had voted to unionize with Workers United, and the union and company had been negotiating toward a national collective bargaining framework since February 2024. The pressure has expressed itself in strikes as well as elections: the longest strike lasted sixty-four days in Brookline, Massachusetts, and ended with the store's workers unionizing, while the largest single action came on March 22, 2023, when 117 union locations staged a one-day strike framed as outlasting interim chief executive Howard Schultz, who had resigned ahead of his Senate testimony. Smaller union footholds exist elsewhere, including about a third of the Chilean workforce, hundreds of workers in New Zealand, and eight stores in Canada.

Starbucks opened in Seattle on March 30, 1971, founded by business partners Jerry Baldwin, Zev Siegl, and Gordon Bowker, who had met as students at the University of San Francisco and were inspired by roasting entrepreneur Alfred Peet to sell high-quality coffee beans and equipment. For its first decade the business operated as a local coffee bean retailer, with no drinks sold at all. The first store stood at 2000 Western Avenue until 1976, when it moved to 1912 Pike Place, the location that became the brand's shrine. In the first two years the founders bought green coffee beans from Peet's, until Peet stopped supplying them in 1973 and helped train their new roastmaster, Jim Reynolds. Even the name carried the founders' idiosyncratic logic, emerging from a list of words beginning with st and a misreading of a Cascade Range mining town before landing on Starbuck, the chief mate in Moby-Dick.

The project that became Netflix's first flagship original began at an independent studio. Media Rights Capital, founded by Mordecai Wiczyk and Asif Satchu, purchased the rights to House of Cards, the political story based on Michael Dobbs's 1989 novel and the 1990 BBC series starring Ian Richardson, with the intention of creating an American series. While wrapping production on his 2008 film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, director David Fincher was shown the BBC series by his agent and became interested in television's long-form possibilities, reasoning that film did not allow the complex characterizations television did. Beau Willimon, who had served as an aide to Chuck Schumer, Howard Dean, and Hillary Clinton, was hired as writer and completed the pilot script in early 2011, seeing the chance to build an entirely new series from the original and deepen its story. The pieces, a prestige director, a political insider writer, and a rights-holder without a network, were assembled just as Netflix began looking for a show that would announce its ambitions.

Grok descends directly from Musk's OpenAI grievance. A co-founder of OpenAI in December 2015 and initially its co-chair, he left the board in 2018 over disagreements with the team's direction, having pledged $1 billion but donated about $50 million. When ChatGPT launched in late 2022 and GPT-4 arrived in March 2023, Musk signed the Future of Life Institute's open letter calling for a six-month pause on training systems more powerful than GPT-4, then told a television interviewer in April 2023 that he would build a maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe, provisionally named TruthGPT. The product that emerged in November 2023 was Grok, its name taken from Robert Heinlein's verb for deep, intuitive understanding, previewed to X Premium subscribers as an early beta built with two months of training. Grok-1 was open-sourced in 2024, and successive model families added image generation, web search, and simulated reasoning modes.

Howard Schultz, born in Brooklyn on July 19, 1953, served as Starbucks chairman and chief executive across three distinct eras, from 1986 to 2000, from 2008 to 2017, and as interim chief executive from 2022 to 2023. He joined the original Starbucks Coffee Company in 1982 as director of retail operations and marketing, left to found Il Giornale, and merged that espresso-bar venture back into Starbucks in the late 1980s. Under his leadership the company built a store network that reshaped coffee culture in Seattle, across the United States, and internationally, while large-scale distribution deals made it the largest coffeehouse chain in the world. He took Starbucks public in 1992 at a 271 million dollar valuation and used the proceeds to double the store count, stepped aside for Orin Smith in 2000, then returned during the 2008 financial crisis to dismiss executives, close hundreds of stores, and rebuild the brand. The rapid expansion under Schultz earned him comparison to Ray Kroc, the franchise architect of McDonald's.

Walter Isaacson's authorized biography, published September 12, 2023, by Simon and Schuster, embedded the chronicler of Jobs, Einstein, and Franklin inside Musk's operations for two years, visiting the SpaceX and Tesla factories, attending board meetings, and standing by when Musk decided to buy Twitter and to launch his artificial-intelligence company. The book's central characterization is that Musk is addicted to drama. Its most contested passage alleged that Musk ordered Starlink deactivated to thwart a 2022 Ukrainian drone attack on the Russian fleet near Crimea; Musk denied ordering a shutdown, and Isaacson retracted the account after it emerged the coastline had been geofenced before the attack, with corrections appended by the outlets that had excerpted the book. Reception split sharply: it debuted at number one on the New York Times nonfiction list while critics variously called it too patient, insight-free, or a dated great-man treatment, and it closes on Isaacson's line about risk-seeking innovators crazy enough to think they can change the world.

The SEC's scrutiny followed Musk into the Twitter acquisition itself. The investigation, running since May 2022, centers on his late disclosure of the 9.2 percent Twitter position on April 4, 2022, twenty-one days after he crossed the 5 percent threshold requiring a Schedule 13D filing, and on his use of the 13G form reserved for passive investors rather than the 13D required of activist acquirers, alongside questions over whether his takeover tweets constituted material changes requiring disclosure. Musk testified twice in half-day sessions in July 2022, then resisted a third: he failed to appear in September 2023, with his lawyer declaring that enough was enough, prompting the agency to obtain a court order compelling testimony. Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler and District Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley successively rejected his objections, and after a deposition skipped hours before its start, the agency sued him in January 2025 for securities violations tied to the purchase.

NASA's Commercial Crew Program supplies the institutional frame for SpaceX's astronaut business. Conceived in 2011 as the agency shifted from developing crew vehicles internally to buying crew transportation as a commercial service, the program awarded fixed-price contracts to Boeing and SpaceX in 2014 after open competitions, with each provider required to pass pad-abort, uncrewed-orbital, launch-abort, and crewed-orbital demonstrations before human-rating. The spacecraft are owned and operated by the vendors rather than NASA, a structural inversion of traditional aerospace procurement. Delays pushed operational service from 2017 to 2020, forcing the agency to keep buying Russian Soyuz seats through the gap. SpaceX began service in May 2020 with Crew Dragon on the Falcon 9, and launched the first operational rotation, Crew-1, that November, with roughly half-year missions swapping crews of up to four astronauts, while Boeing's Starliner remained uncertified for crewed rotations years after SpaceX was flying routinely.

William Henry Gates III, born in Seattle on October 28, 1955, co-founded Microsoft with his childhood friend Paul Allen in 1975 and became the defining executive of the microcomputer revolution. He ran the company as chief executive for twenty-five years, added the presidency and board chairmanship when Microsoft incorporated in 1981, and became the world's youngest self-made billionaire in 1987 at thirty-one, a year after the public offering began compounding his stake. Forbes ranked him the wealthiest person alive in eighteen of the twenty-four years between 1995 and 2017, and in 1999 he became the first person whose net worth briefly passed one hundred billion dollars. Over time he traded operating control for philanthropic scale, co-chairing the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation with Melinda French Gates from 2000 until 2024, and Time counted him among the twentieth century's hundred most influential people. He and French Gates jointly received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016.

Pan Shiyi — founder profiled in the Chinese Founder Ledger — is documented as follows: co-founded SOHO China with wife Zhang Xin in 1995, building it into one of China's leading real estate developers known for landmark Beijing office projects, then resigned as chairman in September 2022 -- after a failed 2020-2021 attempt to sell the company to Blackstone -- to focus on philanthropy and the arts, having since relocated primarily to the United States. The profile is grounded in the 2 sources indexed for this founder.

Wang Wei (Dick Wang) — founder profiled in the Chinese Founder Ledger — is documented as follows: founded SF Express in the early 1990s to serve Hong Kong-bound manufacturers in Guangdong's Shunde district, built it into a major logistics conglomerate, and remains its chairman and majority shareholder. The profile is grounded in the 1 sources indexed for this founder.

The Foundation's official profile frames Nadar as a pioneer of the computing and IT industry in India, crediting him with steering HCL through every technological revolution since 1976 — from mainframe-era indigenous computers through client-server, software services and modern engineering R&D, a 48-year arc few 1970s-founded IT firms anywhere have matched.

Li Xiang — founder profiled in the Chinese Founder Ledger — is documented as follows: founded electric-vehicle maker Li Auto and continues to lead it as chairman and CEO, publicly emphasizing healthy gross margins as a core strategic goal amid intense competition in China's EV market as of mid-2026. The profile is grounded in the 2 sources indexed for this founder.

Liu Yongxing — founder profiled in the Chinese Founder Ledger — is documented as follows: one of four siblings from a family stigmatized as wealthy landlords before the Cultural Revolution, he and his three brothers built a quail-and-chicken-hatching business in 1982 into the Hope Group, which split into four sibling-led companies in 1995, with Liu Yongxing retaining and building East Hope Group into a major player in agribusiness, chemicals, and non-ferrous metals. The profile is grounded in the 1 sources indexed for this founder.

Wang Ning — founder profiled in the Chinese Founder Ledger — is documented as follows: founded Pop Mart in 2010 as a variety store in Beijing's Zhongguancun district inspired by Japanese gashapon vending machines, took it public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in December 2020, and continues to lead it as CEO through the global viral popularity of its Labubu toy line. The profile is grounded in the 2 sources indexed for this founder.

Wang Ning's Pop Mart mar 25, 2026 · Pop Mart's revenue and net income in 2025 surged 185% and 309%, respectively.

On March 25, 2026, Pop Mart's shares fell more than 20% intraday -- their biggest drop in nearly a year -- after the company reported 2025 annual earnings that broadly met revenue expectations; the CEO responded by emphasizing balanced growth over an aggressive revenue strategy and signaled plans to expand product categories including into home appliances.

Zhou Hongyi — founder profiled in the Chinese Founder Ledger — is documented as follows: xi'an Jiaotong University-trained entrepreneur who founded search-keyword company 3721 in 1998, sold it to Yahoo! in 2004 for $120 million, then left after management disagreements to found internet-security company Qihoo 360. The profile is grounded in the 1 sources indexed for this founder.

Ding Lei — founder profiled in the Chinese Founder Ledger — is documented as follows: founder of NetEase, China's second-largest video gaming company at the time of a 2022 SCMP report, who stepped back from a front-line corporate role at a NetEase gaming affiliate amid tightened Chinese regulatory scrutiny of the gaming sector. The profile is grounded in the 2 sources indexed for this founder.

Microsoft was founded on April 4, 1975, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, after Paul Allen, then a programmer at Honeywell, saw the January 1975 Popular Electronics cover story on the Altair 8800 while walking through Harvard Square. Allen bought the magazine, rushed to Bill Gates's Currier House residence, and the two resolved to build a BASIC implementation for the machine. They pitched MITS a demonstration before any interpreter existed, then spent roughly eight weeks, with the help of Monte Davidoff, writing one; when Allen flew to Albuquerque, the software ran, and MITS agreed to distribute it as Altair BASIC. Allen moved to Albuquerque, Gates quit Harvard to join him, and the partnership they incorporated there booked $16,005 of revenue by the end of 1976, a modest figure that nonetheless marked the birth of a company built on selling software as a product.

Zerodha opened for business on 15 August 2010 with the goal of dismantling barriers traders and investors faced in India around cost, support and technology; the name itself fuses the English word zero with the Sanskrit rodha, meaning barrier — a thesis turned into a brand identity.

Ding Lei's NetEase may 21, 2026 · Net revenues were RMB30.6 billion (US$4.4 billion), an increase of 6.1% compared with the same quarter of 2025. · Gross profit was RMB21. · Total .

Dong Mingzhu — founder profiled in the Chinese Founder Ledger — is documented as follows: widowed at 36, she left her young son with his grandmother, moved to Guangdong, and joined Gree's predecessor company as an air-conditioner saleswoman in 1990, rising to president by 2001 and chairwoman by 2012, building Gree from an air-conditioner maker into a conglomerate spanning smart equipment, industrial robots, and new energy. The profile is grounded in the 2 sources indexed for this founder.

Wang Chuanfu — founder profiled in the Chinese Founder Ledger — is documented as follows: founded battery maker BYD in 1995 and steered its diversification into electric vehicles, building it into a company that, per his own June 2026 statement, aims to become the world's largest automaker by scale within five years. The profile is grounded in the 3 sources indexed for this founder.

Wang Chuanfu's BYD jun 10, 2026 — BYD ranked sixth globally in 2025 with 4.6 million vehicles sold—no.

Wang Chuanfu's BYD jun 9, 2026 — BYD targets global top spot in scale within five years, chairman Wang Chuanfu .

The 1986 initial public offering, opening at $21 and closing near $28, created extraordinary wealth inside Microsoft: the subsequent rise of the stock made an estimated four billionaires and twelve thousand millionaires of the company's employees, with Gates's retained 44.9 percent stake anchoring his decades atop the wealth rankings. The company Steve Ballmer inherited as chief executive in 2000 and handed to Satya Nadella on February 4, 2014, kept compounding. Microsoft became the third United States public company to be valued at over one trillion dollars in April 2019, and pandemic-era demand pushed its valuation toward two trillion as cloud computing carried earnings. Both Standard & Poor's and Moody's have awarded the company a AAA credit rating, a distinction its assets and low borrowing costs long supported, and it overtook ExxonMobil in November 2014 to become the second most valuable public company behind Apple.

Paul Gardner Allen, two years older than Gates, met him at Seattle's Lakeside School, which Allen attended from 1965 to 1971, and the two sharpened their programming on the school's Teletype terminals and on University of Washington machines until they were banned from the laboratory in 1971 for abusing their privileges. It was Allen who bought the Popular Electronics issue announcing the Altair 8800 and rushed it to Gates, and Allen who convinced Gates to leave Harvard to build the software company that became Microsoft. Allen named the partnership, negotiated the first MITS demonstration, and wrote the interpreter's make-or-break bootloader on the flight to Albuquerque. His 2011 memoir, Idea Man, fixed his reputation as the technologist and visionary half of the founding duo, the one who saw the personal-computing future first and pulled Gates into it, with the title itself a summary of how Allen understood the partnership's division of labor.

Mukesh Dhirubhai Ambani (born April 19, 1957 in Aden, then a British crown colony) is the chairman and managing director of Reliance Industries and, as of mid-2026, the wealthiest person in Asia with a fortune near $92 billion. He took over Reliance after his father Dhirubhai's death in 2002 and expanded far beyond the founding textiles and petrochemicals into telecom, retail, media and energy.

The machine that created Microsoft's market came from Ed Roberts's MITS, founded in an Albuquerque garage in 1969 by Roberts and Forrest Mims to sell model-rocket telemetry kits, which evolved into calculator kits featured on Popular Electronics covers. Texas Instruments' decision to sell finished calculators at less than half the prevailing price devastated the kit business and left Roberts struggling under roughly a quarter-million dollars of debt, forcing the bet on a computer kit: the Altair 8800, built on the Intel 8080 and featured on the January 1975 Popular Electronics cover, sold by mail order with no screen or keyboard, programmed through front-panel switches or a serial terminal. It became the first commercially successful personal computer, its bus became the industry-standard S-100, and, as computing pioneer Harry Garland put it, the product catalyzed the entire microcomputer revolution. Its first programming language was Altair BASIC, Microsoft's founding product.

When Gates and Allen read about the Altair in January 1975, they understood that computer prices would soon fall far enough that selling software for them could be a real business, and they told MITS founder Ed Roberts they were developing a BASIC interpreter, though none existed, following the engineering custom of the trial balloon. Roberts agreed to a demonstration in March 1975, giving them weeks to deliver. Allen adapted an Intel 8008 emulator he had written for Traf-O-Data to simulate the 8080 on Harvard's PDP-10, and the pair developed and tested the interpreter there; Harvard officials were displeased but found no written policy against it, so debugging finished on time purchased from a Boston timesharing service. Monte Davidoff, a fellow student, argued for floating-point arithmetic and was hired to build it. The finished interpreter, with its own input-output system and line editor, fit in four kilobytes of memory.

Zip2, the first Musk company, was incorporated in Palo Alto in November 1995 as Global Link Information Network by Elon and Kimbal Musk with Greg Kouri, seeded with roughly $2,000 from Elon, $5,000 from Kimbal, and $8,000 from Kouri, plus angel investors. The idea came from a summer internship encounter with a Yellow Pages salesman pitching online business listings. Elon Musk wired a free Navteq navigation database together with a Palo Alto business listing database to build the first version of an online city-guide system for newspapers. The theater was entrepreneurial from the start: he built a large casing around a standard computer and rolled it out for investor visits so that Zip2 appeared to run on a mini-supercomputer. After Mohr Davidow Ventures invested $3 million in 1996, the company pivoted from selling internet presence to local businesses toward licensing city-guide software to newspapers, and Musk became chief technology officer under an outside chief executive. Contracts with The New York Times, Knight Ridder, and Hearst followed, and by 1998 about 160 newspapers were partners.

In February 1976, after discovering that a pre-release copy of Altair BASIC had leaked and was being copied widely through the hobbyist community, Gates wrote An Open Letter to Hobbyists in the MITS newsletter. He asserted that more than ninety percent of Altair BASIC users had not paid Microsoft for it, and that such unpaid copying threatened to eliminate the incentive for anyone to develop, distribute, and maintain high-quality software. The unfairness he attacked was hobbyists gaining the benefit of authors' time, effort, and capital without paying, and the same argument led him to refuse to publish the source code, keeping the program's blueprints from being copied from library shelves into hobby machines. The letter made Gates deeply unpopular among hobbyists, many of whom saw software sharing as the culture's point, but he persisted in the conviction that developers deserved payment, a position the entire software industry eventually institutionalized.

The Acquirers Multiple's analysis of Klarman's 2026 portfolio positioning examined the most recent quarterly filings and concluded that Baupost had continued to hold unusually large cash reserves relative to its historical norms and relative to the posture of comparable firms in the value-investing community. The analysis noted that the firm's reported long positions had been trimmed in several sectors where prices had run ahead of underlying business fundamentals, with the proceeds held in cash rather than redeployed into fresh opportunities that would have required accepting thinner margins of safety than the firm typically demands. The pattern was consistent with Klarman's stated view that genuine bargains had become scarce in the prevailing market environment, and that the prudent posture was to preserve optionality rather than to extend into the same risk premia that the broader market had already compressed and that the broader market had already embraced. The piece highlighted that the decision to hold cash is itself an investment decision, and one that is unusually difficult to sustain in an industry paid to deploy capital and in which the structural incentives push managers toward full investment regardless of the attractiveness of the available opportunities. Klarman's structure as a private partnership allows him to forgo the pressure to be fully invested that constrains most fund managers and that drives the average mutual fund toward holding a portfolio that resembles the index regardless of the underlying valuations, and the 2026 positioning reflected that freedom. The analysis suggested that the cash reserves were not a passive stance but an active preparation for the dislocations that typically emerge when speculative phases reverse, with the firm positioned to act as a forced buyer when others are forced to sell and to do so at prices that finally reflect genuine pessimism rather than the complacent optimism that has characterized the prior phase. The article also noted that Klarman's willingness to underperform during speculative phases is itself a form of risk management, since the avoidance of permanent loss in those environments often translates into outperformance once the cycle reverses and the assets that had been unobtainable during the euphoria become available at prices that finally reflect a margin of safety. The Acquirers Multiple framed the 2026 positioning as a continuation of the posture that had distinguished Baupost in prior market dislocations, with the firm preserving the optionality to deploy capital aggressively when prices finally reflected genuine pessimism rather than extending further into the same compressed risk premia that the broader market had already embraced. The analysis treated the cash position as the most informative single data point in the entire filing and as a deliberate signal about the state of the market and about the firm's expectations for the period ahead.

Before Microsoft, there was Traf-O-Data, the 1970s partnership among Gates, Allen, and hardware builder Paul Gilbert. Roadway traffic counts were then recorded mechanically on paper tape, with time and axle counts punched as patterns, and state and local governments paid firms to process them; the two Lakeside students reasoned they could do the work cheaper and faster with a machine built on the newly announced Intel 8008 microprocessor. Neither knew hardware design, so Gilbert became the third partner and built a prototype that read the tape's hole patterns onto computer cards, while Gates used a University of Washington machine to produce the traffic-flow charts. The business achieved only modest success, but it mattered far beyond its revenue: Allen's 8008 emulator, written for Traf-O-Data, became the foundation on which the two simulated the Altair and wrote the BASIC interpreter that launched Microsoft.

86-DOS began in April 1980, when Seattle Computer Products assigned twenty-four-year-old Tim Paterson to build a substitute for CP/M-86, which Digital Research had not yet finished for the new 8086 processor, so the company could sell its memory boards with a working operating system. The result was a CP/M work-alike for 8086 hardware that Microsoft spotted as the answer to IBM's operating-system problem. In December 1980, Microsoft purchased a non-exclusive license for 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products for $25,000, enough to begin adapting it while the IBM negotiations proceeded. Then, in July 1981, one month before the IBM PC's release, Microsoft bought all remaining rights to the system outright for an additional $50,000. Those two payments, totaling $75,000, secured the asset that MS-DOS was built on, and Paterson himself joined Microsoft to adapt the code for the PC, a transaction that ranks among the great bargains in the industry's history.

The IBM contract itself earned Microsoft only a small one-time fee for PC DOS, but the prestige of IBM's adoption transformed the firm, and the licensing structure turned that prestige into an empire. Because Gates had declined to transfer the copyright on the operating system to IBM, believing other makers would clone the PC's hardware, Microsoft kept the right to sell its own derivative, MS-DOS, to anyone. Columbia Data Products successfully cloned the IBM BIOS, Eagle Computer and Compaq followed, and a flood of IBM-compatible machines all needed an operating system that Microsoft was free to license non-exclusively, one deal at a time. Through aggressive marketing to clone makers, Microsoft rose from a small player to one of the industry's major vendors, and by the mid-1980s more than ninety percent of the fifteen million Americans using PCs at work were running its operating system. PC Magazine asked whether Gates was the man behind the machine.

Microsoft's graphical ambitions predated the Macintosh's success. Gates wanted a graphical user interface as early as 1981, and the spark came at COMDEX 1982, where he saw VisiCorp's Visi On suite demonstrated for IBM-compatible machines; a year later Microsoft learned Apple's GUI, built partly on Xerox PARC research, was far more advanced, and decided it had to differentiate. In August 1983 Gates recruited Scott McGregor, a key developer of PARC's original windowing system, to lead the Windows team, and the environment made its public debut at Fall COMDEX in November 1983, described as a device driver for MS-DOS 2.0 requiring 192 kilobytes of memory and two floppy drives. The retail version finally shipped on November 20, 1985, two years late, as a tiled-window shell over MS-DOS that reviewers received lukewarmly, criticizing its performance and thin software compatibility, though unlike Apple's closed Lisa it could immediately run existing DOS software.

PayPal's corporate genetics came from Confinity, established in December 1998 by Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, and Luke Nosek as Fieldlink, a security-software startup that pivoted to a digital wallet when its first business foundered; the first version of the PayPal payments system launched in 1999. In March 2000 Confinity merged with X.com, the online financial-services company Musk had co-founded in March 1999 with Harris Fricker, Christopher Payne, and Ed Ho. Musk was optimistic about the money-transfer business; X.com president Bill Harris disagreed about its prospects and left in May 2000. That October, Musk decided X.com would terminate its other internet-banking operations and concentrate on payments, the same month the board replaced him with Thiel as chief executive. The company was renamed PayPal in June 2001 and went public in 2002 at $13 per share, raising over $61 million before eBay acquired it that October for $1.5 billion in stock.

Apple's 1988 copyright suit against Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard sought to block GUI elements resembling the Lisa and Macintosh systems, and its collapse cleared Windows' path. Apple argued that the look and feel of the Macintosh interface, taken as a whole, was protected, and it listed 189 interface elements it claimed were infringed; the court found that 179 of those had already been licensed to Microsoft in the Windows 1.0 agreement, and that most of the rest were either unoriginal to Apple or the only possible expression of an underlying idea. The district court set a standard of virtual identity for infringement, which the Ninth Circuit almost entirely affirmed in 1994, holding that the similarities sprang from the license or from basic ideas and their obvious expression, and the Supreme Court declined to hear Apple's appeal. Apple's only win covered the trash can and folder icons in Hewlett-Packard's NewWave; a parallel Xerox suit against Apple was dismissed.

The road to the antitrust trial ran through a decade of escalating scrutiny. The Federal Trade Commission opened an inquiry in 1990 into whether Microsoft was abusing its PC operating-system monopoly, deadlocked two-to-two in 1993, and closed the file; the Department of Justice under Janet Reno then opened its own investigation, producing a July 15, 1994 consent decree in which Microsoft agreed not to tie other products to Windows sales but remained free to integrate additional features into the operating system. That distinction became the battlefield: Microsoft insisted Internet Explorer was not a product but a feature it was allowed to add, while the government disagreed. With more than ninety percent of workplace PCs running its systems, Microsoft's licensing restrictions on manufacturers, its treatment of rival browsers, and its manipulation of application programming interfaces drew the government's case that bundling had unlawfully foreclosed competitors.

Elon Reeve Musk, born June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa's administrative capital, sits at the center of Tesla and SpaceX as chief executive and largest shareholder of both, and has ranked as the wealthiest person in the world in recent years. Born into an affluent family, his father Errol an electromechanical engineer, property developer, and one-time emerald dealer, his mother Maye a Canadian-born model and dietitian, he emigrated to Canada in 1989 at eighteen and moved on to the University of Pennsylvania. His career is an unbroken sequence of compounding bets: the software exits of the 1990s, the electric-vehicle and rocket ventures of the 2000s, the tunneling, neurotechnology, and artificial-intelligence companies of the 2010s, and the 2022 purchase of Twitter. His Wikipedia biography also records a turn into public office, reflecting later government work. The connective thread is a stated ambition to reshape energy generation, transport, space access, and digital discourse itself.

Wang Chuanfu's BYD jun 10, 2026 — Wang Chuanfu , chairman of BYD , 4.6 million vehicles sold, its second-generation Blade Battery , key growth bottleneck, strong exports and .

Gates's most consequential personnel decision came on June 11, 1980, when he persuaded Steve Ballmer, his Harvard friend, to abandon a Stanford MBA program and join Microsoft as its thirtieth employee and first business manager. Ballmer arrived with a Harvard degree in mathematics and economics from the class of 1977 and two years as an assistant product manager at Procter & Gamble, where his office mate was Jeff Immelt, the future General Electric chief. The original terms were $50,000 in salary plus ten percent of the profit he generated, with no equity, an arrangement restructured when Microsoft incorporated in 1981, swapping the profit share for an eight percent stake that Gates funded the majority of after Allen initially objected. Ballmer went on to run operations, operating systems development, and sales, becoming the de facto number two to Gates, then president in 1998 and chief executive in January 2000, before retiring in February 2014 in favor of Satya Nadella.

Internet Explorer began in the summer of 1994 as a project started by Thomas Reardon, built on source code licensed from Spyglass, which had developed the Mosaic browser under license from the University of Illinois. The deal promised Spyglass a quarterly fee plus a percentage of Microsoft's non-Windows revenues for the software, but Microsoft chose to give the browser away free with Windows, so the royalties never materialized; Spyglass sued, and the parties settled for eight million dollars on January 22, 1997. The first version, dubbed Microsoft Internet Explorer, shipped inside the Internet Jumpstart Kit in the Plus! pack for Windows 95 in August 1995, and subsequent versions were folded into service packs and the OEM releases of Windows 95 and later systems, embedding the browser so deeply into the platform that the practice became the core exhibit in the government's antitrust case.

SpaceX began with a greenhouse. In early 2001 Musk met Mars Society founder Robert Zubrin, donated $100,000, and briefly joined its board; that August he announced Mars Oasis, a project to land a greenhouse on Mars and grow plants on the red planet. The launch problem sent him twice to Moscow seeking repurposed intercontinental ballistic missiles from Russian suppliers, trips that ended without a deal. On the flight home, with Michael Griffin, the future NASA administrator, beside him, Musk concluded he could simply start a company to build affordable rockets, applying vertical integration, commercial off-the-shelf components, and the modular methods of modern software engineering to cut launch costs. He founded Space Exploration Technologies in May 2002 with roughly $100 million of his own early fortune, operating from a warehouse in El Segundo, California, and personally interviewing and approving the earliest hires, including engine builder Tom Mueller and future president Gwynne Shotwell.

Microsoft introduced its most successful office product on August 8, 1989, as a bundle of separate applications rather than the integrated single program of Microsoft Works, packaging the word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation tools customers already knew individually. The Windows version followed in October 1990 as a bundle of three applications built for Windows 3.0, and it became the vehicle by which Microsoft converted its operating-system position into applications dominance during the DOS-to-Windows transition. Excel had originally competed against the then-dominant Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet and eventually outsold it, while Word displaced WordPerfect as the suite era consolidated. Competitors alleged that Microsoft used inside knowledge of the DOS and Windows kernels and undocumented application programming interfaces to make Office run better than rivals' products, claims Novell pressed in court; whatever the merits, Office ended the 1990s as the dominant business suite, with market share far exceeding every competitor.

Gates studied the philanthropy of Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller before building his own, donating Microsoft stock in 1994 to create the William H. Gates Foundation; in 2000 he and his wife combined three family foundations and donated stock valued at five billion dollars to create the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. By 2013 it was identified as the world's largest charitable foundation, with assets reportedly above $34.6 billion, and its structure drew on the Rockefeller model of tackling global problems governments ignore. Its program divisions span global development, global health, United States programs, and global policy and advocacy, funding fights against AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria, vaccine campaigns to eradicate polio, sanitation and agriculture programs including Golden Rice, and family-planning access. David Rockefeller's personal generosity was a credited influence, and unlike some peers the foundation lets benefactors see how its money is spent.

Baupost's quarterly 13F filings consistently show a concentrated portfolio of fewer than thirty positions, with the top several holdings often representing the majority of disclosed equity exposure. Klarman has been explicit that the firm sees concentration as the natural consequence of process: when only a handful of ideas clear the firm's downside-first test, the portfolio simply reflects that. He contrasts this with the diversification taught in modern portfolio theory, which he views as a hedge against ignorance. In his framing, broad diversification is appropriate when an investor lacks the analytical conviction to differentiate opportunities. When an investor has done the work, broad diversification becomes a drag on returns without meaningfully reducing risk. The 13F further reveals that Baupost's positions are built slowly, often across multiple quarters. Rather than entering at a single price, the firm scales into positions as prices fluctuate around its estimate of value. This behavior is consistent with a value discipline: each incremental purchase is justified only when the price remains below the conservative estimate of intrinsic value, regardless of how much has already been accumulated.

Wang Chuanfu's BYD jun 10, 2026 — Note: BYD now has 8 of their own ro-ro ships. The last five were commissioned in 2025 .

The Science History Institute records that when Mazumdar-Shaw became managing director of Biocon India she ran newspaper ads describing the company as a 'multinational company' — without mentioning that Biocon India was operating out of her home garage. With two employees, a master brewer's certificate and her father's blessing, she started an industrial-enzyme business for food and textile makers that today reaches patients around the globe.

Post the Blinkit acquisition Zomato has invested roughly 2,800 crore rupees into the quick-commerce unit, including a 500-crore infusion in January 2025. The continuing capital top-ups indicate that quick-commerce remained a cash-hungry vertical even after integration, requiring ongoing investment to defend share against Swiggy Instamart, Zepto and newer entrants.

The Giving Pledge, formally announced in June 2010 by Bill Gates, Melinda French Gates, and Warren Buffett, asks the wealthy to commit the majority of their net worth, more than half, to philanthropy in their lifetimes or wills. It is a public gesture of intention rather than a legal contract, and each signer writes a letter explaining the decision; the pledge is even open to non-billionaires who plan to give away at least $500 million. The early traction was extraordinary: the first forty pledgers represented $125 billion of aggregate wealth by August 2010, and the campaign has since grown past 250 signatories from 30 countries whose combined wealth runs to roughly $600 billion. Momentum has slowed, with 113 signing in the first five years, 72 in the next five, and 43 in the five after that, and the list has occasionally purged members, removing Sam Bankman-Fried in 2022 and T. Denny Sanford in 2023.

The Road Ahead, published in November 1995 by Viking and co-written with Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold and journalist Peter Rinearson, summarized the personal-computing revolution and forecast a future transformed by a global information superhighway. Gates received a $2.5 million advance, with his proceeds and subsidiary-rights money donated to encourage educational technology through a foundation created by the National Education Association. The book shipped with a CD-ROM carrying the text and supplemental material, and the publisher's promotional budget of one million dollars ranked among its largest ever, rivaling the campaign for Colin Powell's memoir. The hardback treated the Internet as an important precursor of the coming highway, suggesting one could think of it as the beginning, the way the Oregon Trail prefigured the interstate; within a year the Internet's explosion forced a substantially revised trade paperback from Penguin in October 1996, promising readers a completely updated edition.

Gates founded Breakthrough Energy in 2015 as an umbrella for organizations accelerating innovation in sustainable energy and other emissions-cutting technologies. At the November 2015 United Nations climate conference in Paris he announced a coalition of twenty-eight wealthy investors from ten countries, alongside a complementary initiative, Mission Innovation, in which twenty national governments pledged to double spending on carbon-free energy research. In December 2016 the effort crystallized into a one-billion-dollar Breakthrough Energy Ventures fund, backed by investors collectively worth $170 billion, including Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, Richard Branson, Ray Dalio, Jack Ma, Mark Zuckerberg, Reid Hoffman, and Meg Whitman. The fund's discipline is patience: it targets businesses where failure risk is high and the investment horizon runs twenty years, against the five-year norm of traditional venture capital. Gates, who had already committed a personal two billion dollars, argued that existing renewables like wind and solar were advancing but the scale of the challenge demanded exploring many paths.

TerraPower, the Bellevue-based nuclear reactor company Gates co-founded and chairs, began with a traveling-wave reactor design and a 2015 agreement with China National Nuclear Corporation to build a 600-megawatt prototype at Xiapu in Fujian province, with commercial plants planned for the late 2020s; the project was abandoned in January 2019 when the Trump administration restricted the necessary technology transfers. The company then won a October 2020 Department of Energy award, between $400 million and $4 billion over five to seven years, under the Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program for its sodium-cooled Natrium design. In June 2021 TerraPower and PacifiCorp, a Berkshire Hathaway Energy subsidiary, announced plans for a joint reactor, and on November 16, 2021, Kemmerer, Wyoming, was selected from four coal-reliant candidate towns. The 345-megawatt project, estimated at four billion dollars with the department covering half and Gates contributing a billion, broke ground in June 2024 and received its construction permit in March 2026, the first ever granted for a non-light-water reactor.

Steven Paul Jobs, born in San Francisco on February 24, 1955, and raised by adoptive parents in what became Silicon Valley, built the defining founder arc of the personal computer age. With Steve Wozniak he co-founded Apple Computer in 1976 to sell the Apple I, gained fame and wealth with the mass-produced Apple II, and pushed graphical computing into the mainstream with the 1984 Macintosh. The board removed him in 1985, and in exile he founded NeXT and bought the Lucasfilm graphics unit that became Pixar. Apple, near bankruptcy, acquired NeXT in 1997, returning Jobs to the company he had co-founded; as chief executive he revived it with the iMac, iPod, iTunes, iPhone, App Store, and iPad, and by 2011 it stood among the world's most valuable publicly traded companies. He resigned as chief executive in August 2011 and died of a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor in Palo Alto that October, at fifty-six.

Bahl is co-founder of AceVector Limited, the holding company that now houses Snapdeal, Unicommerce and Stellaro Brands — a structural answer to the question of how the founders reorganise their corporate identity after Snapdeal's failed-unicorn phase.

A workplace frustration seeded the venture. As a Bain & Company consultant in 2007, Deepinder Goyal noticed colleagues repeatedly lining up at a shared notice board to read printed restaurant menus before ordering lunch. He and fellow Bain analyst Pankaj Chaddah digitised those menus into a website called FoodieBay in 2008, sidestepping the engineering-hero narrative that surrounds most Indian startup origin stories.

Rong Desheng — founder profiled in the Chinese Founder Ledger — is documented as follows: younger of the two Rong brothers, responsible for management and technical development of the family's flour and textile empire; assumed full leadership after 1938 and refused to sell the business to Japanese interests during wartime pressure. The profile is grounded in the 2 sources indexed for this founder.

William Li (Li Bin) — founder profiled in the Chinese Founder Ledger — is documented as follows: founded electric-vehicle maker NIO and continues to lead it as chairman and CEO; delivered a July 2026 speech at Peking University 30 years after his own time there, according to CnEVPost. The profile is grounded in the 3 sources indexed for this founder.

Li attended Peking University roughly three decades before a July 2026 return visit where he delivered a speech, per CnEVPost's report title, though the fetched content did not include the full text of what he said.

Su Hua — founder profiled in the Chinese Founder Ledger — is documented as follows: co-founded Kuaishou and led it as CEO before stepping down in October 2021 to focus on long-term strategy, transferring day-to-day operational responsibility to co-founder Cheng Yixiao while remaining chairman with unchanged voting rights. The profile is grounded in the 1 sources indexed for this founder.

Zhang Chaoyang (Charles Zhang) — founder profiled in the Chinese Founder Ledger — is documented as follows: mIT-trained physicist who founded Sohu, one of China's earliest internet portals, listed it on NASDAQ in 2000, and has more recently taken on public roles as an educator and commentator, including urging students to reconsider graduate school and defer career plans. The profile is grounded in the 2 sources indexed for this founder.

Rong Zongjing — founder profiled in the Chinese Founder Ledger — is documented as follows: wuxi-born industrialist who, with younger brother Rong Desheng, built China's largest privately owned flour-milling and cotton-textile empire in the Republican era, reportedly controlling roughly a third of China's flour output and 30 percent of its cotton output by the early 1920s. The profile is grounded in the 2 sources indexed for this founder.

Gautam Shantilal Adani (born June 24, 1962, Ahmedabad, Gujarat) is founder and chairman of the Adani Group, a multinational conglomerate built around ports and infrastructure. As of mid-2026 he was India's second-richest person and 24th globally with about $89.6 billion of net worth. Time magazine named him to its 100 most influential people list in 2022.

Guo Guangchang — founder profiled in the Chinese Founder Ledger — is documented as follows: fudan University-educated founder who started a market-research firm in 1992, then built Fosun Group from 1994 into one of China's largest privately owned conglomerates spanning insurance, pharmaceuticals, property, steel, mining, retail, and asset management, briefly detained by Chinese police in December 2015 while 'assisting authorities with an investigation' before being released four days later, and stepped down from a subsidiary chairmanship in 2017 to give younger executives a bigger role while remaining chairman of the parent company. The profile is grounded in the 2 sources indexed for this founder.

Yu Minhong (Michael Yu) — founder profiled in the Chinese Founder Ledger — is documented as follows: founded New Oriental, China's largest private off-campus education company, and after Beijing's 2021 ban on for-profit tutoring devastated the business, personally pivoted into live-streaming e-commerce on Douyin, an initiative he called the 'third revolution of business.' The profile is grounded in the 2 sources indexed for this founder.

Liu Chuanzhi — founder profiled in the Chinese Founder Ledger — is documented as follows: institute of Computing Technology researcher who in 1984 used a 200,000-yuan state-institute investment to found what became Legend/Lenovo, later engineering Lenovo's 2004 acquisition of IBM's PC business before retiring from Legend Holdings' chairmanship in December 2019. The profile is grounded in the 2 sources indexed for this founder.

Li Xiting — founder profiled in the Chinese Founder Ledger — is documented as follows: university of Science and Technology of China physics graduate who worked as a researcher in Wuhan and France before co-founding medical-device maker Mindray in Shenzhen in 1991 with Xu Hang and Cheng Minghe, growing it into China's largest medical equipment manufacturer, listing it on the NYSE in 2006, taking it private in a 2016 buyout, and relisting it on China's A-share market; he became a naturalized Singaporean citizen in 2018. The profile is grounded in the 2 sources indexed for this founder.

Xu Jiayin — founder profiled in the Chinese Founder Ledger — is documented as follows: former steelworker who founded Evergrande and built it into China's largest real-estate developer before its 2021 default on roughly $300 billion in liabilities; detained by Chinese authorities in 2023, pleaded guilty in April 2026 to fraud, embezzlement and bribery charges, and was sentenced to life imprisonment by the Shenzhen Intermediate People's Court on August 20, 2026. The profile is grounded in the 4 sources indexed for this founder.

Xu Jiayin's China Evergrande chinese property developer Hui Ka Yan has been sentenced to life in prison.

Xu Jiayin's China Evergrande a court accepted a liquidation against Evergrande's property development unit a day after 67-year-old founder Hui Kan Yan was sentenced to .

Xu Jiayin's China Evergrande -yan to life imprisonment for “multiple combined crimes”, confiscating all of Hui's personal property.

Xu Jiayin's China Evergrande yan pleaded guilty in April to several charges, including embezzlement of assets and corporate bribery.

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, remembered as the two Steves, first met in mid-1971 when mutual friend Bill Fernandez introduced twenty-one-year-old Wozniak to sixteen-year-old Jobs. Their first partnership was the blue-box business: Wozniak built the tone devices after reading an Esquire article, once using one to call the Vatican while posing as Henry Kissinger, and Jobs managed to sell some two hundred of them at $150 apiece, splitting the profit evenly. By 1975 both had left their universities and were attending Homebrew Computer Club meetings, where machines like the Altair 8800 inspired Wozniak to build a microprocessor into his video terminal design. Priced-out of the Intel 8080 and Motorola 6800 chips, he waited until MOS Technology released its $20 6502 in 1976, wrote a BASIC for it, and adapted his paper design; by March 1, 1976, the machine that became the Apple I was working, and Jobs immediately saw its commercial potential where Wozniak had intended to share schematics for free.

Zhang Yiming — founder profiled in the Chinese Founder Ledger — is documented as follows: nankai University-trained engineer who founded ByteDance in 2012, developed news aggregator Toutiao and short-video platform Douyin (known internationally as TikTok), and stepped down as CEO in November 2021 while retaining the chairman title and majority voting control. The profile is grounded in the 1 sources indexed for this founder.

Xu is described by The Guardian as a former steelworker who rose to become one of China's richest people, later building Evergrande from real estate into sports, entertainment, and beverages, per Wikipedia.

Chen Tianqiao — founder profiled in the Chinese Founder Ledger — is documented as follows: fudan University economics graduate who founded online gaming company Shanda in 1999 with family members, grew it into China's largest internet company by market capitalization by 2004, took it private in 2012, and now runs Shanda Group as a family investment firm while funding brain-science research through the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute. The profile is grounded in the 2 sources indexed for this founder.

Zong Qinghou — founder profiled in the Chinese Founder Ledger — is documented as follows: former sent-down youth and salt-farm laborer who built Wahaha into China's leading beverage company, won a prolonged legal and trademark battle against joint-venture partner Danone in the mid-2000s, and served as an NPC delegate from 2002-2018 before dying in February 2024. The profile is grounded in the 4 sources indexed for this founder.

Rong-desheng belongs to Group 1 - Pre-1949 pioneers. The pre-1949 pioneers group anchors the ledger in China's early industrial modernization, covering founders who built flour, textile, match, and cotton-mill enterprises in the late-Qing and Republican periods, before the 1949 establishment of the People's Republic reshaped private industry.

Lei Jun belongs to Group 3 - Internet 1.0. The Internet 1.0 group covers founders who built China's first generation of consumer-internet platforms in the late-1990s and early-2000s dot-com era — search (Baidu), e-commerce (Alibaba), portals (Sohu), gaming and portals (NetEase, Tencent), security software (Qihoo 360), and smartphones-plus-software (Xiaomi) — a cohort shaped by the 2001 WTO accession and the PC-to-mobile transition.

NeXT, Inc. was founded in 1985 by Steve Jobs, the Apple co-founder ousted earlier that year, and was headquartered in Redwood City, California. Jobs seeded it with $7 million of his own money and was running out of funds with no product on the horizon when billionaire Ross Perot, watching a television documentary about the company, invested heavily and joined its board. The company initially built workstation computers for higher education and business markets, with Jobs as chairman and chief executive, Avie Tevanian and Bud Tribble running engineering, and a corporate logo designed by Paul Rand. Wozniak later observed that during the NeXT years Jobs was really getting his head together. The venture became Jobs's twelve-year laboratory for the ideas Apple would later absorb: obsessive industrial design, object-oriented software, and an operating system durable enough to become the foundation of everything Apple shipped after 1997.

Cheng Wei — founder profiled in the Chinese Founder Ledger — is documented as follows: founded ride-hailing app Didi Dache in 2012, grew it via a 2015 merger with rival Kuaidi Dache and the 2016 acquisition of Uber's China operations, then led the company through a 2021 NYSE IPO, a subsequent year-long Chinese cybersecurity probe, a $1.2 billion fine, and a 2022 NYSE delisting. The profile is grounded in the 2 sources indexed for this founder.

Jack Ma — founder profiled in the Chinese Founder Ledger — is documented as follows: alibaba co-founder whose Ant Group affiliate was preparing what would have been the world's largest IPO (targeting roughly $34.5 billion) in Shanghai and Hong Kong in November 2020, when Chinese exchanges suspended the listing days after Ma publicly criticized financial regulators. The profile is grounded in the 2 sources indexed for this founder.

Between the 1960s and the early 1990s Rahul Bajaj did not merely run an automobile company — he made the Bajaj Chetak scooter the visual shorthand for middle-class aspiration in post-independence India. Families booked the scooter and then waited, on average, ten years and sometimes as long as fifteen, because the rigid License Raj quota system capped monthly factory output well below genuine consumer demand.

Pixar began as the Graphics Group of Lucasfilm's computer division, and George Lucas, needing money for a divorce, searched for investors to spin it out. President Edwin Catmull and co-founder Alvy Ray Smith had been declined by thirty-five venture capitalists and ten large corporations, including a General Motors deal that fell through three days before contracts were to be signed. Steve Jobs, freshly edged out of Apple in 1985 and building NeXT, made an offer Lucas initially considered too low; with no alternative buyers, Lucas accepted. On February 3, 1986, Jobs paid $5 million of his own money to Lucasfilm for the technology rights and put another $5 million in as capital, joining the board as chairman of the newly independent company incorporated in Richmond, California. Catmull stayed as president, Smith as executive vice president, and animator John Lasseter kept making the short demonstration films that would quietly define the studio's future.

Lei Jun — founder profiled in the Chinese Founder Ledger — is documented as follows: wuhan University computer-science graduate who joined Kingsoft as an engineer in 1992, later became its CEO, founded Xiaomi, and has since transformed it into a technology conglomerate spanning smartphones, electric vehicles, and chips. The profile is grounded in the 3 sources indexed for this founder.

Zhang Jian — founder profiled in the Chinese Founder Ledger — is documented as follows: qing-dynasty top imperial exam scholar who turned to industry after 1895, founding the Dasheng Cotton Mill in Nantong and framing industrialization as a way to strengthen China against foreign economic encroachment. The profile is grounded in the 3 sources indexed for this founder.

Zhong Shanshan — founder profiled in the Chinese Founder Ledger — is documented as follows: former journalist and Cultural Revolution-era construction laborer who founded bottled-water company Nongfu Spring in 1996 and built it into China's largest bottled-water maker, and was re-appointed chairman of its ninth board of directors effective May 19, 2026. The profile is grounded in the 2 sources indexed for this founder.

The commercial that introduced the Macintosh was conceived by Steve Hayden, Brent Thomas, and Lee Clow at the Chiat/Day agency, produced by Fairbanks Films in New York, and directed by Ridley Scott, on a budget reported between $370,000 and $900,000. A reference to George Orwell's 1949 novel of a dystopia ruled by a televised Big Brother, the sixty-second spot opens on rows of bald, grey-clad workers marching through a blue-gray tunnel of telescreens, intercut with a full-color athlete in red shorts and a white tank top bearing a Picasso-style drawing of the Macintosh, sprinting from four black-uniformed pursuers and hurling a brass-headed sledgehammer through the screen of Big Brother's rant. English athlete Anya Major played the heroine, and David Graham supplied Big Brother's voice. The ad closes by promising that the viewer will see why 1984 will not be like the novel's 1984 — Apple casting itself explicitly as the antidote to conformity.

Wang Jianlin — founder profiled in the Chinese Founder Ledger — is documented as follows: founder of the Dalian Wanda conglomerate (real estate, cinemas, cultural/tourism assets), who by September 2025 was subject to a Chinese court's high-consumption spending restrictions alongside Wanda and several subsidiaries over unpaid debts tied to a major Wuhan development project. The profile is grounded in the 2 sources indexed for this founder.

Think different, Apple's advertising slogan from 1997 to 2002, was created by the Los Angeles office of TBWA/Chiat/Day and read widely as a riposte to IBM's Think. The campaign's birth was scrappy: in 1986 chief executive John Sculley had replaced Chiat/Day with BBDO, and in 1997, under Gil Amelio, BBDO pitched a brand campaign with the slogan We're back. Everyone in the room approved except the recently returned Jobs, who called the slogan stupid on the ground that Apple was not back yet. He then invited three agencies to present ideas reflecting the philosophy he wanted reinforced inside the company he had co-founded. Art director Craig Tanimoto coined the phrase, and Jobs insisted on different as a noun — think victory, think beauty, colloquial like think big — rejecting the grammatically safer think differently. The slogan was still printed on iMac packaging decades later.

Robin Li — founder profiled in the Chinese Founder Ledger — is documented as follows: former Infoseek search engineer who co-founded Baidu in January 2000, has served as chairman since the company's inception and as CEO since February 2004, and built Baidu into China's dominant search engine. The profile is grounded in the 1 sources indexed for this founder.

The iPhone began in 2000 with Jobs's objection to the stylus. Envisioning an Apple touchscreen product a user could operate directly with fingers, he decided the device required a triple-layered capacitive multi-touch screen, then a very new and advanced technology, which would eliminate both the physical keyboard and the mouse, and he recruited a group of Apple engineers to investigate the idea as a side project. When Jobs reviewed the prototype and its interface, he saw the potential to turn the concept into a mobile phone competing in the emerging touchscreen market. The full effort, called Project Purple 2, began in 2005; Apple had quietly registered the iphone.org domain in December 1999. The development history records an eight-month secret collaboration with Cingular Wireless, estimated at $150 million over thirty months, in which Apple rejected the design-by-committee approach that had produced the failed Motorola ROKR E1 and instead was given liberty to develop the hardware and software entirely in-house.

Falcon 1's three failures were engineering case studies in sequence. The March 2006 maiden flight ended forty-one seconds after liftoff from Omelek Island in the Kwajalein Atoll, when a fuel-line leak and fire caused the vehicle to pitch over and strike a reef near the pad; SpaceX initially blamed an improperly tightened nut, though a Defense Department review attributed the failure to corrosion from saltwater spray. The March 2007 second flight survived its first-stage burn but failed during staging, when the first stage, rotating five times faster than expected, bumped the second-stage engine bell; the resulting oscillation and a roll-control failure shut the engine down short of orbit. The August 2008 third flight failed when residual fuel in the new Merlin 1C engine provided transient thrust after shutdown, making the spent first stage recontact the second. Musk later blamed himself for all three, noting he served as chief engineer only because he could not hire anyone good enough.

The iPod's development history credits Tony Fadell, who had shopped a music-player concept elsewhere before finding support at Apple and was hired in 2001 to run the project, code-named P-68. Jon Rubinstein had already secured the crucial component, discovering Toshiba's 1.8-inch hard drive during a supplier meeting in Japan and purchasing rights to it for Apple, where rivals' players relied on 2.5-inch drives; he had also progressed the screen and battery. With most Apple engineers busy on the iMac line, Fadell hired veterans from General Magic and Philips, partnered with PortalPlayer on the software, and had a working prototype within eight months. The physical design drew on Dieter Rams's 1958 Braun T3 transistor radio, the wheel interface on Bang & Olufsen's BeoCom telephone. Jobs set an exacting standard for the device's physical design, contracting Pixo to build the user interface under his direct supervision. Copywriter Vinnie Chieco named it, inspired by the pod-bay line from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Kai-Fu Lee — founder profiled in the Chinese Founder Ledger — is documented as follows: taiwanese-American computer scientist who led Microsoft Research China/Asia (1998-2000) and Google China (2005-2009), founded venture capital firm Innovation Works (later Sinovation Ventures) in 2009, and founded AI company 01.AI in 2023, which builds agentic AI tools for companies using customized open-source models. The profile is grounded in the 2 sources indexed for this founder.

While developing the iPhone before its 2007 unveiling, Jobs did not intend to allow third-party native applications at all, directing outside developers to build web apps for the Safari browser instead. Developer backlash forced a reconsideration: in October 2007 Jobs announced that Apple would provide a software development kit by February 2008, and the SDK shipped March 6, 2008. Before the store opened, users could install third-party apps only by jailbreaking their phones, a thriving gray market that demonstrated demand Apple's founder had underestimated. The App Store opened July 10, 2008, with roughly 500 applications available, coinciding with the iPhone 3G's release a day later. In-app purchases arrived in 2009 and became the dominant monetization model, especially for games. Apple claims the App Store seeded the app economy and says it had paid developers over $320 billion by 2023, while the same record shows developers and regulators criticizing the thirty-percent commission as the excessive toll of a monopoly, including a 2021 Dutch finding that the commission structure was anti-competitive.

The Apple Store chain was founded by Steve Jobs and Ron Johnson, with its first two locations opened on May 19, 2001. The move followed years of failed store-within-a-store concepts: seeing the need for better retail presentation of Apple's products, Jobs began an effort in 1997 to revamp the retail program and build a direct relationship with consumers, hiring Johnson from Target in 2000 to build the division. Media speculation at launch held that Apple would fail at retail; instead the stores bypassed the sales of competing nearby outlets and within three years reached $1 billion in annual sales, the fastest retailer in history to that mark. The stores sell, service, and repair Apple products, with the Genius Bar providing technical advice and same-day repairs as the signature service innovation. Apple has received design patents and architectural awards for the chain, notably its glass staircases and cubes, and rival consumer-electronics retailers lost traffic and margins to the format's perceived quality of service.

Toy Story, the first entirely computer-animated feature film, was directed by John Lasseter from a story by Lasseter, Pete Docter, Andrew Stanton, and Joe Ranft, released November 22, 1995, on a $30 million budget against a $401.2 million worldwide gross. The road there ran through Jobs's gamble: Lasseter had been fired from Disney after pitching The Brave Little Toaster as a computer-animated film, joined Lucasfilm's graphics group, and became a founding member of Pixar in 1986, creating short films to demonstrate the Image Computer. His 1988 short Tin Toy won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short, the first computer-generated film to do so, and drew Disney back. When Disney's Eisner and Katzenberg tried to rehire Lasseter, he chose to stay, telling co-founder Edwin Catmull he could go to Disney and be a director, or stay and make history. Katzenberg then structured the production deal that became Pixar's first feature.

The iTunes Store grew out of Jobs's push to open a legitimate digital marketplace for music as file sharing gutted CD sales. In 2002 he struck an agreement with the five major record labels to offer their catalogs through iTunes — at launch the only legal digital music source carrying all five — and introduced the iTunes Music Store at a special Apple music event in April 2003, opening for business on April 28, 2003, for Mac users, with a Windows version following that October. The store's model, selling individual songs rather than albums at a flat price that settled around ninety-nine cents, rewired label economics and consumer expectations alike. By April 2008 the iTunes Store was the largest music vendor in the United States, and by February 2010 the largest in the world, with first-quarter 2011 revenues near $1.4 billion and 35 billion songs sold by May 2014, before streaming finally overtook downloads in 2016.

Cornelius Vanderbilt, born on Staten Island, New York, on May 27, 1794, and nicknamed the Commodore, was the American business magnate who assembled one of history's great fortunes, first in shipping and then in railroads. He began working with his father's boat business, fought his way into leadership of inland and coastal shipping, and then redirected his energy and capital into the rapidly growing railroad industry, which was transforming the geography of the United States. He was the patriarch of the wealthy and influential Vanderbilt family, stood among the richest Americans of any era, and provided the initial gift that founded Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Because his dominance of shipping and railroads was facilitated in part by political manipulation, historians have argued ever since over whether he belongs among the captains of industry or the robber barons, two labels that have competed for his reputation since his own lifetime.

Musk entered Tesla as a venture investor, not a founder. Tesla Motors was incorporated on July 1, 2003, by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, who served as chief executive and chief financial officer and built the early company around a technology-first concept, the battery, the computer software, and the proprietary motor as the core stack. In February 2004 the company raised $7.5 million in Series A funding, of which $6.5 million came from Musk, freshly capitalized by his PayPal exit. He became chairman of the board and largest shareholder, led the February 2005 Series B round, and co-led the May 2006 round that brought in Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Jeff Skoll. A September 2009 lawsuit settlement with Eberhard ultimately allowed five people, Eberhard, Tarpenning, Ian Wright, Musk, and J. B. Straubel, to call themselves co-founders, resolving the disputed origin in the canonical form the company still uses.

Kai-fu-lee belongs to Group 7 - Recent breakouts. The recent-breakouts group covers founders whose prominence rose sharply in the 2020s — collectibles and IP licensing (Pop Mart), open-source AI (DeepSeek), and applied AI ventures (01.AI) — a cohort shaped by the post-2022 generative-AI wave and China's consumer-brand internationalization.

Qin Yinglin has long been dedicated to the core business of pig farming, developing 20 major technologies spanning breeding, feed, health, and husbandry, and led Muyuan to become a fully integrated modern agribusiness spanning feed processing, swine breeding, and pig farming.

Wang Xing — founder profiled in the Chinese Founder Ledger — is documented as follows: serial entrepreneur behind several failed startups (a Friendster clone, a Twitter clone called Fanfou) before co-founding Meituan in 2010, which he has led as CEO ever since, building it into China's dominant local-services and food-delivery platform. The profile is grounded in the 1 sources indexed for this founder.

Liang Wenfeng — founder profiled in the Chinese Founder Ledger — is documented as follows: zhejiang University-trained engineer who co-founded quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer, built large-scale computing infrastructure that later supported AI research, and founded AI company DeepSeek in July 2023, which gained international attention with the January 2025 release of DeepSeek-R1. The profile is grounded in the 3 sources indexed for this founder.

Liang Wenfeng's DeepSeek deepSeek's V4 model arrives mid-February 2026 with Engram memory architecture, targeting Claude and GPT supremacy in code generation.

DeepSeek's leadership articulated a strategic priority on advancing toward artificial general intelligence as a long-term objective, weighing that goal ahead of near-term profit maximization, a framing that accompanied the company's open-source model-release cadence.

Zhang Yin (Cheung Yan) — founder profiled in the Chinese Founder Ledger — is documented as follows: former Guangdong textile-factory bookkeeper who moved to Shenzhen to work in paper trading, then founded Nine Dragons Paper, a recycling company that imports US scrap paper into China and turns it into cardboard for export packaging, becoming China's biggest paper maker. The profile is grounded in the 1 sources indexed for this founder.

Richard Liu — founder profiled in the Chinese Founder Ledger — is documented as follows: founded JD.com in 2004, built it into one of China's largest e-commerce platforms, and handed the CEO role to longtime executive Xu Lei in April 2022 while remaining chairman. The profile is grounded in the 2 sources indexed for this founder.

Zhang Yiming belongs to Group 4 - Mobile/e-commerce. The mobile/e-commerce group covers founders who built the smartphone-era platforms of the 2010s — ride-hailing (Didi), social commerce (Pinduoduo), local services (Meituan), short video (Kuaishou), logistics (SF Express, ZTO), and e-commerce at scale (JD.com) — a cohort whose businesses were shaped by the mobile-internet transition and, for several, by the 2020-2021 regulatory tightening.

Qin Yinglin — founder profiled in the Chinese Founder Ledger — is documented as follows: founded Muyuan Foods and built it into the world's largest pig-farming and breeding operation, stepping down from all executive and board roles on June 3, 2026 to become Lifetime Honorary Chairman and head of the company's research institute, in a formally completed leadership transition. The profile is grounded in the 1 sources indexed for this founder.

Colin Huang — founder profiled in the Chinese Founder Ledger — is documented as follows: former Google engineer who founded social e-commerce platform Pinduoduo in 2015, grew it into China's second-largest e-commerce platform by market capitalization, and stepped down as CEO in 2020 to focus on long-term strategy as chairman. The profile is grounded in the 2 sources indexed for this founder.

Liu Hongsheng — founder profiled in the Chinese Founder Ledger — is documented as follows: shanghai industrialist known as the "Match King" who built a diversified empire spanning matches, cement, coal, and wool textiles from the 1920s-1940s, and was later designated a protected "nationalist capitalist" by the Chinese Communist Party after 1949. The profile is grounded in the 2 sources indexed for this founder.

Gibbons v. Ogden, decided in 1824, held that Congress's power to regulate interstate commerce encompasses navigation, and the ruling is credited with underwriting the growth of the antebellum economy and the creation of national markets. Daniel Webster argued for Gibbons that federal power over interstate commerce was exclusive; Ogden's counsel answered that the states held concurrent authority. Chief Justice Marshall's opinion defined commerce as more than mere traffic, embracing the trade of commodities and navigation, and read the phrase among the several states to mean commerce intermingled with the states rather than stopping at boundary lines. A license granted under the federal Coasting Act of 1793 therefore took precedence over New York's monopoly grant. The Court produced one of the longest sets of opinions in its history to that point. The precedent became the basis for congressional regulation of railroads, freeways, and broadcasting, the legal architecture of the continental market that Vanderbilt's boats and rails would go on to fill.

The New York and Harlem Railroad, incorporated on April 25, 1831, was one of the first American railroads and the world's first street railway. Its founders laid track on the east side of Manhattan Island, convinced a line on the Hudson side could never compete with steamboats, and the first section, along the Bowery from Prince Street to 14th Street, opened in November 1832. Horses drew the early cars; steam engines arrived in 1837 but were confined to stretches outside the settled city. Reaching Chatham in 1852, the road gave New York a rail connection toward Albany, Boston, and Vermont. In 1854 the city's Common Council barred steam power below 42nd Street, an ordinance the company resisted through injunctions until the courts cleared enforcement in 1858. Vanderbilt acquired the property in the eighteen-sixties and consolidated it with the Hudson River Railroad, and in October 1871 Grand Central Depot became the terminus for intercity trains from the north.

The Accessory Transit Company ran the cheapest route from the East Coast to California: steamer from New York to Grey Town in Mosquitia, up the Rio San Juan to Lake Nicaragua, across the lake to Rivas, stagecoach over the narrow isthmus to San Juan del Sur, and a final steamer to San Francisco. Against an overland crossing that took many weeks, the line was soon carrying two thousand passengers a month at a fare of three hundred dollars each, later reduced to one hundred and fifty. The wealth generated by the route attracted predators, and in 1854 the United States Navy bombarded San Juan del Norte after town authorities demanded the company vacate its premises. Vanderbilt's original contract with the Nicaraguan government also granted him exclusive rights to build a Nicaragua canal until 1861, rights that political instability and the country's frequent volcanic eruptions eventually rendered moot as Panama became the more attractive canal site.

Lee describes 01.AI as building tools to develop AI agents for companies, using open-source models customized for each client, and providing a 'white-glove service' at this early stage of AI-agent adoption to co-create applications generating cost savings and business.

Public money raised through taxation, together with land contributed by public officials and private developers, had built the Erie Railway, and by the middle of the 1850s the road was mismanaged and deeply in debt. Daniel Drew, a cattle drover turned Wall Street banker and broker, first loaned the railroad two million dollars and then acquired control over it, amassing a fortune by skillfully manipulating Erie shares on the New York Stock Exchange. Vanderbilt, assembling a railroad empire, saw financial and strategic opportunity in the property and in 1866 set out to corner the market on Erie, silently scooping up the stock. Having succeeded in the accumulation, he then permitted Drew to remain on the board of directors in his former capacity as treasurer, a gesture of apparent reconciliation with his old adversary that set up one of the most spectacular betrayals in the history of American finance.

Shi Zhengrong — founder profiled in the Chinese Founder Ledger — is documented as follows: chinese-Australian solar-technology PhD who returned to China in 2001 with backing from the Wuxi city government to found Suntech Power, briefly became China's richest person after its 2005 NYSE listing at a peak $16 billion market capitalization, then was forced out as CEO in August 2012 and stripped of his chairmanship in March 2013 as the company collapsed into bankruptcy under $2.2 billion in debt. The profile is grounded in the 3 sources indexed for this founder.

In his seventh annual reflection in January 2026, Birla described the AGR (Adjusted Gross Revenue) resolution as a turning point that fundamentally altered Vodafone Idea's operating environment. The Cabinet froze AGR dues at Rs 87,695 crore, with payment scheduled between FY32 and FY41 — a political fix that converted an existential balance-sheet problem into a long-dated instalment plan.

Grand Central Terminal's site has held three successive stations serving essentially the same function, and the first was Vanderbilt's. The Harlem Railroad had run at street level along Fourth Avenue, with the New Haven line operating over its tracks under a trackage agreement, when Vanderbilt, who had acquired the New York Central in 1867 together with the Hudson River Railroad and fused the pair two years afterward, proposed uniting three separate railroads at a single central station, replacing the separate adjacent depots whose jumbled baggage transfers created chaos for passengers. He commissioned the architect John B. Snook to design Grand Central Depot on 42nd Street, and work started on September 1, 1869, finishing in October 1871. The Second Empire-style depot was considered the country's first station to measure up to those of Europe. Later expansions in 1895 and 1900 could not keep pace with traffic, and the building was replaced by the present terminal in 1913.

Before the Civil War the Methodist Episcopal Church South had contemplated a regional university for training ministers, and after lobbying by Nashville bishop Holland Nimmons McTyeire, church leaders voted in 1872 to found the Central University of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, in Nashville, a project delayed by lack of funds and the ravaged state of the Reconstruction South. The following year McTyeire, in New York for medical treatment, stayed at Vanderbilt's residence; Vanderbilt's second wife was a cousin of McTyeire's wife, both women from Mobile. The Commodore, then the wealthiest man in the United States, had been planning a university on Staten Island, but McTyeire persuaded him to endow Central University with five hundred thousand dollars to help strengthen the ties between all sections of the common country. Vanderbilt doubled the gift to a million, never asked that the school carry his name, and the trustees rechristened it in his honor in the spring of 1873. Landon Garland became the first chancellor as the university enrolled its first students in the fall of 1875.

Varun Alagh serves as Chief Executive Officer of Honasa Consumer Ltd, India's largest digital-first beauty and personal care (BPC) company. Before founding Honasa, he spent nearly two decades at leading FMCG multinationals — Hindustan Unilever, Diageo and Coca-Cola — building expertise in brand management, marketing leadership and business strategy.

The Vanderbilt family rose to define the Gilded Age, its success beginning with the shipping and railroad empires of Cornelius Vanderbilt and expanding into other areas of industry and philanthropy. Cornelius was the richest American until his death in 1877; his son William Henry inherited the fortune and held the same standing until his own death in 1885, the last moment the family name topped the nation's wealth. The dynasty's prominence lasted until the mid-twentieth century, after which the ten great mansions of Fifth Avenue came down and most of the family's other houses passed into other hands or became museums, a decline often called the Fall of the House of Vanderbilt. The founder's rise was improbable: born fourth among nine children of a modest Staten Island family, he left school at eleven and built a shipping and railroad empire that made him one of the wealthiest men in the world. Contemporary descendants include the journalist Anderson Cooper, the actor Timothy Olyphant, and the present Duke of Marlborough.

Zhang-yong belongs to Group 6 - Consumer/retail/real estate. The consumer, retail, and real-estate group covers founders who built mass-market consumer brands (Nongfu Spring, Muyuan Foods, Haidilao), paper packaging (Nine Dragons), education (New Oriental), and property (Evergrande, Country Garden) — a cohort shaped by urbanization, the 1998 housing reform, and, for several, the 2021-2023 property-sector deleveraging.

Vanderbilt was in his seventy-ninth year when he decided, in the spring of 1873, to make the gift that founded Vanderbilt University. The one million dollars he gave to endow and build the institution was, the university's own history records, his only major philanthropy. Bishop Holland N. McTyeire of Nashville, husband of Amelia Townsend, a cousin of Vanderbilt's young second wife Frank Crawford, came to New York for medical treatment early in 1873 and spent his recovery in the Vanderbilt mansion, where he won the couple's support for building a university in the South that would strengthen the bonds between all sections of the country. McTyeire chose the campus site, supervised construction of the first buildings, and personally planted many of the trees that make the campus a national arboretum. The university opened with one Main Building, an astronomical observatory, and professors' houses, enrolling 307 students in the fall of 1875.

Mark Zuckerberg, born on May 14, 1984, in White Plains, New York, co-founded Facebook from his Harvard dormitory in February 2004 and built it into the defining social platform of the internet age. He served as chief executive through the 2012 public listing, the 2021 rebrand as Meta Platforms, and the pivot into artificial intelligence, retaining voting control throughout via a dual-class share structure. Time named him Person of the Year in 2010, the year Facebook crossed half a billion users, and by late 2024 Forbes ranked him the second richest person in the world on the strength of his founding stake. His tenure spans the desktop era, the mobile transition, the Cambridge Analytica crisis, the metaverse bet, and the open-source AI strategy. Through each phase he has kept both the chief executive title and super-voting shares, a governance record that shaped every major decision from the News Feed to Llama.

Zhang Yong — founder profiled in the Chinese Founder Ledger — is documented as follows: founded the Haidilao hot pot chain and, after some years focusing on high-level strategy as chairman, resumed direct CEO control in January 2026 to lead a 'second revolution' strategic overhaul as earnings cooled and China's dining sector slowed. The profile is grounded in the 1 sources indexed for this founder.

Kumar Mangalam Birla (born June 14, 1967) chairs the Aditya Birla Group, one of India's largest conglomerates, and serves as chancellor of BITS Pilani. He is a fourth-generation Birla family member — descendant of Baldeo Das Birla, adopted son of opium trader Shiv Narayan Birla — and grew up in a joint family in Mumbai with parents Aditya Vikram and Rajashree Birla and younger sister Vasavadatta.

Cao Dewang — founder profiled in the Chinese Founder Ledger — is documented as follows: fujianese entrepreneur, born to a family that lost its wealth fleeing the Chinese civil war, who left school at 14 amid poverty and went on to build Fuyao Group into one of the world's largest automotive glass manufacturers. The profile is grounded in the 1 sources indexed for this founder.

Cao Dewang's Fuyao Glass jul 17, 2026 — Cho Tak Wong, also known as Cao Dewang, is the founder and Lifetime Honorary Chairman of Fuyao Group , and an internationally renowned .

Yang-guoqiang belongs to Group 8 - Appliances/solar/industrials/conglomerates. The appliances, solar, industrials, and conglomerates group covers founders who built or led businesses in white goods (Gree), solar panels (Suntech), diversified industrials (East Hope, Great Wall Motor), medical devices (Mindray), chemicals and acquisitions (ChemChina, Fosun), and property-adjacent platforms (SOHO China, Country Garden) — a cohort spanning state-enterprise reform, the 2000s solar export boom, and the 2010s outbound-acquisition wave.

Pony Ma — founder profiled in the Chinese Founder Ledger — is documented as follows: shenzhen University computer-science graduate who co-founded Tencent in 1998 with four classmates, launched the OICQ messaging service that became QQ, and continues to lead the company as chairman and CEO of the Shenzhen-based technology, gaming, entertainment and financial-services conglomerate. The profile is grounded in the 2 sources indexed for this founder.

Pony Ma's Tencent may 14, 2026 — Chair and CEO of Tencent Holdings Ma Huateng ( Pony Ma ): We started 2026 by making significant initial progress on our new AI products, a leader .

Facemash, the precursor Zuckerberg built in October 2003, asked visitors to compare pairs of Harvard student photos and vote on attractiveness, using identification pictures pulled without permission from the university's online house directories. Roughly four hundred to four hundred fifty users cast at least twenty-two thousand votes on launch day. Fuerza Latina and the Harvard Association of Black Women protested the unauthorized use of images, the computer services department filed a complaint, and Zuckerberg faced accusations of breaching security, violating copyright, and invading privacy before the Administrative Board. The board removed the site in early November 2003. The episode contained the seeds of the later business: viral social mechanics, aggressive data acquisition, and an institutional backlash that arrived faster than any product lesson. Zuckerberg spent the same semester probing collaborative tools, uploading annotated art images with comment threads for classmates, a small experiment in social coursework that pointed toward what followed.

The strategy that made Tesla investable was published as a plan. Tesla's 2006 master plan set out the staircase the company actually climbed: begin with a premium sports car for early adopters, use the proceeds and falling component costs to fund progressively more mainstream vehicles, sedans and then affordable compacts, while the battery and drivetrain matured on volume. The plan also announced the solar partnership that prefigured the SolarCity acquisition, photovoltaic panels co-marketed with SolarCity and installed on carports, which could make drivers covering fewer than 350 miles a week energy-positive with respect to their personal transport. The financing architecture beneath it was equally deliberate: Musk led the $13 million Series B in February 2005, co-led the third round in May 2006, and led a May 2008 round that carried total private financing past $100 million, the bridge capital that carried the strategy through the Roadster era into the Model S.

Ghazal Alagh was born on 2 September 1988 in Gurgaon, Haryana, into a middle-class family. She earned a BCA in Information Technology from Punjab University before pursuing short courses in modern and figurative art at the School of Visual Arts and the New York Academy of Art in 2013 — an unusual education path for an Indian consumer founder, blending a programming background with formal fine-art training.

Ren Jianxin — founder profiled in the Chinese Founder Ledger — is documented as follows: founded Bluestar, a small industrial-solvents factory, in 1984 with a RMB 10,000 loan and seven employees, then from 1996 built the state-owned ChemChina empire by taking control of more than 100 troubled, government-owned chemical factories across China, later leading ChemChina's $43 billion acquisition of Swiss agribusiness giant Syngenta and taking the chairmanship of Italian tire maker Pirelli. The profile is grounded in the 1 sources indexed for this founder.

Through the COVID-19 pandemic, Facebook's usage surged and Zuckerberg predicted a permanent acceleration in online behavior that would outlast the virus. The company hired accordingly, expanding headcount from 48,268 in March 2020 to beyond 87,000 by September 2022. The forecast proved wrong: e-commerce demand normalized, advertising softened, and Meta's costs had been sized for a boom that ended. In early 2022 the company reported no growth in monthly users, warned that Apple's privacy changes would cost roughly ten billion dollars in annual advertising revenue, and watched its share price fall twenty-seven percent in a day, erasing about two hundred thirty billion dollars of market value, the largest single-company wipeout Wall Street had seen. Zuckerberg's own net worth fell by as much as thirty-one billion dollars in the rout, and he pointed to competition for attention, particularly from TikTok's short video, as the structural threat. Employment, which had passed eighty-seven thousand at the September 2022 peak, became the clearest physical measure of the reversal.

The Model 3 reveal in March 2016 became the largest reservation event in automotive history. Customers placed refundable $1,000 deposits at Tesla stores and online beginning March 31, and within two days Tesla held 232,000 reservations, nearly triple the standing record of 80,000 deposits the 1955 Citroen DS collected over ten days of the Paris Auto Show. A week after the unveiling the count passed 325,000, representing roughly $14 billion in potential sales, and by August 2017 net reservations stood at 455,000. Musk annotated the demand quality directly: only 5 percent of reservations used the two-vehicle maximum, suggesting low speculation, and 93 percent came from buyers who did not yet own a Tesla. The unveiling promised a $35,000 price, a Standard Range with about 215 miles of rated range, five seats, front and rear trunks, and a drag coefficient lower than the Model S.

In this 2026 interview, Ghazal Alagh publicly challenges the popular leadership maxim 'leave your ego at the door,' arguing that the advice has never felt entirely practical to her. Her counterpoint: building a business from scratch requires genuine belief in one's own ability to solve a problem better than incumbents who have worked in the field for years.

Wei Jianjun — founder profiled in the Chinese Founder Ledger — is documented as follows: born in Baoding, Hebei, he was appointed director of Great Wall Motor -- then a small, partly local-government-owned manufacturer founded in 1984 -- in 1990, grew it into one of China's leading pickup-truck and SUV manufacturers, led its 1998 privatization and 2003 Hong Kong Stock Exchange listing, and remains chairman as GWM sold over 1.3 million vehicles globally in 2025 across brands including Haval, Wey, Tank, Poer, and Ora. The profile is grounded in the 2 sources indexed for this founder.

Wang Jianlin belongs to Group 2 - Reform-era pioneers. The reform-era pioneers group covers founders who built their businesses in the 1980s and 1990s opening of China's economy under Deng Xiaoping, spanning telecom equipment (Huawei), personal computing (Lenovo), home appliances (Haier), beverages (Wahaha), and automotive components (Wanxiang), often starting from township-enterprise or small-collective origins.

The mechanics of the Cambridge Analytica scandal ran through an ordinary-looking personality quiz. In 2013, Aleksandr Kogan, a Cambridge University data scientist, built an app called This Is Your Digital Life under contract to Cambridge Analytica, an offshoot of the SCL Group. Several hundred thousand users were paid to complete a survey framed as academic research, but Facebook's platform permissions let the app also harvest the personal data of those users' friends. The cascading collection reached up to eighty-seven million profiles, which Cambridge Analytica mined for psychographic targeting that it sold to political clients, including the 2016 presidential campaigns of Ted Cruz and, later, Donald Trump. Facebook had patented similar psychological-targeting technology itself in 2012, and the advertising industry had practiced variants for years; what changed was the scale of the harvest and the discovery that consent had never meaningfully existed at any layer of the transaction.

Yang Guoqiang — founder profiled in the Chinese Founder Ledger — is documented as follows: founder of Country Garden Holdings, once China's largest home builder by sales, who tendered his resignation as chairman and executive director for age reasons effective March 1, 2023, handing the chairmanship to his daughter Yang Huiyan while continuing to participate in corporate operations as a special advisor, amid China's broader property-sector debt crisis. The profile is grounded in the 2 sources indexed for this founder.

Reporting through 2026 indicates that Raveendran's personal legal exposure — including a contempt-driven jail order in Singapore — is still developing rather than closed, so any treatment of his record should treat the outcome as provisional and dated to the reporting, not as a settled verdict.

Sriharsha Majety, born in Andhra Pradesh in 1986, studied at BITS Pilani and completed a management program at IIM Calcutta, with a stint in investment banking before founding his first venture — a profile that combined analytical finance training with operational exposure, rare among Indian consumer-tech founders of his cohort.

Lu Guanqiu — founder profiled in the Chinese Founder Ledger — is documented as follows: peasant-born former ironsmith who co-founded a small agricultural-machinery factory with six other farmers in 1969 and built it into Wanxiang Group, a major auto-parts and components conglomerate, leading the company until his death in October 2017. The profile is grounded in the 2 sources indexed for this founder.

Facebook announced the Instagram acquisition on April 9, 2012, roughly six weeks before its own initial public offering, paying about one billion dollars in cash and stock for a photo application with no revenue. Britain's Office of Fair Trading cleared the deal that August, the Federal Trade Commission closed its investigation on August 22, and the purchase closed on September 6 for three hundred million dollars in cash plus twenty-three million Facebook shares. Zuckerberg pledged to build and grow Instagram independently, and co-founder Kevin Systrom's personal proceeds were reported around four hundred million dollars. Commentators measured the price against the thirty-five million dollars Yahoo had paid for Flickr in 2005 and found it extravagant; measured against the competitive threat a fast-growing mobile photo network posed to Facebook's core social graph, it was the cheapest defensive move available to the company at that moment.

Zhang resumed the Haidilao CEO role, announced late Tuesday January 13, 2026, in what insiders called a 'second revolution' for the Hong Kong-listed company, aiming to revive profitability through an accelerated rollout of the 'Red Pomegranate Plan,' an initiative launched in 2024 to develop new restaurant brands beyond hot pot.

WhatsApp began as a near-failure. Jan Koum, a former Yahoo engineer, incorporated the company in Mountain View, California on February 24, 2009, a month after buying his first iPhone, intending an app that would show status updates inside the phone's contacts list. Early versions crashed constantly and Koum considered quitting, but Brian Acton, his former Yahoo colleague, urged patience and joined as co-founder that November, persuading five friends from Yahoo to seed the company with two hundred fifty thousand dollars. Apple's June 2009 push-notification technology transformed the product: users began pinging one another with jokey status messages, and the status app quietly became an instant messenger. By February 2013 WhatsApp served about two hundred million active users with a staff of fifty, and Sequoia's fifty-million-dollar investment valued it at one point five billion. Google's acquisition offers in 2010 had all been declined.

The Twitter takeover began as an accumulation. Musk started buying shares on January 31, 2022, and disclosed a 9.2 percent stake worth $2.64 billion on April 4, triggering the stock's largest intraday surge since the 2013 initial public offering, up as much as 27 percent, and making him the largest shareholder. Offered a board seat that would have capped him at 14.9 percent and restricted his public commentary, he accepted, then reversed on April 11 after posting criticisms of the platform. On April 14 he made an unsolicited, non-binding offer of $43 billion, or $54.20 per share, to take the company private, a number widely read as a cannabis-culture reference. The board adopted a poison pill the next day. Musk framed the bid in free-speech terms, calling free expression a societal imperative for a functioning democracy and denying any profit motive, while reporting tied the impulse to moderation decisions such as the Babylon Bee ban.

Facebook spent its first eight years resisting exit. It reportedly turned down a seven hundred fifty million dollar offer from Viacom in 2006 and refused Yahoo's one billion dollar bid the same year, while successive private financings marked its value up and down: fifteen billion dollars implied by Microsoft's 2007 stake, ten billion at DST's 2009 purchase, fifty billion in a 2011 investment report. Zuckerberg said in 2010 that the company was in no rush. What forced the issue was mechanics, not ambition: once Facebook accumulated more than five hundred shareholders of round-lot size, securities rules subjected it to public disclosure from 2013, making an IPO the rational path. The company filed its S-1 on February 1, 2012, disclosing 845 million monthly active users, 2.7 billion daily likes and comments, and, honestly flagged, decelerating growth in both membership and income.

The firm's first customer came from Australia in June 2011, and the company reached 100 customers within 103 days of that first deal — an early signal of product-market fit that preceded any institutional funding round and validated the cross-border appeal of an India-built SaaS product.

Vedanta's official biography emphasizes that Agarwal left his village for Mumbai at 19 with a tiffin box, bedding and what it calls 'dreams in his eyes.' The corporate myth-making leans hard on the immigrant-metropolitan struggle narrative, positioning the founder as both insider and outsider to Mumbai's business culture.

Facebook formally announced Libra on June 18, 2019, a permissioned blockchain stablecoin meant to move money as easily as messages, backed by a basket of currencies and Treasury securities and governed by an association of payments, technology, and telecommunications companies. The project had quietly incubated for two years: Morgan Beller began working on blockchain at Facebook alone in 2017, and David Marcus moved from running Messenger to lead a dedicated division in May 2018, by which point more than fifty engineers were building it. Founding backers including Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, and Uber were each expected to contribute ten million dollars to fund the launch, planned for 2020. Within weeks of the unveiling, governments on both sides of the Atlantic attacked the plan as a threat to monetary sovereignty and financial stability, and Facebook pledged the currency would not launch anywhere without United States regulatory approval.

He-xiaopeng belongs to Group 5 - EV. The EV group covers founders who built China's electric-vehicle industry across the 2010s and 2020s, spanning the vertically integrated mass-market incumbent (BYD), the premium direct-sales challengers (NIO, Li Auto, XPeng), and the global-ambition software-defined-vehicle push — a cohort shaped by the 2009-2012 new-energy-vehicle subsidy program and the 2025 export surge.

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, announced on December 1, 2015, to coincide with the birth of Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan's first child, holds their pledge of ninety-nine percent of their Facebook shares over their lifetimes. Structured as a limited liability company rather than a charitable foundation, it can make for-profit investments, lobby, and acquire companies, an arrangement critics labeled philanthrocapitalism and observers judged likely to become one of the most well-funded philanthropies in history. Its work concentrates on science, education, and justice and opportunity, the latter spanning housing affordability, criminal justice reform, and immigration reform. The structure choice distanced the couple from the foundation model used by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, trading tax-mandated payouts for flexibility. In 2016 the organization committed six hundred million dollars to create the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, a Mission Bay research collaborative linking scientists at San Francisco, Berkeley, and Stanford, the first installment of a three-billion-dollar, decade-long science program whose stated goal is curing, managing, or preventing all disease by 2100.

Walter Elias Disney, born in Chicago on December 5, 1901, and raised largely in Missouri, became the pioneer of the American animation industry and, with his brother Roy, built what grew into one of the world's largest mass media and entertainment conglomerates. He took a job as a commercial illustrator at eighteen, moved to California in the early 1920s, and established the Disney Brothers Studio with Roy in 1923. With Ub Iwerks he developed Mickey Mouse in 1928 and provided the character's voice in the early years. As a producer he holds the record for Academy Awards won by an individual, twenty-two, from fifty-nine nominations. He introduced synchronized sound, full-color three-strip Technicolor, feature-length animation, and major camera innovations, then expanded into television and theme parks, opening Disneyland in July 1955 and planning the Florida Project and its experimental city of tomorrow until his death from lung cancer on December 15, 1966.

He Xiaopeng — founder profiled in the Chinese Founder Ledger — is documented as follows: alibaba-linked entrepreneur (sold his prior company UCWeb to Alibaba) who leads electric-vehicle maker Xpeng as chairman and CEO, personally took over Xpeng's robotics division in June 2026 ahead of mass production of its humanoid robot 'Iron,' and joined Ant Group's board that same month. The profile is grounded in the 2 sources indexed for this founder.

Liu Yonghao — founder profiled in the Chinese Founder Ledger — is documented as follows: former technical-school teacher who, with three brothers, quit government jobs in 1982 to raise quails and chickens, later founding the animal-feed business that became New Hope Group -- now China's largest animal-feed producer -- and co-founding China Minsheng Bank. The profile is grounded in the 1 sources indexed for this founder.

Anil Agarwal (born 1954 in Patna, Bihar) founded and chairs Vedanta Resources, controlling it fully through Volcan Investments. Born into a Marwadi family, his father ran a small aluminum conductor business and Agarwal chose to skip university to make conductors himself, leaving Patna for Mumbai at age 19 to seek broader opportunity.

Home Invest with Barry Speaking Contact MiB Podcast Transcript: Seth Klarman, The Baupost Group The transcript from this week’s MiB: Seth Klarman, The Baupost Group, is below. You can stream and download our full conversation, including any podcast extras, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube (video), YouTube (audio), and Bloomberg. All of our earlier podcasts on your favorite pod hosts can be found here.

Pershing Square Holdings, Ltd. 1 Company Overview The Company Pershing Square Holdings, Ltd. (“PSH”, or the “Company”) (LN:PSH) (LN:PSHD) is an investment holding company structured as a closed-ended fund principally engaged in the business of acquiring and holding significant positions in a concentrated number of large capitalization companies. PSH’s objective is to maximize its long-term compound annual rate of growth in intrinsic value per share. PSH was incorporated with limited liability under the laws of the Bailiwick of Guernsey on February 2, 2012. It commenced operations on December 31, 2012 as a registered open-ended investment scheme, and on October 1, 2014 converted into a registered closed-ended investment scheme. Public Shares of PSH commenced trading on Euronext Amsterdam N.V. on October 13, 2014 and were delisted from that exchange on January 31, 2025. On May 2, 2017, PSH’s Public Shares were admitted to the Official List of the UK Listing Authority and commenced trading on the London Stock Exchange (“LSE”). PSH has appointed Pershing Square Capital Management, L.P. (“PSCM”, or the “Investment Manager”) as its investment manager. PSCM was founded by William A. Ackman on January 1, 2004.

Li Xiang's Li Auto jan 25, 2026 — In 2025 , Li Auto's deliveries fell 18.81% to 406,343 units, with declines occurring in most months throughout the year. are also heavily .

Zhang Ruimin — founder profiled in the Chinese Founder Ledger — is documented as follows: took over a small, failing Qingdao refrigerator factory in 1984 and built it into global appliance group Haier, known for strict quality-control discipline and later for the 'Rendanheyi' decentralized management model, before stepping down as chairman in November 2021. The profile is grounded in the 2 sources indexed for this founder.

Lai Meisong — founder profiled in the Chinese Founder Ledger — is documented as follows: founded ZTO Express and has served as chairman since May 2013 and CEO since the company's inception, building it into one of China's largest express-delivery companies; a former deputy chairman of the China Express Delivery Association. The profile is grounded in the 1 sources indexed for this founder.

Zhang Xin — founder profiled in the Chinese Founder Ledger — is documented as follows: left Beijing for Hong Kong at 14, worked in garment and electronics factories to save for overseas study, earned a scholarship-funded education in the UK, worked in finance in Hong Kong and New York, then co-founded SOHO China with husband Pan Shiyi in 1995, building it into a major Beijing office developer before stepping down as CEO in September 2022 and shifting business activities toward the United States via Closer Media and Closer Properties. The profile is grounded in the 2 sources indexed for this founder.

The Walmart Museum, built around Walton's 5&10 on the Bentonville town square, preserves the founder's frugality as physical artifact. Among the displays from the company archives is the pair of barber chairs in which Sam and his brother Bud had their hair cut for five dollars — an exhibit that does more cultural work than any plaque, since the richest man in America kept the same inexpensive haircut he had always had. The museum's galleries trace the journey from small-town store to global retailer around Mr. Sam's vision of helping people save money and live better, and the adjoining Spark Café serves butter-pecan ice cream, the founder's favorite flavor, alongside Walmart-themed sundaes. The dime-store galleries come packed with classic finds, vintage displays, and local charm. Admission is free, the hours are long, and the whole installation reads as a working argument about the founder's tastes.

Walmart republishes its founder's ten rules for building a better business as living doctrine, applying them to every part of the company. The first rule demands total commitment: believe in your business more than anybody else, work at it every day, and let the passion spread to everyone around you like a fever. The second is share your profits with all your associates and treat them as partners, on the expectation that they will treat you as a partner in turn and that together you will perform beyond your wildest expectations. The third and fourth rules govern the partnership's mechanics — motivate your partners with high goals, encouragement, competition, and a kept score, since money and ownership alone are not enough; and communicate everything you possibly can, because the more partners know, the more they understand, and once they care, nothing can stop them.

Walmart's own account of its founder centers on a single principle: Mr. Sam, as associates called him, believed in leadership through service, and the conviction that true leadership depends on willing service became the foundation on which Walmart was built and the driver of the company's decisions for more than fifty years. Born in Kingfisher, Oklahoma, in 1918, Walton joined the military at twenty-four in 1942, married Helen Robson in 1943, and moved to Newport, Arkansas, when his service ended in 1945, gaining his early retail experience there and eventually operating his own variety store. In 1950 the family left Newport for Bentonville — Helen wanted small-town living, and Sam could hunt across the seasons of four bordering states — where he opened Walton's 5&10 on the downtown square. The first Walmart followed in 1962 in Rogers, opened when Walton was forty-four.

The Laugh-O-Gram Studio, founded by Disney in Kansas City and operating from June 28, 1921 until October 16, 1923, occupied the second floor of the McConahay Building and became the training ground for pioneers of American animation including Ub Iwerks, Hugh Harman, Rudolf Ising, and Friz Freleng. Disney incorporated Laugh-O-Gram Films in May 1922 at twenty years old, using the remaining assets of the defunct Iwerks-Disney Commercial Artists and money raised from local investors. He had been contracted by Milton Feld to animate twelve cartoons called Newman's Laugh-O-Grams for the Newman Theater and produced nine of the requested twelve with little income. Encouraged by the shorts' popularity with local audiences, he invested six months in his own modernized fairy tale, Little Red Riding Hood, betting that he could own a series rather than merely execute commissions. The studio's collapse instead became the founding trauma of his career.

On June 22, 2026, Ant Group disclosed that He had been named an independent director of its board as part of a broader reshuffle that also added Tsinghua School of Economics and Management dean Bai Chongen and former Deloitte China CEO Tsang Shun-fu; existing directors Laura Cha and AI scholar Zhang Hongjiang retained their seats.

The Alice Comedies paired a live-action girl, originally Virginia Davis, with an animated cat named Julius in animated landscapes, and became the first series of what ultimately grew into Walt Disney Animation Studios. Disney, Iwerks, and their staff made the pilot, a one-reel 1923 short titled Alice's Wonderland, while still running the failing Laugh-O-Gram studio in Kansas City; it showed Alice visiting a cartoon studio and dreaming her way into the cartoon world, and though never released theatrically it pioneered the live-action animation combination alongside Bray Productions' Out of the Inkwell. After the bankruptcy, Disney raised money working as a freelance photographer, bought a one-way train ticket to Los Angeles to live with his uncle Robert and his brother Roy, and shopped the series until Winkler Pictures, which needed a replacement for Felix the Cat after a falling out with Pat Sullivan, signed the deal. Disney directed all fifty-seven films in the series, with four successive actresses playing Alice.

Oswald the Lucky Rabbit was created in 1927 by Disney and Ub Iwerks for Universal Pictures after distributor Charles Mintz, learning that Universal wanted into the cartoon business, asked Disney for a new rabbit character because the market was crowded with cats like Felix and Krazy Kat. Winkler signed a contract with Universal in March 1927 guaranteeing twenty-six Oswald cartoons. Universal's executives rejected the first short, Poor Papa, for poor production quality and the sloppiness and age of its rabbit, but Trolley Troubles, released September 5, 1927, launched the series and became Universal's greatest success to date, rivaling Felix the Cat and Koko the Clown. The series allowed the Disney studio to grow to nearly twenty staff, paid Walt a weekly salary of one hundred dollars and Roy sixty-five, and earned the brothers five hundred dollars per short plus a year-end profit split of sixty-forty in Walt's favor. Oswald was Universal's first major cartoon hit and the proof of the studio's ambition.

Chen Yidan — founder profiled in the Chinese Founder Ledger — is documented as follows: co-founded Tencent in 1998 alongside Ma Huateng, Zhang Zhidong, Xu Chenye, and Zeng Liqing, serving as Chief Administrative Officer and later leading Tencent's philanthropic arm, then stepped down as CAO in March 2013 to focus on philanthropy, founding the Chen Yidan Charity Foundation, co-founding Wuhan College in 2009, and establishing the HK$2.5 billion (US$320 million) Yidan Prize in 2016 to recognize education innovators worldwide. The profile is grounded in the 2 sources indexed for this founder.

Steamboat Willie, a 1928 black-and-white short directed by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks and released by Pat Powers' Celebrity Productions, is considered the official debut of Mickey and Minnie Mouse, although both characters had already appeared in the test-screened Plane Crazy and the unreleased The Gallopin' Gaucho. It was the third Mickey film produced but the first officially distributed, because Disney, having seen The Jazz Singer, was determined to produce one of the first fully synchronized sound cartoons. Earlier sound cartoons such as the Fleischers' Song Car-Tunes and Paul Terry's Dinner Time had failed to keep sound fully synchronized; Steamboat Willie was produced with a click track that kept the musicians on beat and a fully post-produced soundtrack. Powers convinced Disney to use his Cinephone system, a clone of the Phonofilm process. The result became the most popular cartoon of its time, entered the National Film Registry in 1998, and passed into the United States public domain on January 1, 2024.

Mickey Mouse, co-created by Disney and Ub Iwerks in 1928 as a replacement for Oswald, became the longtime corporate icon and mascot of the Walt Disney Company and one of the most recognizable fictional characters in the world. Inspired by silent film personalities like Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks, Mickey was traditionally portrayed as a sympathetic underdog who got by on pluck and ingenuity against challenges bigger than himself, his diminutive stature matched by the falsetto voice Walt provided in the early years. Originally characterized as a cheeky, lovable rogue, the character was progressively rebranded as a nice guy, an impulsive but spirited hero. Mickey appeared in more than 130 films, headlined a comic strip that ran forty-five years, and anchored the merchandising and television businesses that followed. Ten of his cartoons were nominated for the Academy Award for animated short film, with Lend a Paw winning in 1941, and in 1978 Mickey became the first cartoon character with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

The Silly Symphonies, seventy-five musical shorts produced between 1929 and 1939, functioned as Disney's research and development laboratory. Composer Carl Stalling, a Kansas City theatre organist, proposed the series while in New York recording sound for the Mickey shorts, and the first entry, The Skeleton Dance, was drawn and animated entirely by Ub Iwerks. The series broke with convention by recording the music and sound before the animated segments were made rather than after, and it became the venue for trying Technicolor, special effects animation, and dramatic storytelling on the road to feature films. After seeing Herbert Kalmus's tests of the new three-strip Technicolor process, Disney signed a contract giving the studio exclusive rights through the end of 1935, scrapped the sixty-percent-complete Flowers and Trees, and redid it in color; it became the first animated film in three-strip Technicolor, a phenomenal success, and winner of the inaugural Academy Award in its category. Seven Silly Symphonies eventually won Oscars, tying the series record held by Tom and Jerry.

The multiplane camera moved multiple layers of artwork past the camera at varying speeds and distances, creating a parallax illusion of depth that flat cel animation lacked; moving background and foreground in opposite directions even produced rotation, as in Snow White's potion-drinking scene. Lotte Reiniger had built an early multiplane design in the 1920s, Ub Iwerks developed a more advanced version in 1933 partly from salvaged Chevrolet parts, and Fleischer Studios built its Stereoptical Camera with miniature sets in 1934. William Garity developed the advanced multiplane camera for the Disney studio for use on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs; completed in early 1937 and tested in the Silly Symphony The Old Mill, which won that year's Academy Award for animated short, it carried up to seven layers of artwork painted in oils on glass beneath a vertical, movable camera shooting successive frames in Technicolor. A crew of up to a dozen technicians operated the planes, and future Disney chief Card Walker rose from the multiplane camera department.

Disney conceived his first feature-length film in 1933, concluding that popular shorts did not deliver enough profit for the studio's growth and that a feature would expand his storytelling possibilities with elaborate plots and character development. After proposed adaptations of Alice in Wonderland and Rip Van Winkle fell through, the success of Three Little Pigs in May 1933 strengthened his resolve. He settled on the Brothers Grimm's Snow White in spring 1934, having loved the story since seeing the 1916 silent film version as a teenager, and announced the project to The New York Times in June 1934 with a budget estimate of two hundred fifty thousand dollars, roughly ten times a typical Silly Symphony. He introduced the idea to his staff through what he called slow infiltration, sharing it individually in casual conversations. On October 30, 1934, with the basic story outline complete, he assembled the animators on the sound stage in the evening and acted out the entire story for three hours, closing with the announcement of the studio's first feature.

On July 22, 2023, Musk announced that Twitter would be rebranded as X, discarding one of the most recognized consumer brands in the world in pursuit of the everything app he had wanted to build since his X.com banking days in 1999. The bird logo retired after seventeen years of evolution from clip art to Larry the Bird to the 2012 silhouette; the new mark borrowed the double-struck mathematical capital X from Unicode. Reaction ranged from bemusement to hostility: analysts told The New York Times the brand value had effectively been wiped out, critics read a domineering tech-overlord vibe into the mark, users review-bombed the renamed app on the iOS App Store, and a startup called Operation Bluebird petitioned to claim the abandoned Twitter trademark, prompting litigation from X Corp. to defend it. Musk, meanwhile, had bought the X.com domain back from PayPal in 2017 for an undisclosed sum, calling it sentimental.

Vendor-managed inventory, the practice in which a supplier takes responsibility for optimizing the stock a retailer holds, became one of the successful business models used by Walmart, Procter & Gamble, and other large-format retailers. Under these arrangements suppliers work from electronic data interchange formats and statistical forecasting methods to time replenishment themselves, with variations including consignment structures and scan-based trading, in which the retailer effectively houses the product and pays only as it sells. The model's significance for Walmart was strategic as much as operational: converting suppliers from adversarial bargaining counterparties into co-managers of inventory compressed costs across the entire chain and deepened the switching costs of the relationship. Oil companies use similar systems to manage gasoline inventories at the service stations they supply, and Home Depot applies the technique with its larger suppliers. Retail Link, the data platform Walmart began developing in 1985, supplied the technical substrate that made such arrangements practical at national scale.

Everyday low price — EDLP in the industry's shorthand — is the pricing strategy Walmart is most associated with in North America: a promise of consistently low prices that frees shoppers from waiting for sale events or comparison shopping. The economics cut in two directions. EDLP stores save the labor and expense of constant in-store markdowns and run leaner advertising — a 1994 observation noted that Walmart bought feature advertisements in newspapers monthly while its competitors advertised weekly — while gaining more predictable consumer demand, fewer stocking problems, and simpler inventory management. Academic studies of the 1990s found EDLP rare among American supermarket retailers and quantified its tradeoffs, with promotional high-low pricing generating more revenue in some settings while EDLP lowered fixed costs. Walton's version married the pricing stance to volume purchasing and distribution scale, so the price promise and the cost structure reinforced each other.

Kai-Fu Lee's role is documented as: founder of 01.AI (2023); Chairman/head of Sinovation Ventures (formerly Innovation Works, founded 2009) A February 2026 interview describes Lee as heading Sinovation Ventures and as 'the founder of 01.ai,' actively discussing the company's strategy (research date: 2026-08-23).

The 13F record also reveals Klarman's willingness to hold cash even within the equity portfolio. Across multiple cycles, the disclosed long book has consistently represented a fraction of the firm's total assets under management, with the remainder held in cash, distressed debt, private positions, and real estate that do not appear in the public filing. He has argued that the 13F is therefore an incomplete view, and that drawing conclusions about the firm's market timing from the equity disclosures alone is misleading. The firm's true exposure to any risk factor is the sum of all asset classes, not the long-equity slice visible to the public. That said, the visible pattern is consistent with the broader philosophy: the equity book is increased during market dislocations and trimmed as valuations become stretched. The 13F snapshots during the post-2008 recovery and again during the 2020 dislocation show Baupost adding to positions while many peers were reducing exposure - the same contrarian disposition that characterizes the firm's distressed-debt work showing up, on a lag, in the public equity record.

Musk's South African childhood supplied the raw material his later ventures drew on. An obsessive reader who credited the Foundation novels, The Lord of the Rings, and Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy with shaping his worldview, he taught himself programming from a VIC-20 manual at ten and sold his BASIC game Blastar to a magazine for roughly five hundred dollars at twelve in 1983. The schooling was harsher: after his parents divorced in 1979, he chose to live with his father, a decision he came to regret before the two became estranged. He was hospitalized after classmates threw him down concrete stairs and beat him. He passed through Waterkloof House Preparatory School, Bryanston High School, and Pretoria Boys High School as a decent but unexceptional student. His maternal grandfather Joshua Haldeman, an American-born Canadian chiropractor and aviator who relocated the family to South Africa, supplied the adventurer archetype descendants still invoke.

The Zip2 exit set the template for Musk's career: maximum ownership, board friction, and a nine-figure sale. He kept the website running by day and wrote code at night, seven days a week, and later rejected the claim that the venture was financed by his father while acknowledging that Errol Musk contributed about 10 percent of a later $200,000 funding round. His campaign to become chief executive was thwarted by the board, which kept professional management in place. The Musk brothers nonetheless landed the marquee newspaper contracts and persuaded directors to abandon a planned merger with CitySearch. In February 1999 Compaq acquired Zip2 for $307 million in cash, and Musk collected $22 million for his 7 percent share. The sum was recycled immediately into X.com, the online bank he co-founded that same year, the first demonstration of the serial-compounding method he would apply at every subsequent scale.

The eBay acquisition validated PayPal's network position. By the time of the October 2002 purchase, more than 70 percent of eBay auctions accepted PayPal payments, and roughly one in four closed auction listings was transacted through the service, which competed against eBay's own Billpoint subsidiary as well as Citibank's c2it, Yahoo's PayDirect, and later Google Checkout. The scale kept compounding under eBay ownership, reaching $1.8 billion in revenue by the end of 2007 and more than 100 million active user accounts across 190 markets and 25 currencies by 2010. For Musk the transaction was an exit that produced roughly $175.8 million and a diaspora. The alumni network, the so-called PayPal Mafia including Thiel, David Sacks, and Luke Nosek, became a standing force in Silicon Valley investing and, two decades later, a reported source of encouragement for Musk's purchase of Twitter.

By 2008 the two flagship companies were failing simultaneously. SpaceX's first three Falcon 1 launches, between 2006 and 2008, all failed, which nearly ended the company, just as Tesla's financing round collapsed in the financial crisis, leaving Tesla, SolarCity, and Musk personally near bankruptcy at the same moment. The stress was physical: Musk was reportedly waking from nightmares, screaming and in pain. He split his remaining $30 million between SpaceX and Tesla. The turn came on September 28, 2008, when the fourth Falcon 1 flight reached orbit, and in December, when NASA awarded SpaceX a $1.6 billion Commercial Resupply Services contract for Falcon 9 and Dragon cargo flights to the International Space Station, saving the company. Gwynne Shotwell, who negotiated the contract with NASA associate administrator Bill Gerstenmaier, was promoted to president. The sequence is the founder thesis in its purest form: last-dollar survival converted into institutional validation.

The fourth flight was assembled in six weeks from available parts as the company's last chance. A chartered Boeing C-17 delivered the rocket but over-pressurized it in transit, forcing emergency repairs before the attempt. On September 28, 2008, Falcon 1 reached orbit, delivering a 165-kilogram boilerplate payload into low-Earth orbit and becoming the first privately developed, fully liquid-fueled launch vehicle ever to do so, on the last money SpaceX had. Musk later described the moment bluntly to a journalist: out of money, three failures deep, a recession starting, his Tesla financing round failed, his marriage over, not even owning a house. The fifth flight in July 2009 delivered Malaysia's RazakSAT satellite, SpaceX's first commercial launch, after which Falcon 1 was retired, with the company conceding it could not make the vehicle work as a business and moving booked payloads to Falcon 9 rideshares. The design philosophy, the smallest useful orbital rocket as minimum viable product, survived in everything after.

The Roadster proved the concept and nearly killed the company. Tesla began building the car in 2008 in Menlo Park, working out of the service bays of what had been a Chevrolet dealership; by January 2009 it had raised $187 million and delivered 147 cars, with Musk having contributed $70 million of his own money to keep the enterprise alive. The product was a landmark: the first mass-production electric car built around lithium-ion battery cells, with roughly 2,500 eventually sold. The strategic logic was explicit, a premium sports car aimed at early adopters funding the move into sedans and affordable compacts. Governance churned underneath: Eberhard was pushed out as chief executive in August 2007 by a board led by Musk, cycled through a president-of-technology title, and left in January 2008; Musk took over as chief executive in October 2008, at the bottom of the financial crisis, with the Roadster finally shipping.

Production hell was a manufacturing strategy failing in real time. In May 2016 Tesla advanced its 500,000-unit build plan to 2018, two years early, and told suppliers it intended to build 100,000 Model 3s in 2017 and 400,000 in 2018, targets suppliers and industry experts considered unattainable. Tesla financed the plan with a $2 billion share issuance and bought Grohmann Engineering in January 2017 to accelerate automation. The result inverted the intent: over-robotized lines delivered just 2,425 vehicles in the fourth quarter of 2017 against a promised 5,000-per-week rate. Tesla rewired the sequence, building simpler long-range rear-wheel-drive cars first, a lesson taken directly from the Model X launch debacle, and took a mid-April 2018 shutdown to rebuild lines. On July 1, 2018, Musk announced that the 5,000-per-week target had been met. The staircase strategy, premium volume funding the mass-market car, survived contact with its own demand.

The financing structure put Musk's fortune directly at risk. Debt commitments led by Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Barclays, MUFG, Societe Generale, Mizuho, and BNP Paribas totaled $13 billion at the Twitter level, $7 billion in senior secured loans and $6 billion in subordinated debt, roughly seven times the platform's projected 2022 operating cash flow, with annual interest and fees near $1 billion. Musk personally carried $6.25 billion in bank loans secured by $62.5 billion of his Tesla stock, committed $20 billion of cash equity funded largely by Tesla share sales, and raised $7.1 billion of equity from nineteen investors including Larry Ellison, Prince Al Waleed bin Talal, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, and Qatar Holding. Tesla shares fell 12 percent the day after the deal was announced, erasing $21 billion of Musk's paper wealth, and within three days of the board's acceptance he had sold $8.5 billion of Tesla stock.

Paid verification became the platform's identity and its most volatile product. Musk pushed the subscription after the takeover explicitly to offset declining advertising revenue, folding the blue checkmark into a $7.99 monthly Twitter Blue tier launched November 9, 2022. Impersonation disasters followed within days, with accounts posing as companies and public figures, forcing suspension of the feature on November 11 and a relaunch on December 12 at a higher price on iOS to absorb Apple's 30 percent cut. Legacy verification for public figures was slated for removal in March 2023 and executed that April, replaced by a base subscription, a $1,000-per-month verified-organizations tier with gold checks plus $50 per affiliate, and a requirement that advertisers join the verified program to buy ads on the platform. Musk also ordered the recommendation timeline to prioritize paid accounts, inverting verification from an authentication service into the primary subscription wedge.

Gates grew up in Seattle's Sand Point neighborhood, the only son of William Gates Sr., a prominent lawyer, and Mary Maxwell Gates, who sat on the boards of First Interstate BancSystem and United Way of America; his maternal grandfather, J. W. Maxwell, had been a national bank president. Known as Trey within the family, he was small for his age and bullied as a child, and his parents initially steered him toward the law. The household ran on competition, with a reward for winning and a penalty for losing in everything from card games to swimming to the dock. At thirteen he enrolled at Lakeside Prep, where the Mothers' Club spent rummage-sale proceeds on a Teletype terminal and time on a General Electric machine. Gates wrote his first program there, a tic-tac-toe game in BASIC, was excused from math classes to pursue computing, and became fascinated that the machine executed code perfectly every time.

The company's early identity took shape around naming and place. Allen devised Micro-Soft as a portmanteau of microcomputer and software; the hyphen disappeared within a year, and the name Microsoft was registered with the New Mexico Secretary of State on November 26, 1976. Ric Weiland, a high-school collaborator, was the first employee hired. The first international office, ASCII Microsoft in Japan, opened on November 1, 1978, and on January 1, 1979, the company moved from Albuquerque to Bellevue, Washington, because top programmers were hard to recruit to New Mexico; eleven of the thirteen employees posed for a staff photograph just before the relocation. The move put the young firm back in the Seattle orbit where Gates and Allen had grown up, within reach of the talent pool that would power its next decade. Microsoft's BASIC variants were simultaneously becoming the dominant programming language of early home computers, including the Apple II and the Commodore 64.

Diagnosed with Stage 1-A Hodgkin lymphoma in 1982, Allen quit day-to-day work at Microsoft in early 1983 while remaining on its board as vice chairman, resigning from the board entirely on November 9, 2000, after which he stayed only as a senior strategy advisor. He and his sister Jody founded Vulcan in 1986 to manage his business and philanthropic affairs, and he built a multi-billion portfolio that included owning the Seattle Seahawks and Portland Trail Blazers and co-owning the Seattle Sounders. He founded the Allen Institutes for Brain Science, Artificial Intelligence, and Cell Science, funded SpaceShipOne's 2004 first crewed private spaceflight, gave more than two billion dollars to education, conservation, and the arts, and located famous warship wrecks. A 2009 non-Hodgkin lymphoma diagnosis preceded his death from septic shock on October 15, 2018, at sixty-five, with an estimated $20.3 billion net worth.

The Albuquerque demonstration became founding legend. On final approach into the airport, Allen realized they had forgotten to write the bootloader that would read the punched paper tape into the Altair's memory, and he finished writing it in 8080 machine language before the plane landed. Only when the tape loaded and the machine displayed a prompt asking for its memory size did they know the interpreter actually ran on Altair hardware. Roberts agreed to distribute the software and hired them to maintain and improve it, with Allen becoming MITS vice president and director of software at $30,000 a year while Gates worked as a contractor titled Software Specialist. The July 22, 1975 contract paid $3,000 at signing plus royalties per copy sold, thirty dollars for the 4K version, thirty-five for 8K, and sixty for the extended edition, capped at $180,000, with MITS holding a ten-year exclusive worldwide license.

The economics behind the letter were unforgiving. MITS sold the Altair 8800 itself at break-even, counting on memory boards, input-output cards, and other add-ons for profit, so software royalties were one of the few clean revenue streams available to the young partnership, and the April 1975 MITS newsletter had already trumpeted Altair BASIC as up and running. The 8K and extended editions carried the higher royalty tiers that unpaid copying erased. The 1975 contract paid Gates and Allen thirty dollars per 4K copy sold against a $180,000 cap, meaning widespread copying struck directly at their income. Microsoft became independent of MITS in late 1976 and kept developing programming-language products for other systems, carrying the paid-software doctrine forward. Looking back, the letter functions as the industry's founding declaration that software is a product with value, not a giveaway that rides along with hardware.

Windows 1.0's commercial defense was legal as much as technical. Apple had agreed to license certain parts of its graphical interface to Microsoft for Windows 1.0, and Microsoft courted hardware makers, with Compaq, Zenith, and DEC supporting the environment while Microsoft encouraged even competitors to write Windows applications without adopting Microsoft's own interface conventions. The operating environment included multitasking, mouse support, and built-in programs such as Calculator, Paint, and Notepad, though its windows could not overlap. Windows 2.0, released December 9, 1987, added overlapping windows and other Macintosh-like features, which Apple treated as exceeding the 1985 license and answered with a copyright suit in 1988. Microsoft supported Windows 1.0 until December 31, 2001, making it the longest-supported version of Windows ever shipped, a quiet monument to how early Gates had placed the graphical bet. The company had begun selling the Microsoft Mouse in May 1983 to give the environment a pointing device.

The Department of Justice, joined by twenty state attorneys general and the District of Columbia, filed suit on May 18, 1998, before Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, focusing on predatory strategies and barriers to entry. Gates himself never testified at trial; instead his pretrial videotaped deposition became infamous, with a source present calling him evasive and nonresponsive as he sparred with examiner David Boies over the contextual meaning of words like compete, concerned, and we. When excerpts played in court, the judge was seen laughing and shaking his head, and reporting noted that many denials were directly refuted by prosecutors with snippets of emails Gates had sent and received. An Intel vice president quoted a senior Microsoft executive's stated intention to smother Netscape and cut off its air supply by giving away a clone of its flagship browser for free.

The bundling worked. Netscape Navigator dominated browsing in the mid-1990s, but every Windows user received a copy of Internet Explorer without buying anything, and the browser only superseded Netscape once it caught up technologically to support the progressive features of the era, a takeover that began in earnest with version 4.0 in 1997. Microsoft's victory in what became known as the first browser war drove Internet Explorer to a peak of ninety-five percent usage share by 2003, a dominance that invited the regulatory response and, eventually, stagnation. Under a 1997 agreement with Apple, Internet Explorer was also bundled with the Macintosh operating system. The browser's long decline ended with retirement, and its successor Edge, rebuilt on Chromium, did not overtake the old Internet Explorer's standing until November 2019, a two-decade arc from the most distributed software on earth to a museum piece.

In June 2006, Warren Buffett pledged roughly ten million Berkshire Hathaway Class B shares, then valued at $3,071 each before a later fifty-to-one split, to be delivered over multiple years, with the first 500,000-share tranche worth about $1.5 billion. The gift came with three conditions: Bill or Melinda Gates must remain alive and active in the foundation's administration, the foundation must continue to qualify as a charity, and each year it must give away the previous year's Berkshire contribution plus an additional five percent of net assets, effectively converting the donation into a matching grant that doubled giving rather than swelling the endowment. The foundation received five percent of the earmarked shares in 2006 and declining installments each July thereafter, with Buffett adding another two billion dollars of stock in 2018. His cumulative giving to the foundation reached roughly $48 billion before the partnership ended in 2026.

Jobs was born to Joanne Carole Schieble, an American Catholic of Swiss-German descent, and Abdulfattah Jandali, a Syrian Muslim graduate student pursuing a doctorate at Wisconsin, a pairing her father opposed. Arranging a closed adoption, Schieble traveled to San Francisco to give birth and asked that her son go to college graduates; when the selected lawyer and his wife withdrew upon learning the baby was a boy, Paul and Clara Jobs adopted him instead. Schieble initially refused to sign the papers and went to court, relenting only after the couple promised to pay for his college education. Paul Jobs, a high-school dropout turned Coast Guard mechanic and machinist, and Clara, a bookkeeper, moved the family to Mountain View. Jobs later bristled whenever they were called his adoptive parents and described them, in his own phrasing, as his real parents a thousand percent over.

In 1979 Xerox granted Apple access to its Palo Alto Research Center in exchange for the right to buy $1 million of Apple stock ahead of the IPO. Jobs and Apple colleagues visited PARC twice, in November and December 1979, and he was greatly impressed by the graphical user interface of the Xerox Alto, deciding on the spot to implement what he had seen in the Apple Lisa, the business machine under development since that July. Jobs led the Lisa effort from early 1980 until excessive technical demands disrupted it and he was removed from the project that September, which pushed him toward the Macintosh. Released in January 1983 at $9,995, the Lisa offered genuine innovation, windows and icons and a mouse, but its price and software isolation drove buyers away: more than $150 million went into development while only about 10,000 units sold, teaching Apple the cost lesson the Macintosh then had to solve.

NeXT unveiled its first computer at what observers treated as Jobs's comeback moment, a lavish invitation-only gala at the Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco on October 12, 1988, described by attendees as a multimedia extravaganza. NeXT workstations first shipped in 1990 at $9,999 each, technologically advanced machines aimed at the education sector but largely dismissed as cost-prohibitive, a rerun of the Lisa's pricing problem. The workstation was known for technical strengths, chiefly its object-oriented software development system, and Jobs marketed it to financial, scientific, and academic buyers by highlighting experimental technologies like the Mach kernel, the digital signal processor chip, and the built-in Ethernet port. The second-generation NeXTcube arrived in 1990, touted by Jobs as the first interpersonal computer that would replace the personal computer, its NeXTMail system sharing voice, image, graphics, and video in email for the first time.

The original business plan — selling the Pixar Image Computer, a high-end visualization machine — failed. Sales were inadequate, losses grew, and Jobs kept increasing his investment in exchange for a larger stake, reducing management and employee ownership until his cumulative $50 million gave him control of the entire company. In April 1990 Pixar sold its hardware division to Vicom Systems, and early 1991 brought layoffs that cut the staff to roughly forty-two people, its original size. On March 6, 1991, Jobs bought the company outright from its employees and became full owner; he contemplated folding it into NeXT, but NeXT's co-founders refused. As late as 1994 he considered selling Pixar to Hallmark Cards, to Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, or to Oracle chief Larry Ellison, and only after New York critics signaled that Toy Story would be a hit did he decide to give the studio another chance, take an active leadership role, and make himself chief executive.

The commercial's path to air was improvised. It first ran on December 31, 1983, in ten local outlets, including Twin Falls, Idaho, where Chiat/Day bought the last possible break before midnight on station KMVT so the spot would qualify for the 1984 Clio Awards. Its second and only national airing came on January 22, 1984, during the third quarter of CBS's Super Bowl XVIII telecast. Within Apple the ad had been a subject of contention — the board reportedly disliked it — but the single broadcast became a watershed event and, in the industry's judgment, a masterpiece. In 1995 the Clio Awards inducted it into their Hall of Fame, and Advertising Age placed it at the top of its list of the fifty greatest commercials ever made. Regis McKenna later judged the advertisement more successful than the Macintosh itself, an early lesson that Jobs's product launches were media events first.

The campaign's centerpiece, the sixty-second television spot known as Crazy Ones, ran black-and-white footage of seventeen twentieth-century figures, among them Albert Einstein, Bob Dylan, Martin Luther King Jr., Ted Turner, Richard Branson, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Thomas Edison, Buckminster Fuller, Muhammad Ali, Mahatma Gandhi, Maria Callas, Amelia Earhart, Alfred Hitchcock, Jim Henson and Kermit, Martha Graham, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Pablo Picasso, closing on a young girl opening her eyes as if making a wish. Jobs's connections secured likeness rights from figures who never did advertising: he personally telephoned the families of Jim Henson and John F. Kennedy and flew to New York to visit Yoko Ono. Two narrations were recorded, one by Jobs and one by actor Richard Dreyfuss; though Lee Clow argued it would be powerful for Jobs to voice the spot as a symbol of reclaiming the brand, Jobs chose the Dreyfuss version on the morning of the first air date, saying the campaign was about Apple, not about himself. His own narration was played at Apple's internal memorial for him in 2011.

Jobs introduced the iPhone on January 9, 2007, in a keynote at the Macworld Conference and Expo at Moscone West in San Francisco, telling the audience it was a day he had looked forward to for two and a half years and that Apple was going to reinvent the phone. He framed the product as three devices fused into one: an iPod with a widescreen touch interface, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough internet communicator. Six weeks before release, after Jobs found his keys had scratched the plastic prototype in his pocket, the screen was switched to glass, with Corning supplying it and Foxconn winning the manufacturing bid. The iPhone went on sale in the United States on June 29, 2007, at $499 for the 4GB model and $599 for the 8GB model with a two-year contract. Six of ten Americans surveyed knew of its release beforehand; thousands waited outside stores, and stock ran short within an hour.

Unveiled on October 23, 2001, after development in under a year, the first iPod was announced by Jobs as a Mac-compatible product with a five-gigabyte hard drive that put a thousand songs in your pocket. Priced at $399 and launched amid skepticism about a consumer-electronics pivot by a struggling computer maker, it sold more than 100,000 units before the end of 2001, and Fortune labeled it Apple's twenty-first-century Walkman. The device's real strategic weight emerged over the following half-decade: the iPod made Apple a major player in the music industry, set up the iTunes Music Store as the first mass-market legal download service, and trained tens of millions of customers to use Apple interfaces and buy Apple hardware in categories far from computers. Jobs later noted that Apple made little profit from song sales themselves — the store existed to sell iPods — a razor-and-blades inversion where the music subsidized the hardware, not the reverse.

Vanderbilt's lineage traces to Jan Aertson, a Dutch farmer from the village of De Bilt near Utrecht who reached New Amsterdam around 1650 as an indentured servant; over generations the family name fused his village with the Dutch van der to become Vanderbilt. Cornelius was born on Staten Island to Cornelius van Derbilt and Phebe Hand, quit school at eleven, and worked on his father's ferry in New York Harbor. At sixteen he resolved to start a ferry service of his own. In the standard account he borrowed one hundred dollars from his mother to buy a shallow-draft, two-masted periauger he christened the Swiftsure, carrying freight and passengers between Staten Island and Manhattan; the first published account of his life, from 1853, held instead that the boat belonged to his father and that the son took half the profits. Either way, the teen's ferocity in the trade led neighboring captains to mock him as the Commodore.

In 1855 the American filibuster William Walker installed himself as president of Nicaragua, seizing the transit company's assets in the country; he was driven out in 1857 by forces backed by Vanderbilt. Having regained control of the company, Vanderbilt then made the move his critics never forgot: he opened negotiations with Pacific Mail and the United States Mail Steamship Company, the pair that ran the routes across Panama, offering to stop running the Nicaragua line in return for a monthly stipend of forty thousand dollars. The companies accepted, essentially paying him never to compete, and a year later raised the payment to fifty-six thousand when he threatened to reopen the transit. The Accessory Transit line never ran again. For a modest retainer, Vanderbilt had converted a wrecked asset into an annuity, a pure demonstration of the leverage that credible competition held over incumbents who valued their position above everything else.

Between 1866 and 1868, Drew conspired with James Fisk and Jay Gould, whom he brought onto the Erie board, to issue spurious shares, watering down the stock, of which an unsuspecting Vanderbilt bought a large quantity, losing more than seven million dollars in his attempt to gain control. Gould later returned most of the money under threat of litigation, but Vanderbilt conceded the railroad to the trio. They were entangled with the corrupt Tammany Hall machine and made Boss Tweed a director of the railroad, and he arranged favorable state legislation in Albany legalizing the newly issued shares. The historian Gustavus Myers recorded that Vanderbilt's agents poured out money to buy legislative votes against the legalization bill while members impassively took cash from both sides: Gould appeared in Albany with a satchel holding half a million dollars in greenbacks, and one senator kept seventy-five thousand from Vanderbilt and a hundred thousand from Gould, and voted with Gould.

Vanderbilt stipulated that McTyeire serve as chairman of the Board of Trust for life. For its first forty years the institution remained under the auspices of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, a lineage modern historians have documented unsparingly: McTyeire was born into a slave-owning family and wrote an essay defending slavery, chancellor Landon Garland owned as many as sixty enslaved people before the war, and Vanderbilt's own second wife was a Confederate sympathizer during the conflict. Tension between the board and the church over trustee selection and the place of non-Methodist faculty culminated in 1910, when the board refused to seat three Methodist bishops. After litigation, the Tennessee Supreme Court held in 1914 that the true founder of the university was the Commodore himself, not the Methodist Church, and the General Conference voted 151 to 140 to sever its ties with the institution that carried his name.

Family tradition preserves the young Vanderbilt's boldest gesture of defiance, from a line that began with Jan Aertszoon, a Dutch farmer who reached New Netherland as an indentured servant in 1650. Competing with Robert Fulton's company for dominance of New York's waterways, and blocked by the monopoly Fulton's heirs held over trade in and out of New York Harbor, Vanderbilt based himself across the river in New Jersey and flouted the law outright, sailing his boats in and out of the harbor beneath a banner reading New Jersey Must Be Free. He engaged Daniel Webster to argue his position before the United States Supreme Court, and won, helping establish an early precedent for the country's first laws of interstate commerce. The episode fixed the pattern of his entire career: where monopoly closed a market, he treated the closure itself as the opening, converting a legal barrier into a marketing banner and a courtroom fight into a competitive asset.

Zuckerberg grew up in Dobbs Ferry, New York, the son of Edward Zuckerberg, a dentist, and Karen Kempner, a psychiatrist, and was raised with three sisters in a Reform Jewish household. He learned programming as a child and at around eleven built ZuckNet, a network linking the family home with his father's dental office. In high school he wrote the Synapse Media Player, a music program that used machine learning to adapt to listening habits; it drew coverage on Slashdot and a rating from PC Magazine. While still a secondary-school student he took a graduate computer course at Mercy College on Thursday evenings. After transferring from Ardsley High School to Phillips Exeter Academy, where he captained the fencing team, he arrived at Harvard in 2002 with an established reputation as a programming prodigy, studying psychology and computer science and living in Kirkland House.

Thefacebook launched from a Harvard dormitory on February 4, 2004, and expanded school by school as peer networks pulled their friends aboard. The decisive financing arrived in April 2005, when Accel Partners invested twelve point seven million dollars at a ninety-eight million dollar valuation, a Series A that put Accel's Jim Breyer on a five-seat board alongside Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel, with the remaining two seats left open for Zuckerberg to fill. The structure mattered as much as the money: the twenty-year-old founder kept effective control of the company he had built in a semester. Revenue logic came later and from outside; the company grew first and monetized second, inverting the discipline of the era's web businesses and establishing the growth-first template that venture capital would chase across consumer software for the following decade. The round closed as the network spread through the Ivy League, and that same year the company bought Facebook.com and dropped the definite article from its name.

In November 2022 Meta laid off eleven thousand employees, thirteen percent of its workforce, and Zuckerberg told staff that the decision to aggressively increase investment had been his mistake, admitting he had wrongly expected the pandemic e-commerce surge to persist. He attributed the collapse in economics to rising competition, a deteriorating macro environment, and advertising signal loss from platform privacy changes. The cuts continued in waves: in March 2023 the company announced a further reduction of about ten thousand roles plus the closure of five thousand open positions, part of the program Zuckerberg branded the year of efficiency. The restructuring sat inside a broader technology downturn that hit Google, Amazon, Snap, Twitter, and Lyft simultaneously, but Meta's depth reflected its founder's specific error, a pandemic-era forecast compounded by an open-ended metaverse budget that investors no longer tolerated. Employment, which peaked above eighty-seven thousand, was cut faster than any peer in big technology.

The story broke publicly through a whistleblower. Christopher Wylie, a former Cambridge Analytica employee, spent a year working with Guardian journalist Carole Cadwalladr before agreeing to be named, and The Guardian and The New York Times published their simultaneous exposés on March 17, 2018. Reporting had actually surfaced the data harvesting as early as December 2015, when the Guardian's Harry Davies described Cambridge Analytica's work for Senator Ted Cruz using data taken without consent, but the 2018 iteration, armed with Wylie's documentation and Channel 4's undercover footage, detonated. More than one hundred billion dollars came off Facebook's market capitalization within days, and politicians in Washington and London demanded the chief executive appear in person to explain how a quiz application had become a political weapons platform. What made the reporting land was the discovery that no break-in had occurred: the friend-data pathway Kogan exploited was a documented feature of Facebook's platform permissions.

The Instagram deal aged into antitrust folklore. In April 2012, days before the sale, Instagram released its Android app and drew more than a million downloads in a single day, the momentum that made the acquisition urgent. Columbia law professor Tim Wu later argued publicly that the purchase was a felony under United States antitrust law, and in February 2019 the New York Post reported that the FTC had uncovered a memo by a senior Facebook official indicating the acquisition's purpose was neutralizing a potential rival. The episode became the template argument for the big-tech antitrust revival: a dominant platform buying an emerging competitor before it could mature, with the Federal Trade Commission of 2012 declining to intervene and its successor a decade later litigating whether that failure could be undone. A billion dollars for a pre-revenue photo app became the recurring exhibit whenever scholars and regulators argued that the platform era's consolidation had gone too far.

On February 19, 2014, Facebook agreed to buy WhatsApp for nineteen billion dollars, the largest acquisition of a venture-backed company in history at that point: four billion in cash, twelve billion in Facebook stock, and three billion in restricted stock units binding founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton through four-year vesting. Sequoia's stake returned roughly five thousand percent on its investment. The deal was informed by Onavo, Facebook's analytics app for monitoring competitors, which had flagged the messaging startup as performing unusually well. Users revolted on announcement; Telegram claimed eight million new arrivals and Line two million. Zuckerberg framed the purchase at Mobile World Congress that month as a service connecting billions of people, but the strategic logic visible in the numbers was simpler: the messaging layer of the internet would be owned, not rented, and Facebook had decided it would be the owner.

Control was engineered into the offering before price was. Facebook instituted a dual-class share structure in 2009, and the prospectus showed Zuckerberg retaining twenty-two percent ownership with fifty-seven percent of voting shares after the IPO, an arrangement that let the founder take the company public without surrendering a single strategic decision. The roadshow that followed tested the packaging: Zuckerberg drew criticism for wearing a hoodie to the first investor meeting, which Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter dismissed as a mark of immaturity, and a half-hour video frustrated investors who wanted technical detail, so it was cut from later sessions. Demand nonetheless let underwriters lift the target range from twenty-eight to thirty-five dollars up to thirty-four to thirty-eight, and they priced at thirty-eight, the top, valuing the company at one hundred four billion dollars, the largest valuation ever for a newly public firm. Facebook added twenty-five percent more shares two days before trading.

Libra's coalition collapsed under regulatory fire. PayPal exited the association on October 4, 2019, and eBay, Mastercard, Stripe, Visa, Mercado Pago, and Booking Holdings followed within ten days. The project rebranded as Diem in December 2020, slimmed from a multi-currency basket to a dollar-backed stablecoin, with twenty-seven member companies remaining. It never launched. In January 2022 the Diem Association wound down and sold its assets to Silvergate Capital for a reported two hundred million dollars, after the Federal Reserve and the Treasury declined to support a token issued by, or even adjacent to, Facebook. Silvergate wrote off its entire Diem investment in early 2023, months before the bank itself failed. The episode stands as the firmest boundary Zuckerberg's ambition encountered: two billion users could not purchase the consent of the dollar's guardians. Only rudimentary experimental code was ever released; the currency never processed a live transaction at scale.

Disney was born at 1249 North Tripp Avenue in Chicago's Hermosa neighborhood, the fourth son of Elias Disney, a Canadian-born father of Anglo-Irish descent, and Flora Call. In 1906 the family moved to a farm in Marceline, Missouri, where Disney was paid to draw a retired doctor's horse and practiced by copying front-page cartoons from the Appeal to Reason newspaper his father subscribed to; he called the Marceline years the happiest and most formative of his life and later used the town as a model for Main Street, U.S.A. In 1911 the family moved to Kansas City, where Disney and Roy delivered the morning and evening papers on a route their father bought, waking at 4:30 every morning for more than six years. He took Saturday classes at the Kansas City Art Institute and a correspondence course in cartooning while a schoolmate's theater-loving family introduced him to vaudeville and the movies.

Laugh-O-Gram's fatal blow came from its distributor. The studio secured a contract for six shorts with Pictorial Clubs of Tennessee, but the distributor paid only a small advance before going bankrupt, and the loss of income crippled the studio. Disney lived in the office and bathed weekly at Union Station while the payroll went unpaid. A final commission, a dental hygiene film called Tommy Tucker's Tooth, funded production of Alice's Wonderland, a live-action and animation hybrid designed as a last-resort franchise to save the company. Instead the studio filed for bankruptcy in July 1923, and Disney sold his movie camera and moved to Hollywood carrying an unfinished reel of Alice's Wonderland as his only asset. He later recalled that the idea for Mickey Mouse traced to a tame mouse he kept at his desk in Kansas City. A nonprofit organization, Thank You, Walt Disney, has since worked to restore the derelict McConahay Building.

Universal and Winkler renewed the Oswald arrangement in February 1928, but Disney feared Mintz would not renew it again, partly because Iwerks had warned him that Mintz's men were quietly hiring away his animators during print pickups. Disney traveled to New York with his wife to negotiate better terms and was told to accept a twenty percent cut. Most of his fellow animators left for Mintz's studio, and Disney quit working on the Oswald cartoons entirely. On the long train ride home he resolved to create another character and, decisively, to retain the rights to it. He and Iwerks developed the new cartoon in secret, and the first Mickey Mouse film, Plane Crazy, was produced as a silent in summer 1928 and held back from release; Steamboat Willie, with a synchronized soundtrack, reached theaters that fall and became a major hit that eclipsed Oswald. Universal head Carl Laemmle later terminated Mintz and gave the series to Walter Lantz, with whom Disney maintained a friendly rivalry for the rest of his life.

Industry opinion held that the feature would bankrupt the studio. Animator Ward Kimball recalled Hollywood moguls arguing that cartoon comedy worked for six or seven minutes, like the shorts, but that an hour and a half demanded a laugh a minute nobody could sustain, and that the bright colors would hurt viewers' eyes and drive them from the theater. Disney's wife Lillian and his brother Roy, his own business partner, both tried unsuccessfully to talk him out of the project, and industry insiders derisively nicknamed it Disney's Folly while it was in production. Walt pressed ahead on the conviction that a solid story carrying tragedy as well as comedy could hold an audience for an hour and a half. The bet was existential: the studio's future, its borrowing capacity, and its artistic reputation all rode on a format no American studio had ever delivered at feature length, and production costs would multiply several times over the original estimate before the film opened.

The Screen Cartoonists' Guild and its president Herbert Sorrell began meeting with Disney workers at the Hollywood Hotel from the start of 1941 to hear grievances and plan a unionization effort. Art Babbitt, one of the studio's best-paid animators, joined the guild out of sympathy for low-ranking employees and frustration with the company union, the Federation of Screen Cartoonists, in which he had served as a senior official. Disney, who saw no problem with the studio's structure, believed it was his studio to run and that his employees should be grateful for the new Burbank facility, and he refused demands to unionize. In February 1941 he gathered all twelve hundred employees in the auditorium and delivered a speech about his twenty years of struggle in the business, telling them to put their own houses in order instead of grumbling and waiting to be told everything. The assembly was poorly received, guild membership grew, and Disney, viewing Babbitt as having personally betrayed him, fired Babbitt and sixteen other guild members.

To find a site, Disney hired C. V. Wood and Harrison Price of the Stanford Research Institute, whose analysis of future population growth pointed to a 160-acre parcel of orange groves and walnut trees in Anaheim, southeast of Los Angeles in Orange County. Roy Disney hired Wood away from SRI as executive vice president to build the park, and Wood introduced Disney to his friend Joe Fowler, a retired United States Navy rear admiral who became construction boss charged with turning Walt's ideas into engineering realities in a single year. Construction began July 16, 1954, and the park cost seventeen million dollars to complete, opening one year and one day later; two extra lanes were added to U.S. Route 101 in preparation for the traffic Disneyland was expected to bring. The park's design revolutionized the theme park industry, pioneering strict dedication to theming and cleanliness, an earthen berm walling off the outside world, a hub-and-spoke layout, and visual landmarks pulling guests deeper into the park.

To avoid a burst of land speculation, Walt Disney Productions used dummy corporations to acquire 27,443 acres beginning in April 1964, with tongue-in-cheek names like the Ayefour Corporation, Latin-American Development and Management Corporation, and Reedy Creek Ranch Corporation, later merged into the Compass East Corporation; some of the original names are now memorialized on windows above Main Street, U.S.A. Real estate agents unaware of their client's identity negotiated large tracts for as little as one hundred dollars an acre, much of it swamp whose owners were happy to sell, and Disney's team paid Tufts University fifteen thousand dollars for the mineral rights to prevent any sub-surface development. Recording of deeds was delayed until a large portion of the land was under contract. Rumors credited NASA, Ford, the Rockefellers, and Howard Hughes until Orlando Sentinel editor Emily Bavar, struck by Disney's stunned reaction when asked about the purchases, correctly predicted the project in October 1965. Governor Haydon Burns confirmed it days later, calling it the greatest attraction in Florida's history.

Hastings was born in Boston, Massachusetts. His father, Wilmot Reed Hastings Sr., was a lawyer at the Department of Health, Education and Welfare in the Nixon administration; his mother, Joan Amory Loomis, was a Boston Brahmin debutante who recoiled from high society and raised her children to scorn it. The financier and scientist Alfred Lee Loomis was his maternal great-grandfather. Hastings attended Buckingham Browne and Nichols School in Cambridge, and spent a gap year selling vacuum cleaners door to door before entering college. In 1983 he graduated from Bowdoin College with a bachelor's degree in mathematics, a campus he found beautiful and engaging and with which he has stayed involved ever since. The combination of patrician New England lineage and deliberate distance from its social rituals recurs in accounts of a founder who consistently chose unconventional paths, from the Peace Corps to a DVD-by-mail startup, over the establishments available to him.

Hastings had told the producer Mynette Louie in the late 1990s that streaming was always the goal, with DVDs merely a way to build the customer base for the eventual service. By the mid-2000s, data speeds and bandwidth costs had improved enough for customers to download movies from the internet. The first concept was a Netflix box that would fetch movies overnight so they were ready to watch the next morning; by 2005 the company had acquired film rights and designed both the device and the service. Then the plan changed. Once it became clear that a streaming service like YouTube could win huge audiences even without high-definition content, the hardware concept was scrapped and replaced with a pure streaming service. The decision is one of the quiet pivots that made Netflix what it became: rather than defend a proprietary box business, Hastings chose to be everywhere the internet already was, a strategy that would later make Netflix a layer on every connected screen rather than a gadget maker.

Media Rights Capital approached HBO, Showtime, and AMC about House of Cards, but Netflix, hoping to launch its own original programming, outbid the cable networks. The decision inside Netflix was famously data-driven: chief content officer Ted Sarandos looked at the streaming habits of Netflix users and concluded there was an audience for David Fincher and Kevin Spacey, calling the alignment of material and talent an almost perfect storm. The project was announced in March 2011 with Spacey attached to star and executive produce and Fincher directing the first two episodes. Netflix ordered twenty-six episodes to air over two seasons, an extraordinary commitment for an untested platform. Spacey later noted the contrast at the Edinburgh International Television Festival: every other interested network wanted a pilot first, whereas Netflix, relying solely on its statistics, ordered the series directly, and the commitment to two full seasons gave the writers continuity, a clear sense of where the story was going from the start.

Schultz grew up in Brooklyn's Canarsie public housing projects, the son of Fred Schultz, a truck driver, and Elaine, a receptionist. He has described the family as poor, though childhood contemporaries recalled a middle-class upbringing, with one calling the development the country club of housing projects. After school he spent his time at the Boys Club of New York, an organization he remained connected to as an alumnus. He graduated from Canarsie High School in 1971 and enrolled at Northern Michigan University, where he joined the Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity and earned a communications degree in 1975. He had played football hoping for an athletic scholarship, but an injury ended that path and left him to finance his education another way. The distance between his family's economic fragility and the ambition he carried out of Canarsie became a recurring thread in how he later framed Starbucks' employee benefits and ownership programs for hourly workers.

The transformation from retailer to café happened in stages through the 1980s. In 1984 the original owners, led by Jerry Baldwin, purchased Peet's Coffee, tying their identity ever closer to the Bay Area roasting tradition. By 1986 the company operated six Seattle stores and had begun selling espresso coffee. In 1987 the ownership group sold the chain to Howard Schultz, their former marketing director, who put his Il Giornale espresso bars under the Starbucks name and began expanding the company; that same year Starbucks opened its first locations outside Seattle, at Waterfront Station in Vancouver and in Chicago. Growth compounded quickly, and by 1989 there were forty-six stores across the Pacific Northwest and Midwest, with the company roasting more than two million pounds of coffee annually. The decade closed with the espresso-bar concept proven and the machinery of national expansion in place, positioned for the public markets that would arrive three years later.

Starbucks' labor conflict did not begin in Buffalo. Warehouse and roasting plant workers in Seattle became the company's first unionized employees in March 1985, voting to join UFCW Local 1001 in a unit of roughly 120 people, and their 1986 contract brought health care coverage, paid vacation, and sick leave to part-time workers in Seattle and its suburbs. When Schultz became company president in 1987, the unit's history took a contested turn: he sought to expand the bargaining unit to include store workers, a dilution tactic that backfired when the store workers voted the union in, and he proposed reductions in medical benefits, work hours, and just-cause protections established in the prior contract. A decertification petition backed by store employee Daryl Moore succeeded in late 1987, and the plant union was decertified in 1992. Schultz wrote that the company had no involvement in the filing, while local union leaders said management had made it and hired anti-union consultants and lawyers.

Dalio's formal education ran through finance from the beginning. He earned a Bachelor of Science in finance from C.W. Post College of Long Island University, then worked as a clerk on the New York Stock Exchange before taking his MBA from Harvard Business School in 1973. The Bridgewater name was born during the Harvard years: Dalio and a group of friends set up a company whose ambition was trading commodities. The venture yielded little, but when he later opened his own shop he revived the name for what became Bridgewater Associates. The pattern that would define his career, failing cheaply and keeping the lesson as a reusable asset, was already visible. Practical education ran in parallel: after Harvard he traded out of a converted barn in Wilton, Connecticut, worked the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, and traded commodity futures before moving into commodity brokerage.

Dalio founded Bridgewater in 1975 in an office in his Manhattan apartment, and the business at first consisted exclusively of advising corporate clients on managing their currency and interest rate exposures at home and abroad. Later the firm shifted course, selling economic research to governments and to companies including Nabisco and McDonald's. Its paid subscription research report, the Daily Observations, analyzed global market trends and drew McDonald's and its main supplier as clients in the early 1980s. Banks of Mid-America was another early customer, whose treasury director Bob Prince later joined Bridgewater and rose to co-chief investment officer. The firm's first account was a five million dollar fixed-income investment from Hilda Ochoa-Brillembourg of the World Bank. By the mid-1980s Bridgewater had shifted from currency and rate management toward global bonds and currencies for institutions, and in 1990 it launched a hedge fund portfolio using money from Kodak and Loews Corporation.

Dalio grew up an ordinary kid in a middle-class Long Island neighborhood, the son of a jazz musician father and a homemaker mother. He got hooked on investing at age twelve while caddying at a neighborhood golf course, while the market ran hot and stock talk filled the air. He saved his caddying money to buy his first stock, Northeast Airlines, chosen, by his own comic admission, on the rationale that it was the only company he had ever heard of selling for less than five dollars a share. The reasoning was foolish but the luck was real: the company was nearing bankruptcy when it got bought out, and the shares tripled. In high school he had no interest in studying but kept playing the markets. He barely got into C.W. Post college, yet because he could pursue his passion as a finance major he graduated at the top of his class. He learned transcendental meditation in 1969 and completed his Harvard MBA in 1973.

The McNugget assignment grew out of a national shift in eating habits. In 1977 the U.S. government announced dietary guidance urging Americans to decrease meat consumption and increase poultry and fish, following an American Heart Association report on dietary cholesterol, and rising concerns about cardiovascular disease amplified the message. McDonald's, a chain built on the red-meat hamburger, heeded the federal advice and turned to poultry, launching a 1981 combination of fries and boneless chicken pieces that was eventually phased out in favor of the McNugget. Mid-1970s America chose beef first, pork second, chicken third; two decades later beef and chicken had reversed positions. Dalio arrived with the right toolset: his previous role at Shearson Hayden Stone had him advising cattle ranchers and crop producers on adapting to risk, and his scrappy young firm already counted one of America's largest poultry producers as a client, the connection that unlocked the McDonald's work.

The strategy began as estate planning. About thirty years before writing, which dates the work to the mid-1990s, Dalio set out to create a strategy his family could use to invest without his guidance after he was gone. The requirements: a return significantly higher than cash and equal to or above the classic 60/40 stock-bond portfolio, less risk than the 60/40 mix, no exposure that would do badly in any particular economic environment, and no dependence on market timing. The only route, he concluded, was holding a diversifying set of higher-return, higher-risk positions whose combined returns matched the individual pieces at lower aggregate risk. That reasoning produced the concept he named risk parity: take investments of different risks and volatilities and adjust them, increasing the risk of the low-risk assets and decreasing the risk of the high-risk ones, until they balance each other, then weight exposures by the most fundamental drivers of each asset class's returns. Bonds do badly when inflation and growth rise; gold, inflation-indexed bonds, and commodities do well in that environment.

The arithmetic behind the Holy Grail is compact enough to state in full. Take fifteen investment strategies, each with an expected annual return of ten percent and annualized volatility of twenty percent, about what a sensible standalone trading strategy looks like. The portfolio's expected return works out to the weighted average of the strategies, ten percent, no matter how they correlate. The volatility is what changes dramatically: for equally weighted strategies with zero pairwise correlation, portfolio volatility equals each strategy's volatility divided by the square root of the count, which comes out near 5.2 percent, about a quarter of any single strategy's. In Sharpe ratio terms the portfolio jumps from 0.5 to roughly 1.9, nearly a fourfold improvement in risk-adjusted return achieved through correlation alone. This is the engineering insight behind Bridgewater's Pure Alpha franchise: not better forecasts, but a roster of return streams whose profit-and-loss lines do not zig and zag in sync. Quantitative funds have since built entire businesses assembling such rosters across assets, directions, signals, and allocations.

Walton's childhood was shaped by scarcity and movement. His father, Thomas Gibson Walton, left farming for farm mortgaging, working through a brother's mortgage company as an agent for Metropolitan Life and foreclosing on farms through the Depression while the family drifted among Missouri small towns. Sam milked the family cow, bottled the surplus for sale, delivered the Columbia Daily Tribune on a paper route, and sold magazine subscriptions to help the household budget. In eighth grade in Shelbina he became the youngest Eagle Scout in Missouri history, and as an adult he received the Distinguished Eagle Scout Award. Graduating from Columbia's David H. Hickman High School, where classmates voted him the class's most versatile boy, The family left Oklahoma when Sam was five and lived in Springfield, Marshall, and Shelbina before settling in Columbia, Missouri. He enrolled at the University of Missouri as an ROTC cadet, waited tables in exchange for meals, joined Beta Theta Pi, and finished an economics degree in 1940 voted permanent president of his class.

The record of Walton's first store ownership shows how quickly his pricing instincts produced results. Buying the Newport Ben Franklin branch from Butler Brothers in 1945, he concentrated on selling at low prices to drive higher-volume sales at lower profit margins, portraying the effort as a crusade for the consumer. Though the lease price and the branch purchase costs were unusually high, Walton found lower-cost suppliers than rival stores used and consequently undercut his competitors on price. Sales rose forty-five percent in his first year of ownership, to one hundred five thousand dollars in revenue, then to one hundred forty thousand the next year and one hundred seventy-five thousand the year after, and the store reached two hundred fifty thousand dollars within five years. When the lease expired without a renewal agreement, he opened the replacement store at 105 North Main Street in Bentonville under the name Walton's Five and Dime — the building that now houses the Walmart Museum.

Walmart's early growth was overwhelmingly organic, but it used acquisitions surgically to jump borders: the 1977 entry into Illinois, its first corporate acquisition, brought sixteen Mohr-Value stores in Missouri and Illinois, and the 1981 push into the Southeast added ninety-two Kuhn's Big K stores along with openings in Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. The Hutcheson Shoe Company was acquired in 1978, the same year the company branched into wholly owned pharmacies, auto service centers, and jewelry departments — its first moves beyond general merchandise. Florida and Nebraska came in 1982, the first Virginia stores in 1984, and Kentucky and Mississippi had preceded the Texas crossing in the mid-1970s. Each acquisition was bought for locations rather than brands, which Walmart converted to its own format, keeping the store-count arithmetic simple and the logistics web dense and intact, and Western Merchandisers of Amarillo, Texas, followed in 1991.

Sam's Club carried Walmart into the Northeast before the parent banner arrived — its 1989 club in Delran, New Jersey, was Walmart's first operation in the region — and the format's footprint later spanned roughly six hundred United States clubs across forty-four states and Puerto Rico, plus about 170 clubs in Mexico and nearly fifty in China, with licensed operators running clubs in Brazil. Locations range from thirty-two thousand to one hundred sixty-eight thousand square feet, averaging around one hundred thirty-four thousand. The 1990 renaming from Sam's Wholesale Club dropped the middle word, but the economics never changed: membership fees funding low markups, bulk sizes, and pallet-merchandised simplicity. Six Canadian clubs operated from 2003 to 2009 before Walmart Canada closed them to concentrate on superstores. In the 2025 fiscal year the division's ninety billion dollars in sales placed it second in its category, ahead of BJ's Wholesale Club and behind Costco.

Walton's debt to Sol Price was unusually explicit for a competitor. In his autobiography, Made in America, Walton wrote that he had borrowed as many ideas from Price as from anybody else in the business, and he conceded that he liked the Wal-Mart name partly because he admired the construction of Price's FedMart brand. Walton had dinner with Price in 1983; before the year was out, the first Sam's Club had opened in Oklahoma — a sequence Price Club's founder understood perfectly, having watched his innovations migrate north. Asked late in life how it felt to be the father of the warehouse-retailing industry, Price answered with a famously crude joke about wishing he had worn a condom. The exchange became retailing folklore precisely because it captured the era's copying culture, in which formats were public property and execution was the only durable advantage.

The hypermarts failed the arithmetic test. Though the stores were profitable, sales projections proved too optimistic: Walmart was unaccustomed to operating buildings so massive, had not anticipated the heating and cooling costs, and misjudged customer resistance to the parking and congestion of mega-boxes, all while an early-1990s recession depressed retail sales. The smaller Supercenter format, roughly one hundred twenty-five thousand square feet, that debuted in Washington, Missouri in 1988 proved the more profitable experiment, so Walmart renamed the hypermarkets Wal-Mart's Hypermart USA in April 1990 and gradually converted them to Supercenter operations. Two former Hypermart locations still operated as Supercenters decades later, while the Kansas City building — the largest footprint Walmart ever built — closed in 2007. The concept was officially discontinued in 2000, when the Kansas City Hypermart was converted. The episode became a standing case study in format discipline: past a certain point, scale creates costs faster than convenience.

Helen Walton's influence persisted past the founder's death and into institutional philanthropy. When Sam Walton died in 1992, his Walmart ownership passed to her and the couple's four children, and at one point she ranked as the richest American and among the wealthiest women in the world. As president of the Walton Family Foundation, she directed a three-hundred-million-dollar gift to the University of Arkansas in 2002 — at the time the largest donation ever made to an American public university — following an earlier fifty-million-dollar gift to its business school. She established the Walton Scholars program, which supports one hundred fifty students annually and brings Central American students to the United States to study democracy and free enterprise, and she founded a Bentonville children's enrichment center that now bears her name. Late in life, affected by dementia, she painted watercolors her daughter Alice described as lyrical and whimsical.

Butler Brothers also taught promotional retailing. The company organized special sale events every few weeks, printed salebills carrying each store's own name, and let franchisees choose their own sale prices for the promoted merchandise; manufacturers offered special prices to join the large promotions, and Butler Brothers passed the savings down the chain to stores and consumers. Walton absorbed the mechanics of event-driven traffic — and later reacted against them, building everyday low prices precisely to escape the churn of weekly circulars and markdowns. His entry into the system could have taken a different shape: he first tried to become a franchisee of Butler Brothers' Federated Stores dry-goods program before switching to Ben Franklin instead. Federated Stores, the dry-goods franchise Walton first pursued, counted about fourteen hundred members at its peak. The wholesaler faded from prominence after the 1950s and survives mainly as the incubator of its most famous alumnus.

Glass's most consequential technical project began in 1985, two years before the satellite network it would eventually ride, when, alongside Rob Walton, he managed the development of Retail Link — Walmart's proprietary trend-forecasting software that exposed the company's store-level sales data to its suppliers. The system turned vendors from order-takers into co-managers of inventory, an arrangement built on the vendor-managed inventory practices Walmart developed with major suppliers using electronic data interchange and statistical forecasting. Retail Link matured into the connective tissue of Walmart's supply chain, the commercial interface of the satellite network completed in 1987, and the model other retailers copied for decades afterward. Retail Link's data feeds let suppliers see store-by-store movement and plan production accordingly. Glass's later ownership of the Kansas City Royals applied the same cost discipline to baseball, with results the team's fans found considerably less impressive than the retail record.

Sam Walton endowed the Walton Family Foundation in 1987, five years before his death, directing it initially toward charter-school education and later extending its programs into environmental issues, particularly water-related causes. The foundation became one of the largest family philanthropies in the United States: Alice and Jim Walton committed two hundred fifty million dollars in 2016 toward charter-school facilities through its Building Equity Initiative, part of a one-billion-dollar, five-year pledge to expand educational opportunity by partnering with charter operators, researchers, and education reformers. The institutional pattern mirrored the founder's method in business — concentrated bets, measurable outputs, and leverage through capital rather than overhead. The charter-school focus traces to the founder's own directive at the foundation's creation. Combined with Helen Walton's university giving and the Walton Scholars program, the family's philanthropy operates as deliberately as the retail business that funds it.

The corporate record is unambiguous that Walton's competitors considered his core idea impossible: a successful business built simultaneously on lower prices and great service. The company's success exceeded even Walton's own expectations after it went public in 1970, with the proceeds financing a steady expansion of the business. Walton attributed the rapid growth not just to the low costs that attracted customers but to his associates, on whom he relied to give customers the shopping experience that kept them coming back. He shared his vision for the company with associates in a way nearly unheard of in the industry at the time, made them partners in the company's success, and believed firmly that this partnership was the thing that made Walmart great — the clearest statement of the founder-thesis the company still repeats about itself, extended through profit sharing and stock ownership that turned associates into genuine stakeholders.

The middle rules are the softest and the cheapest. Rule five: appreciate everything your associates do for the business, because a few well-chosen, well-timed, sincere words of praise cost absolutely nothing and are worth a fortune. Rule six: celebrate your success, loosen up, show enthusiasm always, and avoid taking yourself too seriously — advice Walton attached to the observation that having fun fools the competition. The later rules turn structural. Listen to everyone in your company and find ways to get them talking, pushing responsibility down the organization so that good ideas are forced to bubble up from within. Exceed what customers expect: deliver what they want plus a little extra, remedy mistakes with apologies rather than excuses, and stand behind everything the business does. Walmart presents the rules as doctrine it still applies to every part of the business, crediting them for the company's rise to global leadership.

Zhang Xin's role is documented as: co-founder of SOHO China; resigned as CEO effective September 7, 2022, remaining an executive director; also founder of Closer Media and CEO of Closer Properties Confirmed resigned as SOHO China CEO effective September 7, 2022 per a stock exchange filing reported by the South China Morning Post; Wikipedia's infobox (referencing 'Zhang in 2026') lists her current roles as including Founder of Closer Media and CEO of Closer Properties, alongside her retained SOHO China co-founder status (research date: 2026-08-23).

Lai Meisong's role is documented as: founder, Chairman of the Board, and Chief Executive Officer, ZTO Express Confirmed as founder, chairman, and CEO per ZTO Express's own investor-relations management page (research date: 2026-08-23).

Zhang Ruimin's role is documented as: founder and former Chairman of Haier Group; stepped down as chairman in November 2021 and became honorary chairman Stepped down as Haier Group chairman in November 2021, becoming honorary chairman, per Caixin Global's report on the company's announcement (research date: 2026-08-23).

The Investment Manager has the responsibility, subject to the overall supervision of the Board of Directors, for the investment of PSH’s assets and liabilities in accordance with the investment policy of PSH set forth on pages 33-34 of this Annual Report (the “Investment Policy”). The substantial majority of the Company’s portfolio is typically allocated to 8 to 12 core holdings usually comprising liquid, listed, large capitalization North American companies. The Investment Manager seeks to invest in high-quality growth businesses, which it believes have limited downside and generate predictable, recurring cash flows. The Investment Manager is an active and engaged investor that works with its portfolio companies to create substantial, enduring and long-term shareholder value. The Investment Manager aims to manage risks through careful investment selection and portfolio construction, and may use opportunistic hedging strategies to mitigate market-related downside risk or to take advantage of asymmetric profit opportunities. For more than 22 years, the investment strategy pursued by the Investment Manager has generated a 15.9% annualized net return and a cumulative net return of 2,506.1% for PSLP/PSH (as converted) compared to a 10.7% annualized net return and a cumulative net return of 850.6% for the S&P 500, PSH’s historical benchmark index, during the same period.1,3

[07:14] BARRY RITHOLTZ: This week on the podcast, I’m not fooling around when I say an extra special guest. Seth Klarman is CEO and portfolio manager at the Baupost Group, a Boston-based private investing firm founded in 1982 with only $27 million in client monies. Over the past four decades that has grown to $22 billion. Seth is known for his patient, risk-averse, and contrarian approach to finding deeply discounted securities in all sorts of areas — equities, distressed debt, real estate, wherever. He authored the book Margin of Safety, a highly sought-after and rare 1991 publication, as well as editing the seventh edition of Security Analysis. Seth Klarman, welcome to Bloomberg. [09:05] SETH KLARMAN: It’s so great to be here. Thank you, Barry. Thank you so much. I’ve been looking forward to this forever. [09:12] BARRY RITHOLTZ: Before we get into your investment philosophy and the development of Baupost, I have to roll back a little bit to your early days — economics from Cornell, an MBA from Harvard. What was the original career plan? [09:30] SETH KLARMAN: So I was always drawn to investing. Even when I was a very young kid, I was interested in the baseball statistics. I became aware that there were these other columns of numbers in the newspaper and asked my neighbor what those were, and started to understand and follow the stock market a little bit. Of course I had no idea what I was doing, but I was paying attention from quite an early age.

In the mid-1970s Agarwal traded scrap metal, sourcing it from cable companies across Indian states and reselling in Mumbai. In 1976 he acquired Shamsher Sterling Corporation, an enameled copper manufacturer, with a bank loan, then in 1986 set up a jelly-filled cable factory, founding Sterlite Industries — the forerunner of today's Vedanta.

Liu Yonghao's role is documented as: founder and Chairman, New Hope Group; his daughter Liu Chang succeeded him as chairman of listed subsidiary New Hope Liuhe in 2013 Listed as Chairman/founder per Wikipedia's most recent (2024 photo-dated) update; his daughter Liu Chang has chaired the listed New Hope Liuhe subsidiary since 2013 (research date: 2026-08-23; role at parent New Hope Group unconfirmed beyond this source as of research date).

Before succeeding, Agarwal tried nine businesses that all failed and was struggling to make ends meet, according to the official account. He launched the tenth venture — cable production — and that one took hold, becoming the bridge into copper and aluminium manufacturing and ultimately the Vedanta conglomerate. The narrative positions persistence through serial failure as the founder's defining trait.

Lu Guanqiu's role is documented as: founder and President of the Board, Wanxiang Group Deceased October 25, 2017, aged 72, per Wikipedia's biography (research date: 2026-08-23).

Bundl Technologies, the courier and shipping service he started with Nandan Reddy in 2013, failed because customers were hard to find and the team lacked the technical depth to scale a logistics platform — a failure that forced the founders to admit they needed a technology co-founder before they could compete in a software-driven market.

The lender coalition's challenge to the Aakash security structure and the board's loss of control over the operating company have effectively separated the brand from its underlying assets, a configuration that will shape whatever entity emerges from the restructuring.

Wei Jianjun's role is documented as: chairman, executive director, Great Wall Motor Wikipedia's Great Wall Motor infobox lists Wei Jianjun as chairman and executive director in present tense, alongside Zhao Guoqing (vice chairman) and Mu Feng (chief executive director) (research date: 2026-08-23).

Ghazal frames the founder's confidence as functional — entrepreneurs must persuade investors, employees and customers to back an idea or product that may not yet exist. That persuasion loop, she argues, is impossible without a strong internal conviction that the founder's view of the future is correct, even when others cannot yet see it.

Ren Jianxin's role is documented as: founding president of ChemChina; Chairman of ChemChina; Chairman of Pirelli Wikipedia's infobox lists him as serving as Chairman of both ChemChina and Pirelli in present tense (research date: 2026-08-23); no separate 2025-2026 primary source confirming continued tenure was fetched in this pass.

Her professional career began at NIIT as a corporate trainer, teaching coding languages and software to managers and engineers from IT companies — a role she has said paid her roughly ₹1,200 a day at the outset. She subsequently experimented with smaller ventures including Dietexpert and an art practice under the name Being Artsy before co-founding Mamaearth.

Pony Ma's role is documented as: co-founder, Chairman of the Board, and Chief Executive Officer, Tencent Confirmed as Chairman of the Board and CEO per Tencent's own company team page (research date: 2026-08-23).

Cao Dewang's role is documented as: chairman of Fuyao Group; also chairman of the China Automobile Glass Association and the Fujian Golf Players' Association Confirmed as Chairman of Fuyao Group per Wikipedia's biography (page dated 2017-07-02; research date: 2026-08-23; no more recent primary confirmation fetched in this pass).

Birla took over as Aditya Birla Group chairman in 1995 at age 28 after his father Aditya Vikram Birla's death. Under his chairmanship the group's annual turnover climbed from $2 billion in 1995 to roughly $70 billion by mid-2026, with operations spanning 40 countries. The scale-up thesis combined global M&A, deep capacity additions and selective new-business bets.

Birla framed the moment with characteristic understatement: 'For the first time in years, the fog has cleared, allowing the business to look beyond survival and focus on sustainable growth.' The framing acknowledged how narrowly Vodafone Idea had escaped collapse under cumulative AGR and Jio-driven competitive pressure between 2018 and 2025.

Liu Hongsheng's role is documented as: founder and industrialist; later NPC representative and CPPCC member under the PRC Deceased October 1, 1956, per Wikipedia biography citing his family history (research date: 2026-08-23).

Colin Huang's role is documented as: founder and former CEO of Pinduoduo; stepped down as CEO in 2020 (handing role to Chen Lei) and, per Wikipedia's current infobox, holds the title 'Chairman and former CEO of Pinduoduo' Wikipedia's infobox (as fetched) lists Huang's title as 'Chairman and former CEO of Pinduoduo', but whether he still holds even the chairman title as of the 2026 research date was not independently confirmed via a primary Pinduoduo/PDD Holdings source in this pass -- flagged unconfirmed.

Qin Yinglin's role is documented as: founder of Muyuan Foods; resigned as Director, Chairman of the Board, member of the Strategy Committee and Sustainability Committee, and President on June 3, 2026; subsequently appointed Lifetime Honorary Chairman and Dean of the Muyuan Pig Farming Research Institute, with Cao Zhinian elected as the new Chairman Confirmed resigned from chairman/director/president roles as of June 3, 2026, with the transition to Cao Zhinian as new chairman completed, per Muyuan's own announcement as reported by Futunn/Zhitong Finance (research date: 2026-08-23).

Richard Liu's role is documented as: founder and Chairman of JD.com; stepped down as CEO in April 2022, with company president Xu Lei taking over as CEO Confirmed as chairman via JD.com's own investor-relations management page, which states he 'served as our chief executive officer until April 2022' (research date: 2026-08-23).

Zhang Yin (Cheung Yan)'s role is documented as: founder and Director, Nine Dragons Paper Holdings Limited Wikipedia lists her current title as 'Founder and director of Nine Dragons Paper Holdings' (research date: 2026-08-23); this reflects the source's most recent update rather than a freshly confirmed 2026 primary filing.

Released the DeepSeek-R1 model and chatbot in January 2025 under open-weight licensing, and per the July 2026 Yicai-reported investor meeting, committed to keeping the company's most advanced future models open-source rather than maximizing near-term profit.

Liang Wenfeng's role is documented as: co-founder of quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer; Founder and CEO of DeepSeek Wikipedia states Liang 'is the co-founder of the quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer, as well as the founder and CEO of its artificial intelligence company DeepSeek'; a July 2026 Reuters/Yicai report corroborates his continued role as DeepSeek's founder addressing investors (research date: 2026-08-23).

Wang Xing's role is documented as: co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, Meituan Wikipedia states Wang 'has been serving as chief executive officer of Meituan since January 2010' (research date: 2026-08-23).

Under Qin's leadership, Muyuan's revenue grew from RMB 78.89 billion in 2021 to RMB 144.15 billion in 2025, annual pig sales volume grew from 40.26 million head in 2021 to 77.98 million head in 2025, and the company became the global number-one in pig farming and breeding, with its feed and slaughtering operations ranking among the top three worldwide.

Zhong Shanshan's role is documented as: founder and Chairman, Nongfu Spring; also majority owner of Beijing Wantai Biological Pharmacy Enterprise Confirmed re-appointed as chairman effective May 19, 2026, for a three-year board term, per a company disclosure reported by Moomoo/Zhitong Finance (research date: 2026-08-23).

Zhang Jian's role is documented as: founder, Dasheng Cotton Mill; late Qing industrialist, educator, and constitutionalist official Deceased August 24, 1926, per Berkshire Publishing's Encyclopedia of China biography (research date: 2026-08-23).

From 1950 to 1990 Indian industrial growth was throttled by government quotas and approval regimes; a factory was legally permitted to produce only a fixed number of units each month regardless of multi-year waiting lists. Bajaj repeatedly petitioned Delhi to raise Bajaj Auto's manufacturing cap, arguing on economic, moral and employment grounds, but bureaucrats kept the ceilings in place for years.

Zong Qinghou's role is documented as: founder, Chairman and CEO of Hangzhou Wahaha Group until his death Deceased February 25, 2024, aged 78, per Wikipedia's biography; succession subsequently passed to his daughter Zong Fuli (Kelly Zong) (research date: 2026-08-23).

Chen Tianqiao's role is documented as: founder, Chairman and CEO, Shanda Group Confirmed as Founder, Chairman and CEO of Shanda Group per the company's own team page (research date: 2026-08-23).

Evergrande defaulted in 2021 on roughly $300 billion in liabilities after government curbs on excessive borrowing and speculation narrowed its access to credit, an event the Guardian describes as emblematic of broader distress in China's property sector.

Xu Jiayin's role is documented as: founder; former Chairman and Communist Party Committee Secretary of Evergrande Group Sentenced to life imprisonment with lifetime revocation of political rights and confiscation of all personal property by the Shenzhen Intermediate People's Court on August 20, 2026; last publicly seen at his April 2026 trial, having not appeared in public since his 2023 detention (research date: 2026-08-23).

Li Xiting's role is documented as: co-founder and President of Mindray; also serves as chairman per Mindray's own corporate infobox Wikipedia describes his years active as '1991-present' and his title as 'Co-founder and president of Mindray,' while Mindray's own Wikipedia infobox separately lists Li Xiting as 'chairman' (research date: 2026-08-23); the apparent discrepancy between 'president' and 'chairman' framing across sources was not resolved with a primary Mindray filing in this pass.

Liu Chuanzhi's role is documented as: founder of Legend (later Lenovo); retired as Chairman of Legend Holdings in 2019, retaining honorary chairman, senior adviser, and strategy-committee roles Retired as Chairman of Legend Holdings as of December 2019, per South China Morning Post reporting on the Hong Kong stock exchange filing; retained honorary chairman/adviser roles at that date (research date: 2026-08-23).

Yu Minhong (Michael Yu)'s role is documented as: founder, Chairman and Chief Executive, New Oriental Education & Technology Group SCMP's December 29, 2021 report describes him as 'the founder, chairman and chief executive of New Oriental Education & Technology Group' (research date: 2026-08-23).

Guo Guangchang's role is documented as: founder and chairman of Fosun International Limited (has stepped down from the chairmanship of a subsidiary, Shanghai Fosun High Technology (Group), while remaining chairman of the parent) Wikipedia states he 'is the chairman and co-founder of Fosun International Limited' in present tense, with Forbes estimating his net worth at US$2.8 billion as of July 2024 (research date: 2026-08-23).

Adani dropped out of school at 16 and moved to Mumbai in 1978 to work as a diamond sorter for Mahendra Brothers, deliberately avoiding his father's textile trade. In 1981 he returned to Ahmedabad to manage elder brother Mahasukhbhai's plastics unit, which became his gateway to global trading via PVC imports and led to the 1988 founding of Adani Exports — today's Adani Enterprises, the group's holding company.

Rong Zongjing's role is documented as: co-founder and elder-brother lead of the Rong flour-and-textile business empire; primarily drove business expansion Deceased 1938, per Wikipedia (research date: 2026-08-23).

Zhang Chaoyang (Charles Zhang)'s role is documented as: founder, Chairman and CEO of Sohu; also an adjunct professor at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) Wikipedia lists Zhang's occupation as 'Founder, chairman & CEO, Sohu' with no reported departure date; separately, HKUST's own announcement confirms his appointment as adjunct professor, and an SCMP article ( in fetched content) covers his public commentary as a 'China internet pioneer' (research date: 2026-08-23).

Su Hua's role is documented as: co-founder of Kuaishou; stepped down as CEO in October 2021, handing the role to co-founder Cheng Yixiao while remaining chairman Per South China Morning Post's report of the October 2021 transition, Su 'will remain as chairman with voting rights unchanged' (research date: 2026-08-23).

William Li (Li Bin)'s role is documented as: founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, NIO LinkedIn lists his title as 'Founder, Chairman & CEO of NIO'; CnEVPost's July 2026 report on his Peking University speech corroborates continued public activity in that role as of mid-2026 (research date: 2026-08-23).

Rong Desheng's role is documented as: co-founder; took sole control of the Rong business empire after brother Rong Zongjing's death in 1938 Deceased July 29, 1952, per Wikipedia (research date: 2026-08-23).

The founders quit their consulting jobs in November 2009 to run FoodieBay full-time, then in November 2010 renamed it Zomato — partly because they were unsure they would stay only in food, and partly to avoid a trademark clash with eBay. The pivot to a more abstract brand marked the first of several identity refreshes that would culminate in the 2025 rebrand to Eternal Ltd.

Zomato raised 8,500 crore rupees through a Qualified Institutional Placement in November 2024, partially to fund the Blinkit investment. The QIP signalled a strategic decision to keep equity dilution as the funding lever for the quick-commerce war, rather than debt — a choice with implications for existing shareholders' long-term ownership.

The Institute highlights Mazumdar-Shaw's early cultural context: she grew up aware of India's pride in chemistry and also aware of the cultural norms limiting women's social mobility. After earning her master brewer title at Ballarat University in Australia, she returned home and faced repeated rejections for brewery management roles on the basis of gender —.

Wang Chuanfu's role is documented as: founder and Chairman, BYD Confirmed as chairman as of June 2026 per CarNewsChina's report quoting him directly (research date: 2026-08-23).

Dong Mingzhu's role is documented as: chairwoman of the Board, Gree Electric Appliances; stepped down as President in April 2025, with Zhang Wei taking over that role Confirmed re-elected to a fifth three-year term as chairwoman as of April 23, 2025, while stepping down as president in favor of Zhang Wei, per Yicai Global (research date: 2026-08-23).

Ding Lei's role is documented as: founder of NetEase; per South China Morning Post, relinquished his role as legal representative and executive chairman of a NetEase gaming affiliate (Shanghai NetEase Network Technology Development Limited) around mid-2022, amid a broader industry trend of Chinese tech leaders stepping back from front-office roles As of the SCMP report ( in fetched content but referencing 2022-era gaming-license freeze context), Ding had relinquished his role as legal representative and executive chairman of a NetEase gaming subsidiary; his current top-line title at NetEase's main listed entity was not confirmed by a primary source in this pass.

Zhou Hongyi's role is documented as: co-founder, Chairman and CEO, Qihoo 360 Wikipedia lists Zhou as co-founder, chairman and CEO of Qihoo 360 with an accompanying 2025 photo, suggesting the role was current as of that year; no more recent primary source was fetched in this pass (research date: 2026-08-23).

Wang Ning's role is documented as: founder and CEO, Pop Mart Wikipedia's infobox lists his current title as 'Founder and CEO of Pop Mart' (as of a June 30, 2025 update); Reuters' March 25, 2026 report corroborates his continued CEO role at that later date (research date: 2026-08-23).

Liu Yongxing's role is documented as: founder, Chairman and CEO of East Hope Group Wikipedia describes him as 'the founder, chairman and CEO of East Hope Group' in present tense (research date: 2026-08-23); no more recent primary confirmation of this title was obtained in this pass.

Li Xiang's role is documented as: founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Li Auto Confirmed via Li Auto's own investor-relations management page listing him under 'Management' (research date: 2026-08-23); CnEVPost's June 2026 report on his margin remarks corroborates his continued CEO role at that time.

HCL started as a hardware outfit manufacturing India's first indigenous computers before evolving into a comprehensive software-services organisation — a hardware-to-services pivot the Foundation positions as a continuous engineering-and-research identity rather than a defensive retreat from commoditised hardware.

Wang Wei (Dick Wang)'s role is documented as: founder and Chairman of SF Express / SF Holding Wikipedia states 'He remains chairman and majority shareholder of the Chinese conglomerate SF Holding', with net worth estimated at $15.3 billion 'as of August 2026' (research date: 2026-08-23).

Ren Zhengfei's role is documented as: founder, Director, and CEO of Huawei Technologies Confirmed as sitting Director and CEO of Huawei per the company's own official executive biography page (research date: 2026-08-23; page but current as of fetch).

Chen Yidan's role is documented as: tencent co-founder and former Chief Administrative Officer (stepped down March 2013); Founder of the Yidan Prize Foundation and the Chen Yidan Charity Foundation; Lifetime Honorary Consultant of Tencent and Honorary Chairman of Tencent Charity Foundation The Yidan Prize Foundation's own biography page describes him in present tense as 'Founder, Yidan Prize' and 'Core Founder, Tencent,' also noting he obtained a Singapore Management University doctorate in 2019 and received an honorary doctorate from University College London in 2025 (research date: 2026-08-23).

CnEVPost frames He's Ant board appointment as significant given his 'deep ties to Alibaba and Ant,' referencing his history selling a prior company (UCWeb) to Alibaba, though the full detail of that history was not captured in the fetched excerpt.

He Xiaopeng's role is documented as: chairman and CEO, Xpeng; as of June 10, 2026, also took direct charge of Xpeng's robotics unit ahead of imminent humanoid-robot mass production; as of June 22, 2026, appointed an independent director of Ant Group's board Reuters confirmed he was 'the chief executive of Xpeng' as of June 10, 2026, and CnEVPost confirmed his Xpeng chairman-and-CEO title in its June 22, 2026 report on his Ant Group board appointment (research date: 2026-08-23).

Sources familiar with the matter told Caixin that Zhang's return to the operational CEO role, after recent years focused on high-level strategy, was meant to quicken decision-making during a pivotal transition period for the company.

Zhang Yong's role is documented as: founder and Chairman of Haidilao; resumed the role of Chief Executive Officer in a leadership shake-up announced late January 13, 2026 Confirmed per Caixin Global's January 14, 2026 report that Zhang 'has resumed his role as chief executive officer,' with the change announced late the prior day, January 13, 2026 (research date: 2026-08-23).

His academic background pairs a Bachelor's in Electrical Engineering from Delhi Technological University (formerly Delhi College of Engineering) with a postgraduate diploma in Finance and Marketing from XLRI, Jamshedpur — an engineering-plus-business combination common among Indian consumer founders who blend operational rigour with marketing instinct.

Shi Zhengrong's role is documented as: founder of Suntech Power; forced to resign as CEO in August 2012 and stripped of the executive chairman role in March 2013 Wikipedia and Reuters both confirm his departure from chairman/CEO roles was completed by March 2013; his activities since then were not confirmed via a primary source in this pass.

Robin Li's role is documented as: co-founder, Chairman of the Board, and Chief Executive Officer, Baidu Confirmed as chairman and CEO per Baidu's own investor-relations management page (research date: 2026-08-23).

Lei Jun's role is documented as: founder, Chairman and CEO of Xiaomi; also Chairman of Kingsoft and of Shunwei Capital; retains 'honorary chairman' title at Kingsoft Office as of June 2025 reporting Confirmed as Xiaomi's founder, chairman and CEO, and as honorary chairman of Kingsoft Office, per South China Morning Post's June 2025 report (research date: 2026-08-23).

Cheng Wei's role is documented as: founder of Didi (2012); current title not confirmed via a primary source in this pass Wikipedia (via the DiDi company article) reports the company was permitted to resume new user registrations in China in early 2023 following regulatory review; Cheng's specific current title was not confirmed via a primary source in this pass -- flagged unconfirmed.

Zhang Yiming's role is documented as: founder and Chairman of ByteDance; stepped down as CEO on November 4, 2021, completing a handover announced in May 2021 Wikipedia's infobox lists his title as 'Founder & Chairman of ByteDance' and states he stepped down as CEO on November 4, 2021, while retaining over 50% of ByteDance's voting rights per Reuters as cited by Wikipedia (research date: 2026-08-23).

Through Titan Capital, Bahl and Bansal have invested in more than 250 startups across consumer tech, health-tech, fintech, SaaS, consumer brands and B2B services, with notable positions including Ola, Urban Company, Razorpay, Ofbusiness and Mamaearth — a portfolio that effectively captures the Indian consumer-internet and SaaS startup map of the 2010s.

After schooling at Scindia and Hill Grange in Mumbai, Ambani studied chemical engineering at what is now the Institute of Chemical Technology, then enrolled for an MBA at Stanford. He withdrew in 1980 at his father's insistence, with Dhirubhai arguing that real-world experience would teach more than classrooms. Stanford classmates included Steve Ballmer; faculty influences included Nobel laureate William F. Sharpe.

The company describes itself as having pioneered the discount broking model in India and, by its own account, is today the country's largest stock broker, attributing scale to disruptive pricing and in-house technology rather than to advertising or outside capital.

Pan Shiyi's role is documented as: co-founder of SOHO China; resigned as chairman effective September 7, 2022, remaining an executive director Confirmed resigned as SOHO China chairman effective September 7, 2022 per a stock exchange filing reported by the South China Morning Post; Wikipedia states he and Zhang Xin 'have since been primarily active in the United States' (research date: 2026-08-23).

Freshworks moved its headquarters to San Mateo, California in 2018 while keeping its Chennai engineering base, encoding the US-India dual-headquarters model that has since become the default template for Indian SaaS companies scaling into North American enterprise buyers.

Freshdesk won $40,000 through Microsoft's BizSpark startup competition before raising any venture money, an early non-dilutive capital event that funded the team at a moment when salary deferrals and stock options were doing the heavy lifting.

Yang Guoqiang's role is documented as: founder of Country Garden; resigned as chairman and executive director effective March 1, 2023, remaining involved as a special advisor to the group Country Garden confirmed in an October 2023 statement that Yang Guoqiang (referred to by his Cantonese name Yeung Kwok-keung) and his daughter/successor Yang Huiyan were both still 'working as normal' in China, denying social-media rumors that they had left the country, per South China Morning Post (2026-08-23 research date).

Lee stated that 01.AI works with traditional-industry companies (banking, insurance, mining, energy) but will decline engagements where a client is unprepared for AI adoption (e.g., lacking prior digital transformation), because it would take too long and cost too much to succeed.

The foundation's health bets were sized to move global systems. It underwrote Gavi, the vaccine alliance launched at the 2000 World Economic Forum, with a $750 million pledge covering its first five years and a further $750 million donation on January 25, 2005, supported the creation of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria with a $100 million pledge in 2002 that grew to more than six billion dollars, and gave $86 million toward polio eradication in 2006, later becoming a core partner of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative. Programs it backed helped cut measles deaths in Africa by ninety percent since 2000, while Gavi and partners immunized more than 760 million children and prevented over thirteen million deaths. The foundation established the Gates Cambridge Scholarships in 2000, launched the Grand Challenges in Global Health research fund in 2003, and pledged $1.6 billion at the June 2020 Global Vaccine Summit, bringing its total Gavi commitments to six billion dollars, the foundation's largest single investment.

The Anil Agarwal Foundation, Vedanta's philanthropic and CSR arm, has spent roughly Rs 2,000 crore in the last five years on socio-economic development, touching about 50 million people across nearly 1,300 villages. The foundation has also pledged Rs 5,000 crore more over five years to strengthen rural communities via a sustainable and inclusive growth model.

In Bridgewater's early days Dalio served institutional investors as both consultant and active manager of their exposures, mostly across commodities and futures. He also put his investment thinking into a daily research commentary, the Bridgewater Daily Observations, sent to clients via Telex, a distribution habit born when the firm operated out of a two-bedroom apartment. In time the quality of that research attracted Bridgewater's first institutional fund to manage directly: a five million dollar account from the World Bank in 1985, and many institutional investors followed. The Daily Observations remains one of the most highly sought-after pieces of market commentary among investors and policymakers across the globe. The through-line is deliberate: research as marketing and marketing as service, with the firm's thinking distributed daily so that clients experienced Bridgewater's process rather than merely its results, an inversion of the hedge fund industry's habitual secrecy.

The Foundation notes that HCL is one of the few global IT companies founded in the 1970s still in existence — a longevity claim that places HCL alongside IBM and Apple, and that the Foundation uses to anchor Nadar's credibility as a long-cycle institution-builder.

On April 3, 2000, the district court ruled Microsoft an abusive monopoly that had committed monopolization, tying, and blocking of competition in violation of the Sherman Act, and on June 7, 2000, it ordered the company split in two. The victory dissolved on appeal: on June 28, 2001, the D.C. Circuit overturned Judge Jackson's rulings, adopting a drastically altered scope of liability because of the judge's own misconduct, including secret press contacts during the trial, and it vacated the breakup. Microsoft then settled with the Justice Department on November 1, 2001, agreeing to let PC manufacturers adopt non-Microsoft software, and the district court accepted most of the settlement in 2002, with obligations expiring November 12, 2007. Critics on the other side called the result a special antitrust immunity; Gates later said the litigation years contributed to Microsoft losing the mobile operating system race to Android, which he called his biggest mistake.

Steve Ballmer, whom Gates had met at Harvard, joined on June 11, 1980, and would succeed Gates as chief executive from January 2000 until February 2014. On June 25, 1981, Microsoft restructured as a Washington corporation, making Gates president and chairman of the board and Allen executive vice president and vice chairman. The partnership fractured in early 1983, when Allen left after receiving a Hodgkin lymphoma diagnosis, an exit preceded by months of strain over a contentious dispute about Microsoft equity. The two men later repaired the relationship, donated millions together to Lakeside School, and remained friends until Allen's death in October 2018, but the formal business partnership between Microsoft's two founders had effectively ended while the company was still on its way up, leaving Gates with undivided operating control of the firm he would lead as chief executive for another nineteen years.

Netflix released the first thirteen-episode season of House of Cards on February 1, 2013, marketed as the first Netflix Original. It was the first television series produced by a studio for Netflix, and among the first series ever released in a binge format, with every episode available simultaneously. The show, starring Spacey as the scheming congressman Frank Underwood and Robin Wright as his equally ambitious wife Claire, received highly positive reviews and thirty-three Primetime Emmy Award nominations, including Outstanding Drama Series and lead acting nominations for Spacey and Wright, becoming the first original online-only streaming series to receive major Emmy nominations. Wright won the Golden Globe for best actress in a television drama in 2014 and Spacey won best actor in 2015. The arc ended in rupture: in 2017, after allegations of sexual misconduct against Spacey, Netflix cut ties with him, and the sixth and final season was produced and released in 2018 without the star.

Musk's route out of South Africa ran through Canada. He applied for a Canadian passport through his Saskatchewan-born mother, both to avoid the apartheid state's mandatory military service for young white men and to ease his path to the United States. Arriving in June 1989, he worked odd jobs on a Saskatchewan farm and at a lumber mill before enrolling at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, in 1990. Two years later he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, which awarded his degrees in 1997: a bachelor of arts in physics and a Wharton School bachelor of science in economics. In 1994 he held two Silicon Valley internships, at energy-storage startup Pinnacle Research Institute and at game developer Rocket Science Games. Accepted into Stanford's materials-science graduate program in 1995, he never enrolled, opting instead for the internet boom after reportedly applying to Netscape and never receiving a response.

Schultz began his career in 1976 as a Xerox salesman in New York, learning to sell in the punishing equipment market of the era. In 1979 the French private equity firm PAI Partners recruited him to serve as general manager of the American subsidiary of Hammarplast, a Swedish manufacturer of kitchenware and coffee-making equipment. Running Hammarplast's United States operations put him in the middle of the specialty coffee hardware business, and in 1981 he traveled to Seattle to fulfill an order of plastic cone filters placed by an unusual customer, a small coffee bean retailer called Starbucks. The visit exposed him to a company whose founders had built a devoted following around whole-bean arabica coffee, and it set in motion the recruitment that brought him west a year later. The Xerox and Hammarplast years gave Schultz the sales discipline and product grounding he would apply to coffee retail, and the filter order remains one of the great accidents in American business history.

At its June 1992 initial public offering, Starbucks counted 140 outlets and revenue of 73.5 million dollars, up from 1.3 million dollars in 1987, with a market value of 271 million dollars. The company sold roughly a twelve percent stake, raising around twenty-five million dollars, which financed a doubling of the store base over the following two years. Trading under the ticker SBUX, the newly public company used the capital and the currency of listed shares to professionalize its operations and fund an aggressive real estate program. The offering capped a five-year run in which Schultz had converted a six-store Seattle retailer into a company with the balance sheet and governance to pursue national scale. It also marked the moment Starbucks' employee stock options gained a public market price, converting the Bean Stock program from a symbolic grant into real, tradeable value for the partners who held it.

In December 2021, workers at the Elmwood Avenue store in Buffalo voted to unionize, making it the only unionized shop among the chain's roughly nine thousand company-owned United States stores at the time. Two other Buffalo stores voted concurrently, one joining and one declining. The workers affiliated with Workers United, an arm of the Service Employees International Union, and organized around under-staffing and under-training, chronic issues the pandemic had exacerbated. The vote landed in an industry with a 1.2 percent unionization rate and was recognized as a symbolic victory for an American labor movement attempting to rebuild in sectors long written off as unorganizable. The campaign's creativity, barista-led committees, and social media documentation turned a single store election in one American city into a template that would be copied hundreds of times within eighteen months, forcing the company into a labor posture it had avoided for three decades.

Sterlite became India's first private-sector copper smelter and refinery in 1993, then in 1995 acquired the long-shut Madras Aluminium from BIFR. The expansion was driven by a simple insight: cable margins were hostage to copper and aluminum prices, so Agarwal decided to manufacture the metals himself rather than buy them — a textbook vertical integration thesis.

Through the 1990s Bridgewater developed a stack of strategies that became industry templates: inflation-indexed bonds, currency overlays, emerging-market debt, global bonds, and super-long duration paper. It pioneered the separation of alpha from beta, the idea that market returns and manager skill are distinct streams that can be isolated and recombined, and it developed an alpha overlay strategy built on a portfolio of twenty uncorrelated investments, leveraged for risk or return and combined with cash or a market benchmark. The Pure Alpha fund launched in 1991 alongside the marketing of portable alpha strategies. The global bond overlay program arrived in 1992, and in 1995 firm executives sat in U.S. Treasury discussions, advising the federal government as it developed inflation-indexed bonds. The All Weather fund and the risk parity approach to portfolio management arrived in 1996, and assets under management grew from 5 billion dollars in the mid-1990s to 38 billion by 2003.

Snow White's final production cost was $1,488,422.74, a massive sum for a 1937 feature and three times the planned budget. Disney mortgaged his own house to help finance production, and midway through he needed a further $250,000 loan to finish the film. He screened a rough cut for Bank of America's Joseph Rosenberg, who sat impassively through the showing before telling the anxious producer that the picture would make a hatful of money and approving the loan. The gamble repaid beyond every projection. The film premiered at the Carthay Circle Theatre in Los Angeles on December 21, 1937, to a standing ovation from an audience that included Judy Garland and Marlene Dietrich, went into general release February 4, 1938, and earned more than eight million dollars internationally in its initial release against its cost, becoming the highest-grossing film of 1938 and briefly the highest-grossing sound film made to that date. It remained the highest-grossing animated film for fifty-five years.

Before founding his own firm Dalio held a sequence of Wall Street jobs that trained him in commodities. He served as Director of Commodities at Dominick & Dominick, and in 1974 he joined Shearson Hayden Stone, the securities firm run by Sandy Weill, who would later become famous for building Citigroup. His mandate there was advising ranchers, grain growers, and other farmers on hedging their risks, mostly through futures contracts, the agricultural client base he carried into Bridgewater's founding a year later. The firing came after he slugged his supervisor in the face at a drunken New Year's Eve party in 1974, ending his time at Shearson Hayden Stone. The incident, which he has recounted openly in later years, closed his employment but not his ties to the commodity clients, who followed him to the advisory business he opened in his Manhattan apartment in 1975.

Pershing Square Holdings, Ltd. 3 Chairman’s Statement INTRODUCTION I am pleased to report that 2025 was another year of impressive performance for PSH on an absolute and relative basis. Through the end of the year, PSH’s Net Asset Value (“NAV”) per share, including dividends, increased 20.9%, compared with a 17.9% return for the S&P 500 over the same period.i,ii In addition to another year of strong performance, the Investment Manager made significant progress on a number of strategic initiatives that position PSH for continued success in the years ahead. The Board was particularly pleased with PSH’s performance given the complex macroeconomic and geopolitical landscape that characterised the year. While inflation in the United States continued its gradual moderation, uncertainty surrounding the trajectory, timing, and ultimate destination of interest rates persisted, causing periods of volatility as markets repeatedly recalibrated their outlook. While U.S. economic growth exceeded expectations, uncertainty also persisted over the duration of restrictive financial conditions. Trade and tariff policy became a less acute source of market volatility as the year progressed, providing greater clarity for businesses and investors. Geopolitical risks remained elevated amid ongoing conflicts in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, and new questions emerged around strategic competition between the major economic blocs.

Honasa was co-founded by Varun with his wife Ghazal Alagh in 2016, with the stated ambition of building purpose-driven, digital-first brands targeted at modern Indian consumers. The husband-wife founding structure has been a recurring theme in Mamaearth's external positioning and storytelling.

As the stores multiplied, so did Walton's ambitions: new approaches and technologies in retail, new store formats including Sam's Club and the Walmart Supercenter, and the decision to take Walmart into Mexico. The company credits his fearlessness in offering lower prices — in the United States and beyond — with setting a standard that outlived him. His dedication to service and to values that help individuals, businesses, and the nation succeed brought him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, conferred by President George H. W. Bush in 1992. The company entered Mexico in 1991 under his chairmanship, opening its first store outside the United States in Mexico City. It was in his Medal of Freedom acceptance remarks that Walton articulated what became Walmart's official purpose: working together to lower the cost of living for everyone and to give the world an opportunity to see what it is like to save and have a better life.

The decision to pivot from Bundl to Swiggy in 2014 was anchored on recruiting Rahul Jaimini — an IIT Kharagpur graduate and software engineer at Myntra — as the third co-founder and CTO, after which Swiggy launched from an office in Koramangala, Bengaluru in August 2014 with just 25 partner restaurants.

The Model 3's commercial vindication was total and rapid. It ended 2018 as the best-selling plug-in electric car in the world, with an estimated 139,782 units delivered in the United States, the first time any plug-in car exceeded 100,000 units in a single year, and it ranked as the American market's best-selling luxury vehicle that year while leading all alternative-fuel vehicles in California during the first half of 2018. In January 2019 it overtook the Model S as the country's all-time best-selling all-electric car, and the next month passed the Chevrolet Volt as the all-time top-selling plug-in in the United States. The $35,000 Standard Range trim finally went on sale in February 2019. That year the Model 3 repeated as the world's best-selling plug-in, topped European sales in its first year on that market with over 95,000 units, and set records in Norway and the Netherlands before surpassing the Nissan Leaf in early 2020 as history's best-selling plug-in car.

The final rules state Walton's competitive doctrine in the plainest terms. Rule nine — control your expenses better than your competition — is, in his formulation, where you can always find competitive advantage: a business can make many mistakes and still recover if it runs an efficient operation, while brilliance cannot save an inefficient company from going out of business. Rule ten, swim upstream, is his founding contrarianism compressed into two words: ignore conventional wisdom, go the other way, and when everybody else is doing something one way, expect a good chance to find your niche by heading in exactly the opposite direction. That is the small-town-discounting decision restated as a maxim. Together the final rules define both the offense and the defense of Walton's system — structural cost advantage on one side, contrarian market selection on the other — and Walmart directs readers to Walton's book, Made in America, for the fuller versions.

The public answer to Cambridge Analytica was deletion, or at least the performance of it. The hashtag DeleteFacebook trended and was tweeted almost four hundred thousand times within thirty days of the reports, with ninety-three percent of the mentions occurring on Twitter itself. Brian Acton, the WhatsApp co-founder who had sold his company to Facebook and since departed, publicly endorsed deleting the platform, an extraordinary rebuke from inside the family of apps. The boycott's economic bite proved limited: a Raymond James survey found that while roughly eighty-four percent of users were concerned about how Facebook handled their data, about half said they would not actually cut back their usage, and Zuckerberg noted he had not seen a meaningful number of people act on the movement. Engagement in likes, posts, and shares did fall close to twenty percent after April 2018, even as overall user growth kept rising.

The distinction she draws is about what the confidence serves. Ego becomes dangerous, in her framing, when it stops serving the business and starts serving the individual — when the founder's identity protection overtakes the company's interest as the dominant decision criterion.

Hastings joined Marine Corps officer training through the Platoon Leader Class, passing his college summers in the Marines, among them a stretch of boot camp at the Officer Candidate School in Quantico, Virginia, in 1981. He did not complete the training and never commissioned, choosing instead to pursue the Peace Corps out of what he described as a combination of service and adventure. Posted to rural northwest Swaziland from 1983 to 1985, he taught mathematics at a high school of roughly eight hundred students. He credits part of his entrepreneurial spirit to those years, remarking that once you have hitchhiked across Africa with ten dollars in your pocket, starting a business does not seem too intimidating. The Peace Corps chapter became a fixed part of the Hastings origin story: an idealistic detour that supplied both the tolerance for discomfort and the improvisational self-reliance that would mark his later founding decade in Silicon Valley, where he arrived after graduate school rather than through any conventional corporate apprenticeship.

The rebrand to Meta arrived at Facebook Connect on October 28, 2021, after a period of intense scrutiny and damaging whistleblower leaks, with reports of the name change surfacing a week earlier. The company became Meta Platforms, folding Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and its virtual reality operations under a brand built around the metaverse, a digital extension of the physical world through social media, virtual reality, and augmented reality. Zuckerberg had discussed the mounting criticism of the company's social services on his third-quarter earnings call days before, pointing to the pivot without previewing the rename. Even the name carried the founder's fingerprints: a Canadian scientific-literature analytics firm called Meta, acquired in 2017 by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, agreed to transfer its trademark and wind down the project. Beginning with fourth-quarter 2021 results, the company reported two segments, Family of Apps and Reality Labs, making the metaverse spending visible to investors for the first time.

The attempted walk-away produced the defining litigation. On May 13, 2022, Musk placed the deal on hold citing reports that 5 percent of Twitter's daily users were spam accounts, and on July 8 he moved to terminate, alleging material breach over spambot data and executive departures. Twitter's board sued in the Delaware Court of Chancery on July 12 to force completion, and Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick set a five-day October trial. The discovery war was sprawling, more than 84 subpoenas from Twitter's side and over 36 from Musk's, reaching Jack Dorsey, Marc Andreessen, and the deal banks, while security chief Peiter Zatko's whistleblower complaint became Musk's ammunition. Musk privately offered to buy Twitter at reduced valuations of $31 billion and $39.6 billion, both rejected. On October 3 his lawyers informed Twitter he would proceed at the original price, a reversal attributed to his team's doubt it could prove a material adverse effect.

At the inaugural f8 developers conference in May 2007, Facebook unwrapped the Facebook Platform, a framework letting outside developers build applications on top of core social features. The bet converted the site from a destination into an ecosystem: by the second f8 in July 2008, the platform hosted thirty-three thousand applications and more than four hundred thousand registered developers. That October, Microsoft purchased a one point six percent stake for two hundred forty million dollars, implying a fifteen billion dollar valuation and carrying rights to sell international advertising, a deal that beat Google for the position. The two moves together defined Facebook's second act: third-party developers supplied product surface area while a deep-pocketed partner validated the advertising economics. The site had opened to everyone thirteen and older with an email address in September 2006, and by late 2007 companies ran more than one hundred thousand pages promoting themselves on the service.

At the time of Zhang's return, Haidilao's revenue from non-hot pot restaurants had risen 227% year-over-year to 597 million yuan, but total revenue fell 3.7% to 20.7 billion yuan and net profit dropped 13.7%; the company reduced its store count by 21 to 1,322 and added only three franchised outlets in early 2025, reflecting cautious expansion amid a cooling Chinese dining sector.

The Mamaearth origin story is rooted in a parenting frustration: after the birth of their first son, Ghazal and her husband Varun Alagh searched for toxin-free baby care products in India and found the market largely lacked genuinely safe options. That gap became the founding brief for Mamaearth, launched in 2016 under parent Honasa Consumer Pvt Ltd with seven initial products and a seed investment of ₹25 lakh.

Educationally, Birla trained at Sydenham and H.R. College in Mumbai, then earned an MBA from London Business School in 1992 and qualified as a chartered accountant with ICAI. The CA-plus-MBA dual qualification is unusual among Indian promoter families and informed his analytical, balance-sheet-conscious management style through later deals.

Walt Disney died on December 15, 1966, during the initial planning of the complex and before construction began, and the company wrestled with whether to bring the Disney World project to fruition until his older brother Roy came out of retirement to see the project through. Construction started in 1967, and the company dropped the planned community in favor of a theme park resort modeled on Disneyland, with the Magic Kingdom, Polynesian Village Resort, and Contemporary Resort Hotel opening October 1, 1971 before a deliberately moderate crowd of about ten thousand guests, sized to avoid the overcrowding of Disneyland's opening. At the grand opening ceremony on October 23 through 25, Roy dedicated the property and declared it Walt Disney World, saying that people knew Ford cars but not Henry Ford, and that the name would keep his brother's memory alive as long as the park stood. Walt Disney World became the most visited vacation resort in the world, the largest single-site employer in the United States, and the flagship of the company's experiences business.

The IPO in September 2021 raised roughly $1.03 billion on Nasdaq, with earlier funding rounds led by Accel, Tiger Global Management, Sequoia Capital India and CapitalG — making it the first India-origin SaaS company to list on a US exchange and creating an ESOP windfall that reportedly turned over 500 employees into crorepatis.

In his second year at Harvard, Zuckerberg wrote CourseMatch, a program that let students pick classes based on the choices of classmates and form study groups. He followed it with Facemash, a site that placed pairs of student photos side by side and asked visitors to judge which person was more attractive, modeled on the printed face books that Harvard houses kept of residents. Built in under a week and populated by pulling ID photos from house intranets, the site drew roughly twenty-two thousand votes from a few hundred users over one weekend before the college shut it down, its traffic having overwhelmed a network switch. Student groups protested the unauthorized use of photographs, the Administrative Board reviewed charges of breaching security and privacy, and Zuckerberg apologized publicly. The episode foreshadowed the defining tension of his career: products built on social data that race ahead of consent.

The strategic narrative after 2024 has been an explicit upmarket pivot, moving the firm from its SMB-origins base into direct competition with much larger enterprise software vendors — a transition that requires rebalancing AI investment, enterprise expansion and cost discipline while preserving the product simplicity that originally defined the brand.

The Erie War's losers were sorted brutally. Fisk and Gould betrayed Drew himself, manipulating Erie's price and costing him a million and a half dollars; the Panic of 1873 cost him more, and by 1876 he was bankrupt with debts exceeding a million dollars and no viable assets, dying in 1879 reliant on his son. That same September of 1869, Gould and Fisk touched off the Black Friday gold panic, and public opinion turned permanently hostile to Gould. Fisk was murdered in 1872. Gould had to relinquish Erie control in 1872 and 1873 after losing a million dollars of stock to the confidence man Lord Gordon-Gordon. The Erie Railway Company, after all the swindles and continuing mismanagement, declared bankruptcy in 1878 and was reconstituted as the New York, Lake Erie and Western Railway. Vanderbilt, who never got his railroad, remained what he had been throughout: the richest man in America.

Birla attributed Vodafone Idea's survival to employee commitment, customer loyalty, partner and shareholder belief — summarizing the doctrine as 'Tough Times Don't Last. Tough Companies Do.' The slogan reframes the 2018 merger, the AGR cliff and the Jio price war as a stress test the company passed rather than a strategic error to be regretted.

The payments ambition came full circle in January 2025, when X announced plans for an X Money Account, a digital wallet letting users move funds between bank accounts and their wallet and make instant peer-to-peer payments, with Visa announced as the launch partner and cryptocurrencies excluded, at least initially, from the payment rails. The product revived the founding thesis of X.com, the online bank Musk co-founded in 1999: financial services attached to a mass consumer internet platform. In the same stretch the platform deepened its artificial-intelligence integration, with xAI's Grok assistant wired into X for Premium subscribers to provide real-time news summarization, image generation, and multimodal search across posts. Whether or not the everything app fully materializes, the strategic direction is unambiguous: convert a communications network into a transaction and intelligence platform, the same funnel Musk attempted with X.com and PayPal a quarter-century earlier.

When the Mothers' Club computer fund ran out, Gates and other Lakeside students chased time on DEC PDP minicomputers, including a PDP-10 run by Computer Center Corporation, which banned Gates, Paul Allen, Ric Weiland, and Kent Evans for a summer after catching them exploiting operating-system bugs to obtain free time. The four responded by forming the Lakeside Programmers Club and offering to find bugs in CCC's software in exchange for terminal hours; Gates went to the company's offices in person and studied the source code of Fortran, Lisp, and machine-language programs until the arrangement ended in 1970. In 1971 a teacher enlisted Gates and Evans to automate Lakeside's class scheduling for computer time and royalties. Evans was killed in a mountain-climbing accident near the end of junior year, a day Gates later ranked among the saddest of his life, and Allen stepped in to finish the system.

Tesla's institutional legitimization came in a thirty-month sequence. In January 2010 the Department of Energy's loan office extended a $465 million loan for advanced clean-energy manufacturing, capital the company later repaid in full. In May 2010 Tesla bought the NUMMI plant in Fremont from Toyota for $42 million, and on June 29, 2010, it went public on the NASDAQ at $17 per share, raising $226 million as the first American car company to hold an initial public offering since Ford in 1956. The Model S luxury sedan entered production in June 2012 and won the 2013 Motor Trend Car of the Year; in September 2013 it became the first electric car to top a country's monthly new-car sales ranking, leading Norway's market. Tesla joined the NASDAQ-100 in July 2013, unveiled the Powerwall and Powerpack storage products in April 2015 to roughly $800 million in orders within a week, and shipped the Model X that September.

As of July 2026, DeepSeek's open-source strategy remained in effect per Liang's reported investor remarks, though the eventual profitability and competitive.

Returning to Kansas City in October 1919 after Red Cross ambulance service in France, Disney apprenticed at the Pesmen-Rubin Commercial Art Studio, where he befriended Ub Iwerks. Laid off in January 1920 when revenues fell after Christmas, the two briefly ran their own firm, Iwerks-Disney Commercial Artists, before both joined the Kansas City Film Ad Company, which produced commercials using cutout animation. Experimenting at home with a borrowed book and a borrowed camera, Disney concluded that cel animation was more promising than the cutout method. Unable to persuade his employer to switch techniques, he opened a business with coworker Fred Harman producing shorts for the local Newman Theater, sold as Newman's Laugh-O-Grams, and studied Paul Terry's Aesop's Fables as a model. The first six were modernized fairy tales, and their local success in 1921 led directly to the founding of the Laugh-O-Gram Studio.

April 1983 delivered two durable Walton signatures at once. The company opened its first Sam's Club, a membership-based discount warehouse club, in Midwest City, Oklahoma — the direct answer to the warehouse format Sol Price had proven with Price Club — and in the same year it implemented people greeters across all its stores. The pairing was characteristic of the founder: one innovation attacked the cost structure through bulk merchandise and membership economics, while the other invested in the storefront experience at minimal expense. Expansion continued that year into Indiana, Iowa, New Mexico, and North Carolina. The first Virginia stores followed in 1984 as the map kept filling in. The warehouse concept scaled fast enough that Walmart later bought the PACE Membership Warehouse clubs from Kmart in 1993 and folded them into Sam's Club, consolidating a permanent second banner alongside the discount stores.

On June 3, 2026, Qin resigned from all his executive and board titles (director, chairman, Strategy Committee member, Sustainability Committee member, and president), a transition the company described as 'successfully completed,' with the board proposing him as Lifetime Honorary Chairman and Dean of the Muyuan Pig Farming Research Institute, while Cao Zhinian was elected the new chairman and Gao Tong was appointed president and CFO.

Recent 13F disclosures have shown Baupost engaging with newer themes - a Pershing Square Holdings position taken during a quarter in which that vehicle traded at a discount to underlying net asset value, and selective positions in companies leveraged to artificial intelligence infrastructure. Klarman has framed these not as thematic bets but as situations where the security's price was below the value of the underlying assets regardless of how the theme played out. This distinction is essential to his method: themes are not investment theses. A theme like artificial intelligence may dominate markets for a decade, but a security whose value depends on the theme resolving a particular way is a speculation, not an investment. Klarman's stated requirement is that even thematic exposure has to work in the adverse scenario - that the asset has to be cheap enough that the theme failing does not cause a permanent loss. The 13F therefore shows Baupost engaging with new themes selectively and asymmetrically. The firm participates when the security offers a margin of safety independent of the theme; it abstains when the security's price already bakes in only the favorable outcome. This discipline is the same one applied to distressed credit and to real estate - the firm does not abandon its standards simply because the asset class is fashionable.

On November 24, 1817, the ferry proprietor Thomas Gibbons recruited Vanderbilt to take command of a steamboat running between New York and New Jersey. Vanderbilt kept his own ventures alive but in practice became Gibbons's business manager. Gibbons was then waging war on the steamboat monopoly that the New York State Legislature had handed to the patrician Robert Livingston and the steamboat inventor Robert Fulton, a privilege Livingston's heirs inherited and licensed to Aaron Ogden for a ferry linking New York and New Jersey. Gibbons had started his rival operation out of a personal quarrel with Ogden, whom he meant to drive into bankruptcy, cutting fares while carrying a landmark legal challenge to the United States Supreme Court. Piloting Gibbons's boats put the young captain in daily defiance of a state-protected monopoly, an apprenticeship in aggressive competition under legal fire that shaped everything he later did as an operator and placed him at the center of the struggle that opened American interstate commerce.

In 1991, months after taking full ownership, Jobs closed a deal with Disney worth $26 million to produce three computer-animated feature films, the first of which was Toy Story. Released in November 1995 as the first entirely computer-animated feature film, it grossed nearly $362 million worldwide in its initial run and brought both money and critical standing. Pixar went public on November 29, 1995, under the PIXR ticker on Nasdaq, and the offering outdid even Netscape's as the biggest of the year: the stock ran from $28 to $45 within its first half-hour, delaying trading on unmatched buy orders, and closed the day at $42. The offering converted Jobs's $50 million rescue of a failing hardware maker into a public animation studio, and his roughly 80 percent stake made him a billionaire on paper just as his other company, Apple, was descending toward its crisis.

Bahl holds institutional positions that span policy and industry bodies: member of the National Startup Advisory Council, board of governors at ICRIER, chairman of the CII Startup Committee, former member of the NASSCOM Executive Council, and an independent director at Piramal Enterprises — a profile that places him at the intersection of Indian startup policy and corporate governance.

Faced with quota rigidities, Bajaj chose to deliberately exceed licensed production to meet genuine consumer demand — and was hauled before the Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices (MRTP) commission with the technical threat of imprisonment. When the judge asked whether he was prepared to go to jail, he reportedly invoked his grandfather Jamnalal Bajaj's nationalist jail time, and the case was ultimately dropped.

I didn’t really ever develop a career plan, but I was drawn to the stock market. I’m drawn to puzzles, Barry. I like doing word puzzles every day, solving math puzzles. I still subscribe to something called a math puzzle book published by Dell. And the stock market — it’s a big puzzle. The financial markets are a big puzzle. How does it all work? How does the performance of the companies get reflected in stock prices? And how can an investor outperform everybody else? All of that is a piece of what drew me in. [10:31] BARRY RITHOLTZ: So I’m interested in how you first found that, beyond the newspaper stock price pages. You grew up in Baltimore. Your parents divorced when you were relatively young. Mom was an English teacher, later a psychiatric social worker. Dad was a health economist at Johns Hopkins. Was it just simply thumbing through the sports pages, literally to the next set of pages where the stock pages were? [10:59] SETH KLARMAN: That’s literally it — the numbers on the page attracted my attention. I think my origin story is a lot like other people who ended up in the investing business, like Warren Buffett, like Todd Combs, like many others. Drawn to small businesses, wanted to make money. I was delivering a newspaper route for the Baltimore Sun papers. I had a snow cone stand in my driveway one summer. I mowed lawns, I raked leaves, I shoveled snow. I did little carnivals for the neighborhood kids.

The first Wal-Mart Discount City's design drew on Ann & Hope, the discount store Walton visited in 1961 — the same year Harry B. Cunningham, the future Kmart founder, made his own pilgrimage — and the name itself derived from FedMart, the chain Sol Price had founded in 1954. Walton said he liked calling his discount chain Wal-Mart because he genuinely liked Price's FedMart name. Within five years of the Rogers opening, the company had expanded to eighteen stores in Arkansas with nine million dollars in sales, and in 1968 it crossed state lines for the first time with stores in Sikeston, Missouri, and Claremore, Oklahoma. The original Rogers building now holds a hardware store and an antiques mall, while the company's Store One successor operates as a Supercenter blocks away — a compact street address book of American retail history that the company never demolished.

NeXT's modest sales understated its influence. Using a NeXT computer at CERN in Switzerland in 1990, the English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, creating on that machine the first web browser, called WorldWideWeb, while the NeXT environment also served as the development platform for the first web server, CERN httpd, and later for the video games Doom and Quake. The object-oriented NeXTSTEP development environment made rapid prototyping of exactly such applications practical, which is why the machine kept appearing at the origin points of 1990s software. Jobs's marketing of the NeXTcube as an interpersonal computer built for revolutionizing human communications and groupwork, a claim that looked like puffery when the hardware failed to sell, reads in retrospect as a description of what developers actually did with the platform — they built the internet's first generation on it.

Zong Qinghou was born October 11, 1945 (Suqian, Jiangsu) - died February 25, 2024 (Hangzhou, Zhejiang).

By the mid-1990s Apple's distress was existential. In 1995 the chief financial officer asked directors to find a buyer, judging the company no longer able to support itself, and resigned when the board refused; Fortune wrote in February 1996 that the company which invented the personal computer would likely disappear, noting that $1,000 invested in Apple a decade earlier was worth $2,900 against $22,000 in Compaq. Apple came hours from acquisition by Sun Microsystems, refused an IBM offer it later sought again, and failed to ship a modern operating system after the Copland project collapsed into feature creep. Choosing between Be's BeOS and NeXT, Apple announced on December 20, 1996, that it would purchase NeXT and its NeXTSTEP operating system for roughly $429 million plus 1.5 million shares of Apple stock, bringing Jobs back into management for the first time since 1985 and giving the Mac its next technological foundation.

The bridge from near-death to franchise was NASA's commercial procurement. In 2006 SpaceX was selected for the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program and awarded $396 million to demonstrate crew and cargo resupply, funding that underwrote the Dragon spacecraft and accelerated the Falcon 9, whose first flight in June 2010 carried a Dragon qualification mockup. The first operational Dragon launched that December, completed two orbits, and returned safely to Earth, completing all mission objectives. In May 2012, on the Dragon C2+ mission, Dragon became the first privately built spacecraft to bring cargo to the International Space Station. The capital structure stayed tight through the ascent: across its first decade SpaceX ran on roughly $1 billion of total funding, of which Musk had personally contributed about $100 million, with private equity supplying roughly $200 million more. By mid-2012 his roughly two-thirds ownership stake was valued near $875 million on private markets.

At age 24 Ambani was handed responsibility for the Patalganga petrochemical plant while Reliance was deepening its oil refining and petrochemicals bet. He subsequently directed construction of the Jamnagar grassroots refinery, which by 2010 could process 660,000 barrels per day and was integrated with petrochemicals, power, ports and supporting infrastructure — the world's largest single-location grassroots refinery at the time.

India's 1991 liberalization policies were a tailwind Adani exploited quickly, expanding trading into metals, textiles and agro products. In 1994 Gujarat outsourced management of Mundra Port; Adani won the contract in 1995, set up the first jetty, and built Mundra into India's largest private-sector port — handling close to 210 million tonnes of cargo per annum at peak capacity under Adani Ports & SEZ (APSEZ).

More than 1.6 crore clients now route billions of orders each year through Zerodha's platforms, contributing a stated 15% plus of all Indian retail trading volumes — scale metrics that underline how a bootstrapped firm, with no marketing budget, captured a structurally large share of a fast-growing market.

Difficulties obtaining funding for Disneyland prompted Disney to investigate new fundraising methods, and he decided to create a television show named after the park, broadcast on the then-fledgling ABC network, which in return agreed to help finance construction. For its first five years the park was owned by Disneyland, Inc., a joint venture of Walt Disney Productions, Walt Disney personally, Western Publishing, and ABC, with many shops along Main Street, U.S.A. rented to outside companies. The structure gave the studio outside capital without conventional bank debt and gave ABC guaranteed family programming, and by 1960 Walt Disney Productions had bought out all other shareholders. The partnership seeded a lasting relationship that culminated in the Walt Disney Company's acquisition of ABC in the mid-1990s. For Disney the arrangement solved the recurring problem of his career: financiers who controlled his projects also controlled their risks, and since Oswald he had understood that ownership, not participation, determined who collected the value.

Three days after graduating in 1940, Walton joined JCPenney as a management trainee in Des Moines at seventy-five dollars a month and spent roughly eighteen months absorbing the systems of a major chain before resigning in 1942 in anticipation of wartime induction. He worked at a DuPont munitions plant near Tulsa, then entered the Army Intelligence Corps, supervising security at aircraft plants from Fort Douglas in Salt Lake City and finishing the war as a captain. The service years settled his ambition: he concluded while in the army that he wanted retailing and a business of his own. Those twin convictions — systematic training absorbed inside a national retailer, and an early certainty about independence — framed everything that followed, from franchise ownership through the discounting experiments that eventually produced Walmart. It was his only extended apprenticeship inside a major chain, and he carried its merchandising discipline into every store he later ran on his own.

Paul Jobs built a workbench in the family garage to pass along his love of mechanics, and his son admired the craftsmanship of a father who could build any cabinet or fence and handed him a hammer to work alongside. The childhood home on Crist Drive in Los Altos, bought in 1967 with the family's savings so Steve could reach the better Cupertino schools, later became the original site of Apple Computer and was added to historic-site lists in 2013. School was a poor fit: Jobs resisted authority, played pranks at Monta Loma Elementary, skipped a grade, and after bullying at Crittenden Middle School gave his parents an ultimatum to move or lose him to dropout. At thirteen he cold-called Bill Hewlett of Hewlett-Packard asking for parts for a frequency-counter project, and Hewlett gave him a summer job. The neighborhood around Homestead High tied him early to Silicon Valley.

Aggressive international expansion through 2012–2015 took Zomato into more than 20 countries, including the United States via the acquisition of Seattle-based Urbanspoon. The breadth-first push proved expensive; over 2022–2024 the company unwound most overseas markets, liquidating ten foreign subsidiaries inside a year — a tacit admission that global sprawl had underdelivered on unit economics.

On January 16, 2007, Netflix launched its streaming media service, introducing video on demand over the internet. At launch it offered only one thousand films, compared with seventy thousand available on DVD, and the service, then called Watch Now, at first required Internet Explorer on a computer. Hollywood studios, including 20th Century Fox, Sony Pictures, MGM, Paramount, Universal, Warner Bros., New Line Cinema, and Lionsgate, licensed their second-run content, never expecting the upstart to endanger the lucrative relationships they already had with cable television. The modest catalog was a deliberate artifact of that licensing caution: studios sold Netflix their older libraries, comfortable that the internet upstart would stay a niche convenience. Hastings treated those constraints as an incubation period, using the thin catalog to prove out streaming technology, collect behavioral data, and build the viewing habits that would later justify billion-dollar originals budgets and renegotiate the economics of Hollywood once subscriber scale gave Netflix bargaining power no cable network could ignore.

Dalio separates the All Weather betas from his tactical alphas. All Weather is his ideal strategic asset allocation mix of betas, the asset classes he constantly holds, while his tactical bets form a well-diversified portfolio of alphas he calls the Pure Alpha approach. He built All Weather with his Bridgewater team, especially Bob Prince and Greg Jensen, who have been at the firm forty and thirty years respectively and remain its co-chief investment officers. Once it was built, he judged it straightforward enough that practically anyone could implement it, could not imagine being paid to manage others' money this way, and showed just about everyone he knew how to do it, only to be surprised when many clients asked Bridgewater to manage money in the strategy, which became a product and has evolved since. Bridgewater now runs All Weather its own way for clients while Dalio runs his version for his family and his family's foundation and keeps teaching the recipe, including a complete investment-principles course built with Singapore's Wealth Management Institute.

Shareholders approved the special resolution renaming Zomato Ltd to Eternal Ltd in March 2025, formalising the holding-company structure that would house Zomato, Blinkit, Hyperpure and the District going-out vertical. The structural separation between parent brand and operating brands gave each vertical a cleaner capital-allocation identity.

The offering itself malfunctioned. Nasdaq's systems faltered on May 18, 2012, delaying the opening trade until late morning and leaving orders uncertain while the price wobbled; investment firms absorbed losses the exchange tried to remedy with a forty million dollar compensation offer against a much larger damage bill, with UBS alone estimating losses up to three hundred fifty million dollars and Bloomberg estimating retail investors lost roughly six hundred thirty million. More than forty lawsuits followed within a month, several alleging that lead underwriters including Morgan Stanley cut earnings forecasts during the roadshow and shared the revisions selectively with preferred clients. Morgan Stanley paid five million dollars that December to settle allegations over analyst conduct. A week after listing the stock traded at twenty-six point eight one dollars, carrying a price-earnings ratio of eighty-five despite shrinking quarterly revenue, the market's verdict on an offering priced for perfection.

Biocon's path from enzymes to therapeutics is summarized in the biography as 'exponential'. From its garage origin the enzyme business scaled to a multinational biopharmaceutical enterprise that delivers world-class therapeutics globally, is India's largest insulin producer, and has pioneered the world's only Pichia-based recombinant human insulin — now available in over 40 countries. Mazumdar-Shaw is chairman and managing director throughout.

The McDonald's collaboration placed Dalio and Bridgewater on the map. He rejects any suggestion that he was the creator of the Chicken McNugget, calling that overreaching, but the assignment's afterlife was substantial: it helped the firm eventually score a five million dollar investment from the World Bank, its biggest early commitment. Dalio had founded Bridgewater in 1975 out of his two-bedroom Manhattan apartment, two years out of Harvard Business School, initially advising corporate clients he knew from his prior Wall Street career. In 1981 he moved the firm to Wilton, Connecticut, operating from a converted barn that doubled as office and home. By the mid-1980s Bridgewater had grown to about ten people and rented a big old farmhouse, with the firm occupying part and his family the rest: meetings around the kitchen table, cars in the driveway, and children waving at colleagues as they passed, an informality he described in his 2017 book. The firm now explores AI-supplemented investing under chief executive Nir Bar Dea, who took over in 2022.

The next day, May 29, 1941, more than two hundred staff members struck during the production of Dumbo, against the advice of Sorrell, who wanted more time to organize. During the stoppage Disney retaliated by caricaturing striking employees in Dumbo as the antagonistic circus clowns who demand their pay, and studio guards once stopped him from confronting Babbitt on the picket line. The pickets kept a carnival atmosphere, at one point marching a mock guillotine to behead a mannequin of Disney's attorney, Gunther Lessing, while unionized staff at Technicolor and Pathé refused to process Disney films and the League of Women Shoppers picketed theaters exhibiting them. Disney was absent for the resolution, having accepted the State Department's Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs offer to make a goodwill trip to South America. Pressed by the National Labor Relations Board, the settlement reinstated fired employees, equalized pay, clarified the salary structure, and created a grievance procedure. The strike left the studio with 694 employees, and departed animators including Bill Tytla, Walt Kelly, and Tyrus Wong seeded rival studios and United Productions of America.

Tesla announced the Model 3 in April 2016 as its first mass-market vehicle, and demand outran physics. Within a week the company held more than 325,000 paid reservations. To accelerate output, Tesla invested heavily in robotics and automation for assembly, which instead slowed production, a stretch the company itself described as production hell, with significant delays and mounting financial pressure while Tesla became one of the most shorted stocks in the market. The crisis coincided with Musk's August 2018 announcement that he was considering taking Tesla private, the message that produced the securities-fraud charge and settlement. The production crisis was resolved by the close of 2018, after which the Model 3 ranked as the world's best-selling electric car every year through 2021, the payoff for a deliberately brutal ramp that Musk staked his chairmanship, his liquid wealth, and the company's solvency to survive.

After returning from the Peace Corps, Hastings applied to his first choice, MIT, was rejected, and attended Stanford University instead, graduating in 1988 with a master's degree in computer science. His first job was at Adaptive Technology, where he built a software-debugging tool. There he met Audrey MacLean in 1990, when she was chief executive of Adaptive Corporation; in 2007 he told CNN that she taught him the value of focus, the conviction that one product done well beats two done adequately. The lesson became a load-bearing principle for everything he built afterward. It sharpened the product discipline at Pure Software, the company he left Adaptive to found in 1991, and it resurfaced decades later in Netflix's insistence on a single, simple subscription proposition rather than the tangled tiering that competitors offered. The Stanford detour also planted him in Silicon Valley at the moment the software-tools market was becoming a real business.

Disneyland was dedicated on Sunday, July 17, 1955, at an International Press Preview televised nationwide on ABC and anchored by Art Linkletter, Bob Cummings, and Ronald Reagan. Although 28,000 people attended, only about half were invitees; the rest used counterfeit tickets or climbed over the fence. Guests tripped over television cables on a very hot day while rides broke down, restaurants ran out of food and drinks, the doors of Sleeping Beauty Castle were left unlocked to reveal its empty shell, and the Mark Twain Riverboat was overloaded with passengers. The press dubbed the day Black Sunday, and during the lifetimes of Walt and Roy, July 17 was considered a preview, with July 18 the official opening. The problems proved transient. Disneyland went on to the largest cumulative attendance of any theme park in the world, with 757 million visits through the end of 2021, and it drew 17.33 million visitors in 2024, second worldwide only to the Magic Kingdom it inspired.

At the 1939 Academy Awards, producer Walt Disney received an honorary Oscar for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, presented by Shirley Temple and unique in the award's history: one full-sized statuette flanked by seven miniature Oscars. The film had been nominated for Best Musical Score, and its success made Disney's name inseparable from the idea of feature animation. The Library of Congress selected it in 1989 as one of the inaugural twenty-five films in the National Film Registry, and the American Film Institute ranked it among the hundred greatest American films and, in 2008, the greatest American animated film ever made. Adjusted for inflation, it remains among the top ten performers in North American box office history, with an adjusted gross above two billion dollars, and worldwide it still tops the inflation-adjusted animation list. Successive theatrical re-releases, a Broadway musical, theme park attractions, and a 2025 live-action remake kept the property a compounding asset for the studio.

The deal closed on October 27, 2022, with theatrical finality. Musk tweeted that the bird was freed and immediately fired chief executive Parag Agrawal, chief financial officer Ned Segal, legal chief Vijaya Gadde, and general counsel Sean Edgett, with security escorting the executives out of headquarters. Isaacson's biography reports that Musk meticulously changed the closing schedule so the terminations landed before their stock options vested, as retribution over the spambot standoff. Golden parachutes valued at $38.7 million, $25.4 million, and $12.5 million for the three most senior executives went unpaid amid for-cause assertions that invited litigation. Musk assumed the chief-executive role, dissolved the board, merged the company into X Holdings, and created X Corp. in March 2023 to house it. Twitter's shares ceased trading the next day, and the ticker was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange on November 8.

The PayPal fortune began as X.com, the online financial-services and e-mail-payment company Musk co-founded in 1999. One of the first federally insured online banks, it signed up more than 200,000 customers in its initial months, yet investors judged Musk inexperienced and replaced him with Intuit chief executive Bill Harris by year's end. In 2000 X.com merged with Confinity, the startup founded by Max Levchin and Peter Thiel whose PayPal money-transfer service outgunned X.com's own product. Musk returned as chief executive of the combined company, but his preference for Microsoft software over Unix opened a rift that pushed Thiel to resign; the board then ousted Musk himself in 2000 and reinstated Thiel. Under Thiel the company focused on the PayPal service and renamed itself PayPal in 2001. When eBay bought PayPal for $1.5 billion in stock in 2002, Musk, the largest shareholder at 11.72 percent, received $175.8 million, the war chest for everything after.

Taken together, these and other factors reinforced an environment in which market volatility is increasingly influenced by policy expectations and geopolitical developments, creating a more challenging investing landscape. The Board remains focused on long-term value creation for PSH shareholders and believes that the Investment Manager’s disciplined, fundamentals-driven approach continues to serve investors well. Periods of market dislocation during the year allowed the Investment Manager to deploy capital at attractive valuations, consistent with its patient and opportunistic investment philosophy. During the year, PSH and the Investment Manager undertook a number of strategic initiatives designed to strengthen PSH’s balance sheet, enhance shareholder returns, and position the Company for long-term value creation, including debt issuances, increased shareholder distributions, share repurchases, and a significant investment in Howard Hughes Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:HHH). The Board believes the Investment Manager’s strategic initiatives and performance continue to demonstrate the strength of its long-term orientation in an increasingly complex global environment. These actions, including subsequent developments at HHH and related commitments by PSH, are discussed in greater detail in the sections that follow. INVESTMENT PERFORMANCE During the year ended December 31, 2025, PSH’s NAV per share, including dividends, increased by 20.9% net of fees, ending the year at $85.32.

Walmart's technological edge accumulated in deliberate layers. By the company's twenty-fifth anniversary in 1987 it maintained offices to track inventory and sales and to send instant communication to its stores, and by 1988 it had equipped ninety percent of its stores with barcode readers to help manage the movement of enormous inventories. Each layer compounded the last: point-of-sale data fed the satellite network completed in 1987, which fed the distribution centers and the trucking fleet, shortening reorder cycles that competitors still measured in weeks. The company treated information infrastructure as a capital investment in competitive position rather than as overhead — an approach later extended to vendors through proprietary software that shared Walmart's sales data with its suppliers, turning the supply chain itself into a proprietary asset. The point-of-sale scanning layer was less glamorous than the satellite constellation but more consequential for daily operations.

The corporate machinery arrived in a rush. Wal-Mart incorporated in Delaware on October 31, 1969, changed its name to Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. in 1970, and that same year opened a home office and its first distribution center in Bentonville while operating thirty-eight stores with fifteen hundred employees and forty-four-point-two million dollars in sales. The home office concentrated buying, finance, and distribution under one small-town roof. Trading as a publicly held company began October 1, 1970, followed soon by a New York Stock Exchange listing, and the first stock split came at forty-seven dollars a share. The public capital funded a steady state-by-state crawl: Arkansas, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, and Oklahoma at the time of listing, Tennessee by 1973, Kentucky and Mississippi by 1974, and by the 1975 entry into Texas, one hundred twenty-five stores with seventy-five hundred employees and total sales of three hundred forty million dollars.

In 1945, at twenty-six, Walton bought his first store: a Ben Franklin variety-store franchise in Newport, Arkansas, supplied by the Chicago wholesaler Butler Brothers. The purchase was financed with a twenty-thousand-dollar loan from his father-in-law, the Oklahoma banker and rancher Leland Robson, plus five thousand dollars saved from Army pay. His theory of the trade was already contrarian to conventional small-town merchandising: if his prices matched or beat those of stores four hours away by car, shoppers would stay home to buy, so he kept shelves consistently stocked with a wide range of goods. He added a tiny second shop, the Eagle department store, down the street beside his main local competitor. The formula worked — sales volume climbed from eighty thousand dollars to two hundred twenty-five thousand dollars within three years, a tripling that put the store on the radar of every retailer in the region.

The transition years between 2007 and 2008 supplied Netflix's foundational infrastructure stories. In February 2007 the company delivered its billionth DVD, a copy of Babel to a customer in Texas. In April 2007 it recruited ReplayTV founder Anthony Wood to build a Netflix Player that would bring streaming to televisions; Hastings eventually shut the project down to encourage other hardware manufacturers to build in Netflix support, and the effort was spun off as the digital media player company Roku. In January 2008 all rental-disc subscribers became entitled to unlimited streaming at no additional cost, a response to the introduction of Hulu and Apple's new video-rental services. In August 2008 the Netflix database was corrupted and the company could not ship DVDs for three days, leading it to move all its data to the Amazon Web Services cloud, a migration that became a textbook case study in cloud architecture and incidentally tied Netflix's fate to the infrastructure of its eventual competitor's parent.

Nadar is credited with steering HCL to create several joint ventures and alliances that aided its emergence as a global technology enterprise — an explicit alliance-led growth model rather than a build-everything-organically approach, distinguishing HCL's expansion strategy from peers like Infosys.

Dalio's investment method, as the firm describes it, aims at a timeless and universal understanding of how economies and markets work. Because events repeat themselves in slightly different costumes for fundamentally identical reasons, he studies as many episodes as he can, which demands grasping and simulating the markets of every major country across a minimum of the past hundred years, or for as long as they existed. Principles are then expressed as algorithms, back-tested across many cases and converted into computerized systems that sit alongside human judgment to decide which positions to hold. The system is designed to be unbiased to the environment, performing equally well in bull and bear markets, and to produce the highest level of return for a desired level of risk rather than the highest possible return, since one really bad period is enough to knock an investor out of the game. The firm credits him with pioneering the separation of alpha and beta, the All Weather risk parity approach, Pure Alpha's uncorrelated alphas, currency overlay, and active inflation-indexed bond management.

Bridgewater's crisis call carried its reputation far beyond hedge fund circles. By 2007 the firm's total assets had grown to 50 billion dollars, up from 33 billion in 2000, and Barron's would write that no one was better prepared for the coming crash than Bridgewater's clients and subscribers. The firm had begun warning in spring 2007 about the perils of runaway financial leverage. Its researchers reviewed the public accounts of most major financial institutions around the globe and found that estimated future losses on bad debts totaled 839 billion dollars. In December those conclusions were reported to the U.S. Treasury Department when Dalio met with Treasury Secretary staff and other White House economic advisers. When the crash came, Pure Alpha spared its investors most of the stock market's meltdown. The following year Senator John McCain visited the firm and addressed employees during his presidential campaign.

A 2020 Zoho lawsuit alleging that Freshworks had misappropriated Zoho's intellectual property was settled in 2021, leaving the matter closed without disclosed damages — a rare instance of an Indian-origin SaaS firm facing IP litigation from the very parent ecosystem its founders came out of.

Bridgewater's rise ran through a series of product inventions that became industry standards. Dalio started to become known outside Wall Street after turning a profit in the 1987 stock market crash. In 1991 he launched Pure Alpha, the flagship strategy whose name borrows the Greek letter that, in Wall Street parlance, denotes the excess return a manager can create above market returns when adjusted for risk. In 1996 he launched All Weather, a fund that pioneered a steady, low-risk approach later known as risk parity. Bridgewater became the world's largest hedge fund in 2005. Two years later the firm saw the 2008 financial crisis coming, and that same year Dalio issued his first book, the essay How the Economic Machine Works, a template for reading what is happening now that graded the potential of various economies, the seed of the template framework.

A national merit scholar who scored 1590 out of 1600 on the SAT, Gates enrolled at Harvard in the autumn of 1973, taking Math 55 and graduate-level computer science courses without ever settling on a concentration. There he met fellow student Steve Ballmer, the future Microsoft chief executive who stayed to graduate magna cum laude while Gates left after two years. In a combinatorics class taught by Professor Harry Lewis, Gates devised an algorithm for pancake sorting that held the record as the fastest solution for more than thirty years, with its eventual successor only two percent faster, and the work was formalized and published with Harvard computer scientist Christos Papadimitriou. During the summer of 1974 Gates joined Allen at Honeywell, keeping the partnership alive until the Altair 8800 created the opportunity that pulled him out of Cambridge for good.

The company's response to the Buffalo drive was immediate and intensive. Starbucks sent managers and executives, including its North America retail president, to Buffalo to engage employees on operational issues and work shifts alongside them, while workers were required to attend captive-audience meetings carrying anti-union messages. Some area stores were temporarily closed for remodeling, and one store preparing to vote was staffed heavily with new transfers, which workers said diluted union support while the company attributed it to pandemic sick-leave coverage. Starbucks asked that all twenty Buffalo-area stores vote simultaneously, which would have expanded the voting pool from 81 employees to about 450, a structure that generally works against unionization; the National Labor Relations Board ruled against the company twice, allowing store-by-store votes. Before the vote was scheduled, the company announced a fifteen-dollar minimum wage and raises for tenured workers, and it retained Littler Mendelson as its labor counsel.

Growth after the IPO came through both new stores and portfolio moves. In 1994 Starbucks acquired The Coffee Connection and with it the rights to use, make, market, and sell the Frappuccino beverage, which it introduced under the Starbucks name in 1995 and which grew into a product line generating more than two billion dollars in annual sales by 2012. In 1999 the company experimented with full eateries in the San Francisco Bay Area under the Circadia brand and acquired Pasqua Coffee, a retail chain with almost sixty locations in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York. In April 2003 it bought Seattle's Best Coffee and Torrefazione Italia from AFC Enterprises for seventy-two million dollars, adding only 150 stores but, according to contemporaneous reporting, a more significant wholesale business. By June 2003 Starbucks Japan alone ran 466 stores with plans for dozens more, evidence of how the model was compounding internationally.

In 1982, at twenty-nine, Schultz was hired at Starbucks as director of retail operations and marketing, joining owners Jerry Baldwin and Gordon Bowker in a business built on whole-bean coffee, leaf teas, and spices. On a 1983 buying trip to Milan he encountered Italian espresso bar culture for the first time, and he returned convinced the company should serve traditional espresso beverages rather than only sell beans. Baldwin and Bowker allowed a pilot of the café concept, which succeeded, but they declined to roll it out, citing the high cost of espresso machines, the scarcity of American repair expertise, and customers' unfamiliarity with the drinks. The disagreement over whether Starbucks was a retailer of coffee or a place to consume it defined the break that followed. Schultz concluded that the espresso bar idea required a company of its own, and he began planning his exit from the business he had only just joined as an employee.

IBM approached Microsoft in July 1980 about software for its forthcoming personal computer, a connection eased by Gates's mother's service on a United Way board alongside IBM chief executive John Opel. IBM initially asked Microsoft to write the BASIC interpreter and, when the subject of an operating system arose, Gates referred the company to Digital Research, maker of the dominant CP/M system; those negotiations failed. When IBM's Jack Sams reported the impasse, Gates and Allen proposed 86-DOS, a CP/M-like system Tim Paterson had built at Seattle Computer Products. Microsoft first licensed and then fully acquired the system, hired Paterson to adapt it for the IBM PC, and delivered it as PC DOS for a one-time fee of $50,000. Gates deliberately did not transfer the copyright to IBM, betting other manufacturers would clone the hardware; they did, and MS-DOS became the industry's de facto standard.

Mazumdar-Shaw is credited with making 'affordable innovation' the foundation of her business model — a phrase the Institute uses to summarize her commercial philosophy. Recognition includes EY World Entrepreneur of the Year 2020, Forbes' 100 Most Powerful Women in 2010, and Time's 100 Most Influential People in the World. Her vision and work, the Institute notes, drew global recognition for both Indian industry and for Biocon specifically.

Leadership of the foundation professionalized across its first quarter century: Patty Stonesifer served as the first chief executive until 2008, Jeff Raikes succeeded her, Susan Desmond-Hellmann took over in 2014, and Mark Suzman replaced her in February 2020. The founders' 2021 divorce forced governance changes, including a two-year trial arrangement after which either could exit; Melinda French Gates resigned as co-chair on May 13, 2024, effective that June, and in January 2025 the foundation was renamed the Gates Foundation with Bill Gates as sole chair. Warren Buffett resigned as trustee in June 2021 and clarified in June 2024 that the foundation would receive nothing further from his estate. The institution held $91 billion in assets at the end of 2025, had committed more than two billion dollars to pandemic response, and had co-hosted the 2019 Event 201 pandemic exercise with the World Economic Forum.

Goyal publicly disclosed that he twice considered asking Blinkit founder Albinder Dhindsa to step aside post-acquisition, citing potential conflict-of-interest concerns. The admission — rare in Indian startup governance — illustrated the awkwardness of integrating a founder-CEO into a larger acquiring company, and informed Goyal's eventual decision to elevate Dhindsa to group CEO in 2026.

Goyal pushed Zomato into food delivery in March 2015, originally leaning on third-party logistics like Delhivery and Runnr before acquiring Runnr in 2017 to bring a delivery fleet in-house. That infrastructural pivot — from a software marketplace into a hybrid tech-plus-logistics operator — set the unit-economics battle that Zomato would fight against Swiggy for the next decade.

The firm runs open educational and community initiatives — Varsity, Trading Q&A — intended to empower retail investors, framing investor education not as a CSR add-on but as a moat that compounds trust among the same population it eventually monetises.

At Homestead High, Jobs held two divergent interests, electronics and literature, a duality he traced to reading Polaroid founder Edwin Land on the importance of people who stand at the intersection of humanities and sciences. Bill Fernandez introduced him to Steve Wozniak in 1971, and Jobs visited Wozniak weekly at Berkeley, studying in nearby Stanford's student union and staging light shows for Homestead's avant-garde jazz program instead of joining the electronics club. A classmate remembered him as half brain and half hippie, smart enough for the nerds, too intellectual for the hippies, an individual where individuality was suspect. In his senior year he took a freshman English class at Stanford and read Shakespeare and Plato, King Lear above all. The friendship with Wozniak, five years older and already a self-taught engineer of rare gifts, became the technical-commercial pairing on which Apple would later be built.

Adani Power, founded in 1996, became the country's largest private thermal power producer with 4,620 MW capacity. The group's vertical-stacked infrastructure thesis — port, power, rail, gas distribution — let each adjacent business feed the next, a model Adani has used repeatedly to compound physical assets into operating monopolies.

Ambani founded Reliance Infocomm (later Reliance Communications) to lead the group's information and communications push, then lost it in the 2005 family-split brokered by mother Kokilaben, under which telecom went to younger brother Anil. The 2016 launch of Reliance Jio marked Mukesh's return to the sector and, in effect, his reprising of the digital infrastructure thesis he had first sketched with Infocomm.

In May 2026 the firm announced an approximately 11% global workforce reduction — around 500 employees — as it realigned resources around its largest growth opportunities and the AI transition, a restructuring that signals how even a profitable SaaS incumbent must redesign its cost base when category dynamics shift.

At the August 1997 Macworld Expo in Boston, Jobs announced a partnership with Microsoft whose terms included a five-year commitment to keep releasing Microsoft Office for the Macintosh and a $150 million investment in Apple. The long-running patent dispute over whether Windows infringed Apple's interface rights was settled, and Internet Explorer would ship as the Mac's default browser. Jobs framed the deal for the audience as the end of an era of rivalry: for Apple to win, Apple had to do a really good job, and if others helped, so much the better. The money was largely symbolic — Apple's market capitalization stood at $2.46 billion the day before, with $1.7 billion in quarterly revenue and $1.2 billion in cash reserves — but the psychological effect was immediate, signaling that the returning founder would trade pride for survival, keep Office on the platform, and refocus the company on execution rather than litigation.

His recognition stack includes Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year (Startup), Fortune Global 40 under 40, The Economic Times Entrepreneur of the Year, and the Joseph Wharton Award for Young Leadership — honours that bookend his ascent from a Wharton-and-Microsoft background into the centre of Indian consumer internet and angel investing.

Fresh out of Harvard Business School with an MBA in 1964, Bajaj made the unconventional choice to move his young family to Akurdi on the rural outskirts of Pune, building a house on the factory campus rather than settling in a Mumbai or Delhi elite enclave. He kept his children in the local school alongside the children of factory workers, signalling a deliberate rejection of inherited entitlement.

Jobs ran NeXT with an obsession for aesthetic perfection, evident in the magnesium case of the NeXTcube, and the strain on the hardware division told: after selling only 50,000 machines, NeXT withdrew from hardware entirely in 1993 and transitioned to software with the release of NeXTSTEP for Intel processors, refashioning itself as NeXT Software. The company reported its first annual profit, $1.03 million, in 1994, and in 1996 released WebObjects, an early enterprise framework for building web applications that Apple would later use to run the Apple Store, MobileMe, and the iTunes Store. In 1997 Apple acquired NeXT for $427 million, returning Jobs to the company as an advisor before his elevation to chief executive. NeXTSTEP became the basis for Rhapsody and Mac OS X, whose Darwin core now underlies macOS and iOS, making the failed workstation company the software DNA of every Apple device sold since.

Reusability was SpaceX's cost thesis and its hardest technical problem. The active test program began in late 2012 with low-altitude vertical-takeoff-and-landing prototypes of the Falcon 9, moving to high-velocity booster-return tests in late 2013. The payoff arrived in stages: in December 2015, Falcon 9 Flight 20 achieved the first successful landing and recovery of an orbital-class first stage, on solid ground; in April 2016 came the first landing on the autonomous drone ship Of Course I Still Love You in the Atlantic; and in March 2017 the SES-10 mission re-flew a returned booster and recovered it again, the first re-launch of a payload-carrying orbital rocket. Within months SpaceX was offering customers a 10 percent discount to fly on reused first stages. Setbacks punctuated the march: a CRS-7 launch failure in June 2015 traced to a failed steel strut, and a September 2016 pad explosion destroyed the $200 million AMOS-6 satellite during propellant loading.

The original Disney arrangement rankled: Pixar created and produced the films, Disney marketed and distributed them, profits and costs split equally, but Disney kept all story, character, and sequel rights plus a distribution fee of 10 to 15 percent. Renewal talks through 2003 and 2004 failed repeatedly, and in January 2004 Jobs announced he would never deal with Disney again while Michael Eisner ran it. The deadlock broke when Bob Iger replaced Eisner in October 2005 and moved quickly to mend the relationship; on January 24, 2006, Jobs and Iger announced Disney would buy Pixar in an all-stock deal worth $7.4 billion. The merger made Jobs Disney's largest individual shareholder with about seven percent of the stock and a board seat, and his holdings passed on his death to the Steven P. Jobs Trust. Iger later wrote that Jobs rarely created trouble for him and speculated they would have explored merging Disney and Apple had Jobs lived.

Qin Muyuan, understood from the source's phrasing to be related to Qin Yinglin, was proposed for election as a non-independent (executive) director alongside new president Gao Tong, suggesting continued family involvement on the board even as Qin Yinglin stepped back from executive control.

The years with Gibbons taught Vanderbilt to run a large and complicated business. He moved his family to New Brunswick, New Jersey, a stop on Gibbons's New York to Philadelphia line, where his wife Sophia ran a profitable inn whose proceeds fed, clothed, and educated the couple's thirteen children. A quick legal study, he represented Gibbons in meetings with lawyers and traveled to Washington to engage Daniel Webster for the Supreme Court argument. Vanderbilt's own appeal against the monopoly sat next on the Court's docket, but it never came up: on March 2, 1824, the Court ruled for Gibbons, holding that states had no power to interfere with interstate commerce. Gibbons v. Ogden remains a landmark, and the protection of competitive interstate commerce it established is considered the basis for much of the prosperity the United States subsequently generated. Vanderbilt had bet a decade of his career on the right side of the argument.

Birla credited the government's 'unflinching determination to revitalise the telecom sector' alongside promoter conviction on the long-term potential of Indian telecom. The acknowledgment explicitly positioned Vodafone Idea's survival as a public-private joint rescue — not a pure private-sector turnaround — which has implications for how the operating economics should be read.

Early deals set the modernization template: Indian Aluminum Company (INDAL) acquisition in 2000, Hindalco's Nifty Copper Mines and Mount Gordon Copper Mines in Australia in 2003, and majority stake in L&T Cement in 2004 — renamed UltraTech Cement. The moves diversified beyond the group's viscose, metals and cement core while tightening vertical integration in aluminum and cement.

Zuckerberg began writing code for a new site in January 2004 and launched Thefacebook on February 4 with roommates and classmates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes. The concept echoed the student directory at Phillips Exeter Academy, his boarding school, which students nicknamed the Facebook and used to list class years, friends, and phone numbers. Six days after launch, Harvard seniors Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and Divya Narendra accused Zuckerberg of stalling on their HarvardConnection project while building a competing product, a dispute that later settled for twenty million dollars in cash plus 1.2 million Facebook shares. The company started as a Harvard-only service and expanded within months to Columbia, New York University, Stanford, and the Ivy League, with Moskovitz driving the push across campuses as demand spread faster than the founders could provision servers. The site lived at thefacebook.com and carried its definite article until the company bought the shorter domain in 2005.

Mamaearth has consistently emphasised its 'MADE SAFE' certification, claiming to be the first Asian brand to secure that mark, and uses the toxin-free positioning as a core brand promise. The certification choice functioned as both a quality benchmark and a marketing wedge against incumbent personal care brands perceived as chemically loaded.

Facebook's financial coming of age arrived on a compressed timeline. It reached EBITDA profitability in early 2008 and turned cash-flow positive in September 2009, ahead of schedule, after closing a roughly two hundred million dollar operating gap. The Russian investment firm DST injected two hundred million dollars in 2009 at a ten billion dollar valuation, money Zuckerberg described as buffer rather than necessity. By July 2010 the service counted five hundred million users, half of them logging in daily for an average of thirty-four minutes, with one hundred fifty million on mobile. SecondMarket trades valued the company at forty-one billion dollars by November 2010, pushing it past eBay to become the third most valuable American web property after Google and Amazon. In January 2009, Compete data had already ranked it the most used social network in the world, a position it would not relinquish.

Ghazal identifies specific warning signs of ego-driven decisions: feedback beginning to feel like a personal attack rather than useful information, and changing one's mind beginning to feel like losing. Both signal that the founder's self-image has become entangled with being right, rather than getting it right.

The 2023 recovery fused cost discipline with an AI narrative. Meta launched Threads, its Twitter competitor, on July 6, and released Llama 2 for commercial use the same month through partnerships with major cloud providers including Microsoft, the first product of a generative AI group formed that February. Zuckerberg told investors in October that artificial intelligence would be the company's biggest investment area in 2024. The market ratified the pivot: Meta's shares finished 2023 up one hundred fifty percent, among the best performances in technology, and reached an all-time high in January 2024, bringing the company within reach of a trillion-dollar market capitalization. The year also carried regulatory costs, including a record one point two billion euro fine from Ireland's Data Protection Commissioner over European data transfers, but the efficiency program plus the AI story restored the investment case Zuckerberg had spent 2022 dismantling.

Under Varun's leadership, Honasa evolved from the single flagship Mamaearth brand into a multi-brand 'House of Brands' portfolio spanning The Derma Co., Aqualogica, BBlunt, Dr Sheth's, Staze Beauty and Luminéve. Each brand was built on a distinct value proposition and assigned a clearly defined role within the broader portfolio, marking a deliberate platform-company strategy.

The founders built their own delivery fleet rather than relying on restaurant staff, an operational choice that distinguished Swiggy from Foodpanda, TinyOwl and Ola Cafe — all of which were better-funded but struggled to control the last mile, eventually consolidating or shutting down by 2015–16.

On April 10, 2018, Zuckerberg testified before a joint hearing of the Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees, questioned for more than four hours on his company's handling of user data. He apologized and took personal responsibility for not doing enough to prevent the platform being used for harm, spanning fake news, foreign interference in elections, and hate speech. He walked the committee through the timeline he said he had known: Kogan's quiz app installed by three hundred thousand people in 2013, the discovery in 2015 that the data had reached Cambridge Analytica, a deletion demand, and the later revelation by journalists that the data had never actually been destroyed. The performance was received better than critics expected, and Facebook's stock rose while he testified, but the hearing fixed in the public record that the world's largest social network had lost custody of its own data supply chain.

Project Nand Ghar, a flagship Anil Agarwal Foundation initiative in collaboration with the Ministry of Women & Child Development, modernizes anganwadi centers across 14 states through 8,000 centres. The initiative targets health, nutrition and education improvements for 70 million children and 20 million women across India's 1.37 million anganwadi centres — a scale designed to match the problem.

India's disinvestment program opened the door to two landmark acquisitions: BALCO (51% for Rs 551.50 crore in 2001) and Hindustan Zinc Limited (about 65% in 2002). Both were sleepy public-sector mining firms; Agarwal bought them cheap, modernized them, and turned HZL into the world's largest integrated zinc producer within two decades.

When Laugh-O-Gram collapsed, Disney moved to Hollywood in July 1923 at twenty-one, drawn less by the cartoon industry, then centered in New York, than by his brother Roy's convalescence from tuberculosis and his own hope of directing live-action films. His efforts to sell Alice's Wonderland were in vain until New York distributor Margaret Winkler, who was about to lose both the Out of the Inkwell and Felix the Cat series and needed replacement product, answered his letter and signed a contract in October 1923 for six Alice comedies. Disney and Roy formed the Disney Brothers Studio to produce them, moved child actress Virginia Davis and her family west on a contract of one hundred dollars a month, and persuaded Iwerks to relocate from Kansas City in 1924. The first official Walt Disney Studio opened at 2725 Hyperion Avenue in 1926, the physical origin of the company that still bears his name.

I sold candy at religious school on Tuesdays and Thursdays because the kids were starving after school. I would buy it up over the weekend and bring it to school and sell it for an arbitrage profit. So it was just a pattern of being drawn to small business and making money, and over time that led to an interest in the stock market. My first stock was some bar mitzvah money when I was around 10 years old. [12:03] BARRY RITHOLTZ: Well, it can’t have been bar mitzvah money. [12:05] SETH KLARMAN: It wasn’t bar mitzvah money then, it was a present, but then bar mitzvah money continued to be. So really, 10 years old, and about a share of Johnson & Johnson. [12:14] BARRY RITHOLTZ: Still have it? [12:15] SETH KLARMAN: Do not still have it. It’s split three for one, but ultimately I presumably have traded that in for something else that I like better. [12:23] BARRY RITHOLTZ: So let’s fast forward a little bit to the Baupost origin story, which isn’t that far ahead. You’re only 25. The urban legend is you co-founded Baupost, but in reality you were brought in to manage money for the four founding families — still at 25. That’s a kind of shocking thing: “Oh, we have all this wealth, let’s bring in this kid to run our portfolio.” [12:51] SETH KLARMAN: Right. And I would say the same thing. If I were in their seats, I would wonder, how does this kid know how to do that?

When Gibbons died in 1826, Vanderbilt worked for the son William until 1829, then struck out entirely on his own, assembling lines step by step around New York. He took over Gibbons's Jersey ferry, shifted to western Long Island Sound, and in 1831 assumed his brother Jacob's route to Peekskill on the lower Hudson. There he met the steamboat operator Daniel Drew in open competition, and Drew fought hard enough that Vanderbilt bought him out; impressed, he then made Drew a secret partner for the next thirty years so the two men would have an incentive never to compete with each other. In November 1833 a Camden and Amboy Railroad train derailed at Hightstown with Vanderbilt aboard, nearly killing him; the former president John Quincy Adams rode the same train and survived the jolt. The episode marked his first serious brush with the iron rail, the industry he would one day rule.

Dalio's publishing record tracks his shift from money manager to public educator. How the Economic Machine Works, the template essay, appeared as his first book in 2007. In 2011 he self-published a 123-page volume titled Principles outlining his philosophy of investment and corporate management, which he distributed free. Principles: Life and Work, published by Simon & Schuster in 2017, became a New York Times number one bestseller and Amazon's top business book of that year, and CNBC named it among the thirteen best business books of 2017. Principles for Navigating Big Debt Crises followed in 2018, an illustrated Principles for Success in 2019, and Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order in 2021, released alongside a free online personality assessment called PrinciplesYou. How Countries Go Broke, on navigating the big debt cycle, appeared in 2025 and also became a New York Times bestseller.

In May 2024 the company acquired US-based IT-management firm Device42 for about $230 million, the same month Mathrubootham handed the CEO seat to Dennis Woodside and moved into the executive chairman role — coupling a sizeable M&A bet with a leadership transition.

The firm reached unicorn status in 2018 and decacorn status in 2022 at a $10.7 billion valuation, propelled by funding from Accel Partners and Norwest Venture Partners — a capital trajectory that funded city expansion and the cloud-kitchen build-out before the IPO.

Strategically, Birla argued that India deserves three private telecom players and a successful Vodafone Idea, calling it 'an idea whose time has come.' The framing positions Vi not as a market-rate competitor but as a structural necessity — a triopoly component the country needs to avoid an effective Jio-Airtel duopoly.

Hastings left Adaptive Technology in 1991 to found Pure Software, which produced products to troubleshoot and debug software. The company's fast growth proved difficult for him because he lacked managerial experience: he said he had trouble managing through rapid headcount expansion, that his engineering background had not prepared him for the challenges of being a chief executive, and that he asked his own board to replace him, telling directors he was losing confidence. The confession itself became part of the Hastings management canon, an early admission that technical founders do not automatically grow into chief executives. Pure Software nonetheless survived its founder's inexperience, went public in 1995, and made Hastings a multimillionaire. The gap he identified between what he knew how to build and what he knew how to run became the animating problem of his career, and the raw material for the talent-density and freedom-and-responsibility doctrines he would later impose on Netflix.

I don’t think people should generally be starting investment firms at age 25, and of course I really didn’t start the firm. The firm was in the process of being created. The four clients of the firm that came together, the founders, had the idea that they would build a firm that might go and make investments itself, might hand money to others who were already in the business of making investments. They wanted to build kind of an institutional structure, a framework for how to make sure the money got managed well. Given what was then, back in the early ’80s, a highly fraught time — as you know from history, the volatile markets, long history of underperformance of the stock market, real economic uncertainty, stagflation at some point and getting worse, Treasury bond yields getting higher and higher. So it was a really fraught moment. They wanted to make sure that the money they had not only was kept intact but was accounted for — clip the coupons, collect the dividends, and all of that. The founders were all selling businesses around that time. So the serendipity was, I was a student at business school. Bill Poorvu, the P-O of Baupost, was my real estate professor. He and some friends were selling Channel 5 — he was a big investor in that, the largest sale at the time of a TV station, to Metromedia. It was the ABC affiliate in Boston. A third friend had a computer publishing and consulting business. All of that was getting sold. So they had this pile of $27 million.

Acquisition built the empire. Facebook bought Instagram in April 2012 for approximately one billion dollars in cash and stock, Onavo in October 2013, WhatsApp in February 2014 for nineteen billion dollars, and Oculus VR later that year for two point three billion, the deal that carried it into virtual reality hardware. Later purchases tested the limits of that strategy: the four hundred million dollar Giphy acquisition in 2020 was ordered divested by Britain's Competition and Markets Authority, which also fined Meta seventy million dollars for withholding information, and the asset finally sold to Shutterstock for fifty-three million. The early deals, executed quickly and largely without challenge, defined the company's competitive doctrine of neutralizing emerging threats by owning them, a doctrine that later antitrust scrutiny in the United States and Europe would interrogate through the retrospectoscope of Instagram's and WhatsApp's dominance.

Honasa claims to have systematised a 'repeatable brand-building playbook' anchored in consumer-centric innovation, digital-first distribution and data-driven marketing. That framework reportedly enabled each of the new brands — The Derma Co., Aqualogica, Dr Sheth's, BBlunt — to scale to a ₹100 crore annual revenue run rate within two years of launch, evidence of the platform thesis producing measurable output.

In 2007 Hindalco acquired Atlanta-based Novelis Inc, then the world's leading producer of aluminum rolled products, in a landmark overseas deal. The acquisition marked Birla's most ambitious push to take an Indian metals business up the value chain into downstream rolled products for global automotive and aerospace markets.

The 2008 turnaround cut deeply into the store base. In July 2008, during the Great Recession, Starbucks announced it would close 600 underperforming company-owned stores and cut back United States expansion plans, and on July 29 it eliminated almost a thousand non-retail jobs, 550 of them layoffs. The same month it announced closure of 61 of its 84 Australian stores after misreading that country's café culture. In January 2009 the company announced 300 additional store closures and the elimination of seven thousand positions, with the board approving a reduction in Schultz's own salary. Altogether, from February 2008 to January 2009, Starbucks terminated an estimated 18,400 United States jobs and began closing 977 stores worldwide. The scale of the retrenchment signaled that the founder's return was a genuine restructuring rather than a symbolic restoration of the brand's romance, and it bought the balance sheet room to reinvest in stores and people.

Blinkit is now Eternal's largest business vertical by order value, with revenue growth of 145 percent year-on-year reported for one recent period — a vindication of Goyal's 568-million-dollar all-stock bet. The performance reframed the 2022 acquisition from a contested move into a category-defining consolidation in Indian quick commerce.

From 2009-2012, Adani acquired Abbot Point Port and the Carmichael coal mine in Queensland, Australia — controversial bets that drew sustained environmental opposition and became a recurring flashpoint in the global coal debate. The assets also marked Adani's first major overseas infrastructure footprint beyond trading.

The post-acquisition operating doctrine was radical cost destruction. On November 4, 2022, Musk laid off roughly half of Twitter's workforce; two weeks later he issued an ultimatum asking employees to commit to extremely hardcore work toward a Twitter 2.0 or leave, prompting resignations that took headcount from about 7,500 to roughly 1,500, an 80 percent reduction. Paid verification launched at $7.99 per month on November 9, was suspended within days amid impersonation crises, and relaunched on December 12. Musk restored previously banned accounts including Donald Trump, relaxed hate-speech policies, and removed the COVID-19 misinformation prohibition. His suspension of the ElonJet jet-tracking account and of journalists covering it drew broad backlash in December, and a poll he ran on stepping down returned a yes; Linda Yaccarino, NBCUniversal's advertising sales chair, succeeded him as chief executive in June 2023, with Musk moving to executive chairman and chief technology officer.

The production fix and the market re-rating arrived together. From July 2019 to June 2020 Tesla reported its first four consecutive profitable quarters, qualifying it for the S&P 500, which it entered that December as the most valuable company ever added to the index. During 2020 the share price rose 740 percent, and by December the market capitalization exceeded the next nine automakers combined; in October 2021 Tesla became the sixth American company to reach $1 trillion. The physical footprint scaled in parallel: Gigafactory Shanghai broke ground in January 2019 as the first car plant in China owned outright by a foreign automaker rather than through a joint venture, and produced its first Model 3 in December of the same year, under twelve months from groundbreaking to production. Gigafactory Berlin and Gigafactory Texas both broke ground in 2020 and began building the Model Y in 2022.

In December 2013 Ambani flagged a possible digital-infrastructure collaboration with Bharti Airtel for 4G in India, and at the June 2014 AGM committed Rs 1.8 trillion of investment across businesses over three years with 4G broadband services targeted for 2015. The scale of the bet — capital committed before a single rupee of telecom revenue — was unprecedented in Indian corporate history.

By 1926 distribution of the Alice series had passed to Margaret Winkler's husband, Charles Mintz, and after Mintz asked for new material to distribute through Universal, Disney and Iwerks created Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, a character Disney wanted peppy, alert, saucy, and venturesome. The series became a critical and commercial success that positioned the studio as a major force in American animation. In February 1928 Disney traveled to New York to negotiate a larger production budget, only to discover that Mintz had persuaded several of his artists, including Hugh Harman, Rudolf Ising, and Friz Freleng, to work directly for him, and that Universal, not Disney, owned the intellectual property rights to Oswald. Mintz threatened to produce the series himself unless Disney accepted reduced terms. Disney refused the ultimatum, lost most of his staff except Iwerks, and returned to California carrying the lesson that would define the company: own what you create.

The defining governance crisis of Musk's Tesla tenure arrived in September 2018, when the Securities and Exchange Commission sued him over a tweet stating that funding was secured for potentially taking Tesla private, a claim the agency characterized as false, misleading, and damaging to investors. The suit initially sought to bar Musk from serving as an officer of any publicly traded company. Two days later he settled without admitting or denying the allegations: Musk and Tesla were each fined $20 million, Musk agreed to step down as Tesla's chairman for three years, and he retained the chief-executive post. The aftermath ran for years. In 2019 the SEC asked a court to hold him in contempt over a production forecast tweet, producing a clarified agreement with a list of topics requiring preclearance. Musk has said in interviews that he has no regrets about the message that triggered the investigation.

Rainmatter, Zerodha's fintech fund and incubator, has invested in multiple startups with the explicit aim of expanding India's capital markets — a use of promoter cash that doubles as ecosystem-building and reinforces the firm's bet on financialisation as a multi-decade trend.

The foundation was designed to die. In October 2006 it was split into a trust that manages the endowment and an operating foundation that makes grants, with the announcement that all resources would be spent within fifty years of Bill's and Melinda's deaths, a deadline later tightened to twenty years in contrast to the perpetual life of most large foundations. In May 2025, Gates went further, announcing that the foundation would cease operations on December 31, 2045. The spend-down logic is administrative as much as philosophical: a fixed horizon lowers administrative costs over the institution's life and prevents the drift into token grantmaking that consumes perpetual endowments. Buffett's own stipulation that proceeds from shares he still owns at death be deployed within ten years of his estate's settlement reinforced the same conviction that philanthropic capital should be spent, not preserved.

Through the mid-1980s Microsoft scaled from scrappy to dominant. SoftLetter reported the company, with an estimated $55 million in 1983 sales, as the world's second-largest microcomputer software company; InfoWorld called it the industry's most influential firm, with some insiders saying it aimed to be the IBM of software, and more than ninety percent of the fifteen million Americans using a PC at work ran MS-DOS. On February 16, 1986, Microsoft moved to a corporate campus in Redmond, and on March 13, 1986, it went public on the Nasdaq at $21.00 per share, raising $61 million as the price ended the day at $28.00. By 1987 it was the largest personal-computer software producer, having passed Lotus, and its July 1987 purchase of Forethought, the developer of PowerPoint, marked its first major acquisition. Cytation, picked up in January 1986, had already formed the company's CD-ROM division months before the offering.

The final thirty months of Walton's life compressed Walmart's transformation from regional powerhouse into multinational. American sales had quadrupled to thirty-two billion dollars over the previous five years by 1990, the year Walmart acquired the food-service distributor The McLane Company. In 1991 the company opened its first store outside the United States, in Mexico City, and launched the Sam's American Choice brand under the Made in America initiative, meant to stimulate American suppliers to produce more products at lower prices. On March 17, 1992, President George H. W. Bush presented Walton with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Walton died on April 5, and his eldest son, S. Robson Walton, took over as chairman of the corporate board on April 7, 1992 — a year in which Walmart operated in forty-five states. Eighteen months after his death, in December 1993, the company's stores crossed the billion-dollar mark in sales in a single week.

The post-crisis period brought both vindication and humbling. In 2009 the Pure Alpha strategy was unsuccessful: economic growth responded faster than anticipated, the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 19 percent, and the fund reportedly gained only 2 to 4 percent, a miss that became part of Dalio's own argument against overconfidence. Pure Alpha II has posted a historic average return of 10.4 percent, with only three losing years. In 2010, when U.S. gross domestic product faltered, the firm booked significant gains on Treasury bonds and other securities, and in November it founded the 10 billion dollar Pure Alpha Major Markets fund, pushing total assets above 100 billion for the first time. In 2011 the Teacher Retirement System of Texas invested 250 million dollars in a non-voting stake in Bridgewater's intermediate holdings company, and by early 2012 the firm managed roughly 120 billion dollars in total.

In April 2026, Xu pleaded guilty at the Shenzhen Intermediate People's Court to charges including fundraising fraud, misuse of funds, illegally taking public deposits, and, per the court, embezzlement and bribery; he also faced separate charges of illegally extending loans, fraudulently issuing securities, and bribery by units, with the court saying it would hand down verdicts later.

Her central diagnostic question for separating conviction from ego: 'Am I protecting the business, or am I protecting my identity?' If the motivation for defending an idea is to avoid embarrassment, admit a mistake or maintain the image of being right, ego is likely driving the response — and the decision deserves reconsideration.

To tap international capital, Agarwal incorporated Vedanta Resources Plc in London in 2003, becoming the first Indian firm to list on the London Stock Exchange (December 10, 2003). The listing vehicle then became the group's parent through internal restructuring — an unusual inversion that placed India-heavy assets under a UK-listed holding company.

The Titan Capital page positions Bahl as 'an influential voice on issues about Indian start-ups and entrepreneurship,' a self-description that aligns with his subsequent Shark Tank India judging role and his public championing of profitable 'Indicorns' over loss-making unicorns.

Schultz left Starbucks in 1985 to build the espresso-bar business its owners would not pursue. He calculated he needed four hundred thousand dollars to start, and to prepare he visited more than five hundred espresso bars in Milan, studying how the format worked as commerce and as theater. Fundraising was brutal: of the 242 investors he approached, 217 rejected the idea outright. Starbucks itself ultimately invested one hundred fifty thousand dollars in the new venture, with Baldwin taking a board seat and Bowker offering unofficial help, while a local doctor, Ron Margolis, contributed another hundred thousand. Schultz absorbed most of the personal risk of introducing espresso drinks to the American market. The rejection rate became part of the founding mythology he retold for decades, a standing reminder that the concept later valued in the tens of billions of dollars was, at inception, a proposition most professional investors declined to fund.

While shutting down Apple's licensing of its operating system to clone manufacturers, one of Jobs's first moves as acting chief executive was to develop the iMac, which bought the company time to restructure. Introduced in 1998, the original iMac integrated the display and processor in a streamlined translucent plastic body and became a sales smash, moving roughly one million units each year. The machine reintroduced Apple to media and public and announced the company's new emphasis on design and aesthetics — its maker boasted that the back of their computer looked better than the front of anyone else's. It also made hard technical choices that rippled across the industry, dropping the floppy disk drive and standardizing on USB, which popularized USB among peripheral makers who began shipping translucent-plastic accessories to match. The iMac was the first proof, ahead of the iPod and iPhone, that Jobs's design-led product philosophy could be a mass-market financial engine rather than a niche taste.

Ghazal has stated that she personally tests every product before it is opened up for consumer sale — a 'paranoia' she frames as a non-negotiable core value, rooted in the founding decision that the brand would only ever launch products she would use on her own baby. That founder-as-chief-quality-gate framing has been a recurring PR and trust-building device for the brand.

By Walmart's twenty-fifth anniversary in 1987, the company operated 1,198 stores with fifteen-point-nine billion dollars in sales and two hundred thousand associates. The consistent explanation offered for its success between 1980 and 2000 was structural rather than promotional: a contiguous pattern of expansion that built new distribution centers in a hub-and-spoke framework, each within driving distance of the stores it fed. Growth proceeded outward ring by ring rather than in scattered leaps, concentrating logistics density and managerial supervision in every region before the next one opened. That discipline — unglamorous, capital-intensive, and self-reinforcing — turned Walmart into the most profitable retailer in the United States by 1988 and the largest American retailer by revenue by late 1989, while competitors with flashier merchandising never matched the underlying cost structure. The West Coast and Northeast held out longest, with first stores in California and Pennsylvania arriving only in 1990.

The Foundation attributes HCL's large engineering-and-R&D division to Nadar's 'pioneering spirit and belief in engineering and research' — positioning R&D as the engine of HCL's differentiation rather than labour-arbitrage services, the more common Indian IT narrative.

The profile positions Mathrubootham's product background as his key qualification — he understood the business-software market deeply before founding Freshworks, identifying the wedge by observing customer frustration rather than by chasing a hot category, which made execution speed a more reliable moat than feature breadth.

In January 2020 Zomato swallowed Uber Eats India in an all-stock deal worth roughly 206 million dollars, handing Uber a 9.99 percent stake. The trade absorbed a sub-5-percent rival and lifted Zomato's share of the Indian food-delivery market to roughly 52 percent — a textbook consolidation move just before COVID-19 lockdowns supercharged online ordering.

Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard in his second year to finish the project, moving with Moskovitz and the early team to Palo Alto, where they leased a small house that doubled as an office. Over the summer of 2004 he met Peter Thiel, who became the company's first outside investor, and the team took its first real office mid-year. They had planned to return to Harvard but stayed in Silicon Valley, drawn by what Zuckerberg described as the mythical quality of the region's computer culture, and turned down corporate buyout offers as the site's growth compounded. The engineering culture institutionalized itself in hackathons held every six to eight weeks, all-night sessions with music, food, and beer where staff shipped a working project by morning. Zuckerberg framed the ethos simply: it is acceptable to break things in order to make them better, a phrase that later became the company's unofficial motto.

The regulatory reckoning outlasted the news cycle. In July 2019 the Federal Trade Commission fined Facebook five billion dollars for privacy violations, while the United Kingdom's Information Commissioner's Office extracted a five hundred thousand pound penalty for exposing users' data to serious risk of harm. Cambridge Analytica itself filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in May 2018, collapsing under the scrutiny it had created. The scandal restructured the company's relationship with governments on both sides of the Atlantic and made privacy a board-level constraint rather than a product afterthought. Zuckerberg's response over the following year, a public commitment to rebuild around private, encrypted messaging, represented the most consequential strategic redirection of his tenure, converting a data-breach catastrophe into the stated rationale for the company's next platform architecture. Facebook's stock had already recovered its scandal losses by May 2018, well before the fines arrived, an early signal of how little lasting economic damage the episode would do to the franchise.

Organizing spread faster than any comparable retail campaign in decades. In November 2021, workers at three more Buffalo locations filed petitions; by early January 2022 the number of stores filing had grown past ten and extended beyond New York state; by the end of January more than fifty stores nationwide had petitioned. Mid-February brought more than seventy stores across twenty states, the end of February more than one hundred across twenty-five states, and mid-March more than one hundred fifty. The National Labor Relations Board certified the first union outside Buffalo on February 25, 2022, when a Mesa, Arizona store voted twenty-five to three, and on March 22 the first Seattle store voted unanimously to unionize. By May 27, 2022, one hundred stores had voted yes, and two hundred had organized by late July. Workers at challenged stores and the labor board alleged anti-union conduct influenced the losing votes, which the company denied.

The Institute's biography lists her most cherished honors as the Padma Shri in 1989 and the Padma Bhushan in 2005, both presented by the President of India for innovative efforts in industrial biotechnology. The 2014 Othmer Gold Medal recognized her pioneering role in developing the Indian biotechnology industry and her campaign to make India healthier.

Over the same period, PSH’s share price increased by 33.9%, reflecting a narrowing of the discount to NAV at which PSH shares traded from 31.2% to 24.1%.iii,iv By comparison, the S&P 500 increased 17.9% during the year ended December 31, 2025.

The competitive consequences moved faster than the rockets. In 2014 SpaceX won nine of the twenty openly competed commercial launch contracts worldwide, prompting Arianespace to ask European governments for subsidies to withstand the pricing pressure. The same capabilities cracked the United States military launch market, where United Launch Alliance's near-decade monopoly had pushed costs above $400 million per launch. In January 2015 Google and Fidelity invested $1 billion for 8.33 percent of SpaceX, valuing the company near $12 billion; by July 2017 a $350 million round valued it at $21 billion. In 2017 SpaceX captured a 45 percent global share of awarded commercial launch contracts, and by March 2018 it held over 100 launches on its manifest, worth roughly $12 billion in combined contract revenue from commercial and government customers, making it the leading global launch provider by manifested missions.

The January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics, demonstrating the MITS Altair 8800 built on the Intel 8080, convinced Gates and Allen that the moment had arrived to start a software company, and Gates dropped out of Harvard that same year. His parents were supportive once they saw how badly he wanted it, and he framed the decision conservatively: he remained officially on leave, so that if the venture failed he could always return to school. He never went back to complete his degree. Instead he took a leave of absence in November 1975 to work with Allen at MITS in Albuquerque, where their new partnership, named Micro-Soft as a blend of microcomputer and software, opened its first office. The trade name Microsoft was registered with the Secretary of State of New Mexico on November 26, 1976, dropping the hyphen within a year.

He treated employees as the institutional heartbeat rather than as a balance-sheet cost line, and chose to live physically among the workforce for decades. This belief — that a company's strength derives from the surrounding community — was reflected in Bajaj Auto's relatively stable industrial relations through the turbulent 1970s and 1980s even as the firm scaled into India's largest two-wheeler maker.

Newport taught Walton the most expensive lesson of his career. The store's success attracted its landlord, P. K. Holmes, whose family had a history in retail and who wanted the location and the franchise rights for his son; because Walton had never secured a renewal option in his lease, and because rent already ran at five percent of sales, Holmes simply refused to renew and forced him out. Walton called the fifty-thousand-dollar price Holmes paid for the inventory and fixtures a fair price, but the eviction ended his first business on someone else's terms. He would treat control of real estate and contract terms as existential matters ever after, and the episode pushed him to Bentonville, where the second act of his retail career began. The lost lease, more than any early success, hardened the ownership instincts that later defined Walmart's expansion.

The official positioning also highlights Agarwal's reputation as the first Indian to list a business at the London Stock Exchange — a fact the company foregrounds in his profile — and his self-described founding ethos captured in the line 'You must dream to make your dreams come true,' which the corporate site uses as a tagline.

The years 2009 and 2010 marked the crossover. In 2009 Netflix streams overtook its DVD shipments for the first time. In January 2010 the company agreed with Warner Bros. to delay new-release rentals by twenty-eight days after DVDs became available for sale, an attempt to help studios sell physical copies, and similar deals with Universal and Fox followed in April. In August 2010 Netflix reached a five-year deal worth nearly one billion dollars to stream films from Paramount, Lionsgate, and MGM, adding roughly two hundred million dollars a year in costs; it spent 117 million dollars on streaming content in the first six months of 2010, up from thirty-one million in all of 2009. In September 2010 Netflix launched in Canada, its first international market, and in November 2010 it began offering a standalone streaming service separate from DVD rentals. Each step converted the free bonus feature into the core business, and the content budgets made clear which side of the company management intended to feed.

Around 1971, Wozniak read an Esquire article on the blue box, an illegal tone-generating device that tricked the telephone network into free long-distance calls, and designed a low-cost digital version. Jobs decided the pair should sell them and split the profit, and the clandestine sales went well enough that Jobs later credited the episode as the seed of Apple: without the blue boxes, he argued, there would have been no Apple at all, because the experience proved two young men could take on large companies and beat them. The episode fixed a division of labor that recurred at Apple — Wozniak as the inventor of elegant, minimal engineering, Jobs as the salesman who found the market, set the price, and captured the value. It also marked his first exercise of pricing power and margin thinking applied to somebody else's brilliant circuit design, skills he would spend four decades scaling from gadgets to global product lines.

For FY2025, the firm reported revenue of $838.8 million, GAAP net income of roughly $183.7 million, and roughly 5,300 employees — its first full year of GAAP profitability, marking the inflection from a growth-at-all-costs profile to one that can fund itself from earnings.

In 1987 Walmart completed a twenty-four-million-dollar satellite network linking every store to Bentonville with two-way voice and data transmission and one-way video communications — at the time the largest private satellite network in existence. The system let the corporate office track inventory and sales and communicate instantly with stores, collapsing the information lag that had always separated headquarters from the selling floor. Combined with the barcode readers that reached ninety percent of stores by 1988, the network gave Walmart a persistent structural information advantage over regional competitors still working from weekly paperwork. It was the technological expression of Walton's logistics obsession: the founder who scouted towns from a second-hand airplane spent his final decade wiring the whole company together from orbit, and the investment kept paying out long after his death. Centralized buying had already run through the Bentonville home office since 1970, when the first distribution center opened there.

Musk's public standing is inseparable from his market value. His biography records a figure who became polarizing precisely because he behaved unlike the reclusive billionaire norm, eccentric and spontaneous in decisions that moved markets and frequently controversial in statement. Ashlee Vance's biography captured the split with a description of a persona that was part philosopher, part troll. Time listed him among the world's most influential people in 2010, 2013, 2018, and 2021, and named him Person of the Year for 2021, with editor-in-chief Edward Felsenthal writing that as a marker of influence, few individuals had shaped life on Earth, and perhaps life beyond it, more than Musk. Institutional recognition ran in parallel: a Royal Aeronautical Society Gold Medal in 2012, fellowship of the Royal Society in 2018, and election to the National Academy of Engineering in 2022, honors accumulated before his reputation fractured along political lines.

Vedanta expanded geographically throughout the 2000s: Konkola Copper Mines in Zambia (2004), a controlling stake in Sesa Goa iron ore (2007), Anglo American's zinc assets in Namibia, Ireland and South Africa (2010), and Cairn India — India's largest private-sector oil producer — in 2011. Sesa Goa and Sterlite were merged in 2012 to consolidate group structure.

In 2018 Idea Cellular — owned by the Aditya Birla Group — merged with Vodafone India to create India's then-largest telecom service provider, Vodafone Idea. The merger was a defensive consolidation against the Jio price war and a bet that scale alone could survive Mukesh Ambani's disruptive entry into Indian telecom.

And the basic job offer I got wasn’t “come run a fund.” It was “come join us and let’s figure out some more things to do with the money.” [14:46] BARRY RITHOLTZ: So eventually you become the lead partner there. [14:50] SETH KLARMAN: I don’t know if CEO is right, Tom. I wasn’t CEO for the first seven or so years, and then I became CEO and effectively got control of the firm — as sort of a handshake deal where we agreed that if I worked hard and did well for the clients, they would recognize that with a stake in the business. So I had no stake the day it was formed and ended up with over half. [15:16] BARRY RITHOLTZ: You ended up with over half. That’s amazing, 40-something years later. [15:20] SETH KLARMAN: Now much less, because I’m a big believer in sharing the pie with my team. [15:25] BARRY RITHOLTZ: It makes a lot of sense. Let’s talk a little bit about the timing. You mentioned there was a lot of turmoil and stagflation. The previous 16 years — I want to say the inflation-adjusted returns were something like down 75%, ’66 to ’82, something along those lines. ’82 was the beginning of a historic bull market. How did that affect how you thought about risk, how you thought about opportunities? What did the markets look and feel like in ’82, when, I imagine, most people were still pretty bearish?

In July 2011 Netflix announced it would separate its subscription plans in two: one covering streaming and the other DVD rental, each starting at $7.99 a month, effectively raising the price of the combined bundle by sixty percent. In September, the same month Netflix expanded into Latin America, it announced its intention to rebrand and restructure the DVD service as an independent subsidiary called Qwikster, splitting the two businesses entirely. Customers reacted with fury, reading the moves as a price increase and a betrayal of loyalty. Netflix's stock value dropped, and eight hundred thousand of its twelve million customers cancelled their subscriptions. Netflix quickly apologized, and in October 2011 announced it would retain the DVD service under the Netflix name, with streaming and DVD plans branded together. The reversal was as instructive as the blunder: Hastings had misread how much of the brand's identity lived in the little red envelope, and the episode became the canonical case study in how not to migrate a loyal customer base from an old business model to a new one.

The Q3 FY26 results Birla was commenting on showed a narrower net loss of Rs 5,286 crore versus Rs 6,609 crore a year earlier, with revenue up 2% YoY to Rs 11,323 crore. ARPU rose 3% sequentially to Rs 172, but the company lost 3.8 million subscribers — indicating the turnaround remained a slow-motion grind rather than a clean inflection.

In 1834 Vanderbilt attacked the Hudson River Steamboat Association, the steamboat monopoly between New York City and Albany, sailing under the name the People's Line and borrowing the populist language of Andrew Jackson's Democracy to rally public support. By year's end the monopoly paid him a large sum to stop competing, and he switched operations to Long Island Sound. As New England's textile mills multiplied, the first railroads ran from Boston down to the Sound to connect with his steamboats, and by the end of the decade he dominated Sound shipping and began absorbing the connecting railroads themselves. In the 1840s he targeted the most attractive of them, the New York, Providence and Boston Railroad, known as the Stonington: cutting fares on competing lines, he depressed its share price and took its presidency in 1847, the first of the many railroads he would head. Commodore, once a common tag for steamboat entrepreneurs, now meant Vanderbilt alone.

International recognition listed by the Institute includes the Nikkei Asia Prize for Regional Growth, the Express Pharmaceutical Leadership Summit Award for Dynamic Entrepreneur, the 2004 Economic Times Businesswoman of the Year award, Ernst & Young's Entrepreneur of the Year Award for Life Sciences and Healthcare, the World Economic Forum's Technology Pioneer award, and the Indian Chamber of Commerce's Lifetime Achievement Award —.

Starlink turned SpaceX from a launch provider into an infrastructure operator. Development of the low-Earth-orbit satellite constellation began in 2015, with prototype launches in 2018 and the first large batch of sixty satellites deployed in May 2019; within years the constellation grew past 7,600 operational satellites, some 65 percent of all operational Earth satellites. SpaceX estimated the total design, build, and deployment cost of the decade-long project at roughly $10 billion. The network acquired geopolitical weight during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, when Musk provided free Starlink service to keep Ukraine connected, at a yearly cost to SpaceX of about $400 million. Controversy followed the deployment: he refused to block Russian state media on the system, and in 2023 he denied Ukraine's request to activate coverage over Crimea to support an attack on the Russian navy, citing fear of a nuclear response.

Two years after Schultz's departure, the original Starbucks management team decided to concentrate on Peet's Coffee and Tea, the Bay Area roaster Baldwin had acquired, and sold the Starbucks retail unit to Schultz and Il Giornale for 3.8 million dollars. The 1987 purchase gave Schultz the name, the roasting operation, and six Seattle stores, which he folded into his espresso-bar company and rebranded under the Starbucks name. Expansion followed quickly across the United States, and the strategy drew a mixed reception: relations with independent coffeehouse chains were strained, while some owners credited Starbucks with educating American customers about coffee. The deal resolved the 1984 argument over the company's identity in Schultz's favor, converting a bean retailer into a beverage-led café chain. It remains one of the defining acquisitions of modern consumer retail, executed at a price that now looks vanishingly small against the global enterprise it ultimately produced.

Kailash Nadh, the CTO with a PhD in artificial intelligence and computational linguistics, is credited as the brain behind Zerodha's technology and is treated internally as a co-founder despite joining in 2013 — an illustration of how the Kamaths blended early technical leadership into the founder story rather than hiring a vendor-led stack.

In March 2009, Starbucks introduced VIA Ready Brew, a line of instant coffee packets first unveiled in New York with testing in Seattle, Chicago, and London. The initial flavors, Italian Roast and Colombia, rolled out across the United States and Canada that October, supported by an in-store blind taste challenge in which many customers could not distinguish the instant product from freshly brewed coffee. The launch was a deliberate provocation inside a company that had built its identity on bean-to-cup craft, and financial analysts speculated that selling instant coffee under the same brand would devalue whatever premium positioning Starbucks had left. Schultz framed the product as extending the brand into occasions the stores could not reach, from travel to office pantries. The bet that a mass format could coexist with the café business tested the elasticity of the brand at the exact moment the turnaround was rebuilding its premium credentials, and VIA survived as a permanent presence on the shelf.

In 1996 Pure Software announced a merger with Atria Software, integrating Pure's programs for detecting bugs in software with Atria's tools for managing the development of complex software. The Wall Street Journal reported problems integrating the two companies' sales forces after both head salesmen left following the merger. In 1997 the combined company, Pure Atria, was acquired by Rational Software, a deal that triggered a forty-two percent drop in both companies' stocks after it was announced. Hastings was appointed chief technical officer of the combined company and left soon after the acquisition. He later priced the sale at around 750 million dollars and treated it as a missed opportunity rather than a triumph, diagnosing a decline in talent density as the root cause: as top people left, the company needed more rules to guard against mistakes, which drove out even more high-caliber people. That diagnosis, that process is a tax on weak talent, became the intellectual foundation of Netflix's culture.

Zomato's parent reported a net profit of 253 crore rupees in the relevant reporting period alongside Blinkit's revenue surge — a moment that crystallised the dual-engine thesis of food delivery plus quick commerce. The combined numbers made Eternal a case study in disciplined post-IPO scaling of an Indian consumer-internet conglomerate.

Nadar started his career inside the elite DCM management trainee system where he met the people with whom he later founded HCL in a Delhi barsati 'akin to a garage startup' — a deliberate echo of Silicon Valley origin myths adapted to a 1970s Delhi context.

To replace Oswald, Disney and Iwerks developed Mickey Mouse, possibly inspired by a tame mouse Disney had kept at his desk in the Laugh-O-Gram studio, although the character's origins remain unclear. Disney's original choice, Mortimer Mouse, was rejected by his wife Lillian as too pompous in favor of Mickey. Iwerks revised Disney's provisional sketches to make the character easier to animate, and Disney, increasingly removed from the drawing board, provided Mickey's voice until 1947; one employee later described the division of labor as Iwerks designing the body while Walt supplied the soul. Mickey first appeared in a May 1928 test screening of Plane Crazy, but it and The Gallopin' Gaucho failed to find a distributor. After seeing The Jazz Singer, Disney bet on synchronized sound for the third short, Steamboat Willie, creating the first post-produced sound cartoon and launching the character who became the company's icon.

Zomato's July 2021 IPO raised about 9,375 crore rupees, then among the largest Indian technology listings. The offer drew outsized retail and institutional interest and validated the loss-making-platform listing thesis on Indian exchanges, even though the shares would trade well below issue price for an extended stretch after the post-listing pop.

The middle 2010s tested the firm's stability. Over 2014 to 2016 the University of California's Regents pulled 550 million dollars from Bridgewater over concerns about the firm's future leadership. In 2016 Connecticut approved 22 million dollars in grants and loans through a program initiated by Governor Dannel Malloy, in exchange for job training, job creation, building renovations, and retaining the 1,402 jobs the firm supported in the state, along with 30 million dollars in urban tax credits. That year the firm managed about 150 billion dollars. In October 2017 Grant's Interest Rate Observer published The Face on the Wall Street Milk Carton, sharply criticizing Bridgewater over alleged conflicts such as lending money to its auditing firm KPMG and the presence of 91 former employees at custodial bank Bank of New York Mellon. The article became the talk of Wall Street; Bridgewater denied any impropriety, and a week later Jim Grant apologized in print and on CNBC, retracting parts of the story.

On March 29, 2023, Schultz testified before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, where Bernie Sanders pressed him on an administrative law judge's finding that Starbucks had engaged in egregious and widespread misconduct in responding to the Buffalo organizing effort. Judge Michael Rosas had ordered the company to reinstate fired workers and required Schultz either to read employees a notice of their rights or be present at a meeting where the rights were read; Schultz said he would not comply, maintaining the company had not broken the law. Weeks later, on April 26, 2023, labor board prosecutors indicated corporate leadership had failed and refused to bargain with 144 unionized cafés, and the board had accumulated more than eighty claims of anti-union activity, including threats to close stores and terminations tied to organizing. In September 2023, an administrative law judge separately found the company violated labor law by announcing raises only for non-union employees.

For FY2025, Freshworks reported revenue of $838.8 million, up 16% from $720.4 million in 2024, with GAAP net income of approximately $183.7 million against a net loss of about $95.4 million in 2024 — a swing that validates the post-IPO model in which the firm absorbed losses to push through to genuine GAAP profitability.

In September 1972 Jobs enrolled at Reed College in Portland, an expensive school he insisted on although his parents could ill afford it, drawn by its countercultural intensity. After a single semester he dropped out without telling them, unwilling to spend their money on an education that seemed meaningless, but stayed months longer auditing whatever interested him, including Robert Palladino's calligraphy course. In the 2005 Stanford commencement address he described sleeping on friends' dorm-room floors, returning Coke bottles for food money, and walking seven miles across town each Sunday for a free Hare Krishna meal. The audited calligraphy course resurfaced a decade later, when the Macintosh shipped with multiple typefaces and proportionally spaced fonts that no rival machine offered, a connection Jobs treated as the clearest proof that dots can only be connected looking backward. The dropped-out-but-still-around posture became permanent parts of his founding mythology.

The handover of Bridgewater stretched over nearly a decade and ended in complete separation. Dalio served as co-chief executive for ten months before a March 2017 announcement that a company-wide shakeup would take him out of the co-CEO seat by April 15. His voting rights passed to Bridgewater's board in September 2022, when he also relinquished the co-chief investment officer post, completing his operational exit. He sold his last shares in Bridgewater and left its board in 2025, ending a run of nearly five decades. He then began managing his personal investments directly through the Dalio Family Office, serving as its de facto chief investment officer, recruiting former Bridgewater research leader Steven Kryger as co-chief investment officer for global macro strategy and former JPMorgan Chase executive Alma DeMetropolis as deputy chief executive officer. In early 2026 the family office disclosed its first United States stock portfolio since the pandemic through a regulatory filing, roughly 503 million dollars with more than three-quarters allocated to gold-based exchange-traded funds.

The business model Majety built has multiple complementary streams: commission from restaurant partners, delivery and platform fees, the Swiggy One subscription for repeat usage, and quick-commerce via Instamart — a layered approach that hedges against dependence on any one revenue line.

SEBI fined Reliance Industries Rs 950 crore for manipulation of Reliance Petroleum Limited shares in 2007, with the regulator concluding RIL had used connected trades to profit from short-selling of its own subsidiary's stock. The matter became a recurring reference point in critiques of the group's governance and trading-discipline record.

Honasa became India's first unicorn of 2022 in January that year, raising $52 million led by Sequoia at a $1.2 billion valuation — a milestone the company frames as validation of rapid growth and category leadership, even though the same valuation benchmark would later become politically charged during the IPO debate.

In May 2020 Adani Green won the world's largest solar bid — an $6 billion, 8,000 MW photovoltaic plant from Solar Energy Corporation of India — with Adani Solar adding 2,000 MW of cell and module manufacturing. The pivot from thermal to renewables was sudden and headline-grabbing, positioning Adani as a green-energy champion alongside his coal assets.

With a year left on the Newport lease but the store effectively sold, Walton, his wife Helen, and her father negotiated a purchase on the downtown square of Bentonville, Arkansas — a small store plus title to the building, conditioned on a ninety-nine-year lease to expand into the shop next door. That next-door owner refused six separate times, and Walton had nearly abandoned Bentonville when Robson — acting without Sam's knowledge — made one final visit and paid twenty thousand dollars to lock in the expansion lease. The family opened for business with a one-day remodeling sale on May 9, 1950. The store Walton bought had been doing seventy-two thousand dollars in annual sales; it reached one hundred five thousand dollars in the first year, then one hundred forty thousand, then one hundred seventy-five thousand — the seedbed of everything Walmart became.

The acquisition's aftermath reshaped both the platform and its competitive field. The seven banks that funded the $13 billion of debt could not sell it down, expecting to mark it down by at least 15 percent while holding it on their books. Advertisers pulled back amid moderation concerns, and Meta launched Threads in July 2023 as a direct rival built in months, prompting a threatened infringement suit. The economics later turned: the platform's outlook improved by 2025 with a shift toward subscriptions and artificial intelligence, banks sold the last of the debt at roughly 98 cents on the dollar in a refinancing Bloomberg described as a remarkable turnaround, and in March 2025 Musk announced xAI would acquire X in an all-stock transaction valuing the combined enterprise at $45 billion. Court filings in August 2024 revealed nearly 100 stakeholders in the takeover, including Bill Ackman, Jack Dorsey, Binance with $500 million, and the venture firms that had backed him throughout.

In Microsoft's first five years Gates personally reviewed, and often rewrote, every line of code the company produced, before growing into a manager and then an executive role. He was never officially on a development team after his work on the TRS-80 Model 100, yet he wrote code that shipped in company products as late as 1989, keeping a programmer's authority inside a fast-scaling organization, an era of the company's history later captured in the Microsoft Press interview collection Programmers at Work. When Microsoft Excel was announced in 1985, the technology columnist Jerry Pournelle observed that Gates liked the program not primarily for the money it would make but because it was, in his judgment, a neat hack. The same intensity drew criticism in the late 1990s, when his business tactics were widely considered anti-competitive, an opinion subsequently upheld in multiple court rulings that reshaped how the company could behave toward partners and rivals.

Ghazal's argument is not that founders should eliminate ego entirely — rather that they need to recognise when ego is influencing their decisions for the wrong reasons. Her view reframes 'ego' from a binary vice to a signal that needs interpretation, an unusual nuance in the founder-discourse landscape.

Vedanta's biography emphasizes Agarwal's role mentoring young entrepreneurs and engaging with students globally — at University of Toronto, Oxford Union, LSE, Hindustan Times Leadership Summit and WEF. The framing positions him less as a remote mining magnate and more as a public-facing executive consciously building a thought-leadership brand alongside the operating businesses.

On August 20, 2026, the Shenzhen Intermediate People's Court sentenced Xu to life imprisonment, revoked his political rights for life, and ordered confiscation of all his personal property; the court and Evergrande's real estate arm were separately fined a combined 15.82 billion yuan (approximately US$2.4 billion). The court stated that between 2016 and 2021, Evergrande and Xu engaged in 'continuous, large-scale financial fraud' to inflate assets and conceal liabilities, and that parties involved 'gained control of financial institutions' through bribery, without naming the institutions.

Gates committed Microsoft to the graphical interface years before it paid off. Computerworld noted in 1987 that he had pushed Windows almost fanatically for years while much of industry treated it as a joke, and a Microsoft manager later recalled that betting the company on it was an enormous wager. Windows 3.0, launched May 22, 1990, sold more than 100,000 copies in two weeks and pulled resources away from OS/2, the operating system Microsoft had been co-developing with IBM since an August 1986 agreement; in a May 16, 1991 internal memo, Gates declared the OS/2 partnership over and redirected the company to Windows and the Windows NT kernel, a switch developers who had backed OS/2 called the head-fake. By 1993 Windows was the world's most widely used graphical operating system, vindicating a decade of insistence. Windows 3.1 followed in March 1992 and sold more than three million copies in its first two months on the market.

In October 2001 Apple introduced the iPod, its first portable digital music player, launching as a five-gigabyte device capable of storing around a thousand songs. The financial effect was enormous. In the quarter ending March 26, 2005, Apple earned $290 million on sales of $3.24 billion, against $46 million on $1.91 billion in the same quarter a year earlier, and Jobs told developers in June 2005 that Apple's share of the entire portable music device market stood at 76 percent. The player used a 1.8-inch hard drive where rivals used 2.5-inch units, enabling the small size that defined it, and it sold for $399 with more than 100,000 units gone before the end of 2001. The iPod converted Apple from a computer maker into a consumer-electronics company, set up the iTunes Store, trained the market for the iPhone, and funded the research that followed.

Ghazal was one of the original Sharks on Shark Tank India Season 1. She has spoken about the format demands — pitches that ran 45 minutes to an hour and 15 minutes, requiring instant decisions, which she described as both exciting and fun. The show turned her into a public face of Indian consumer entrepreneurship beyond Mamaearth's customer base.

The founding partnership fractured early. In 2005, Eduardo Saverin, the co-founder who had funded initial costs and handled business operations from the East Coast, sued Zuckerberg and Facebook, alleging that Zuckerberg had spent Saverin's money on personal expenses, as his stake and role were diluted around the Palo Alto team. The case settled out of court with sealed terms, and the resolution affirmed Saverin's title as co-founder in exchange for his silence toward the press. The rupture, later dramatized in the 2010 film The Social Network, whose accuracy the participants disputed, established a pattern in which Zuckerberg consolidated operational control around the people physically building the product. Sean Parker, the Napster co-founder who became company president in 2004, and Thiel, whose angel round bridged the company to its first venture financing, anchored the early capital structure while classmates drifted out of day-to-day roles.

The 1991 liberalization dismantled the protective walls around Indian industry almost overnight, allowing global two-wheeler giants with deep pockets and contemporary designs to enter the market. By 2001 Bajaj Auto was widely written off by analysts as a scooter relic unable to survive the shift to motorcycles — a near-death moment for the company the Chetak had built.

The SolarCity acquisition remains the most litigated strategic decision of Musk's Tesla tenure. Tesla announced the all-stock $2.6 billion purchase in 2016, folding SolarCity into its battery-storage division as Tesla Energy; the deal was controversial because SolarCity faced liquidity problems Tesla shareholders had not been informed about, and the announcement itself knocked more than 10 percent off Tesla's stock. Multiple shareholder groups sued, arguing the purchase existed to bail out a Musk-affiliated company at their expense. Musk's defense was the mission: as part of the original Tesla master plan, the company meant to accelerate the move from a mine-and-burn hydrocarbon economy toward a solar-electric one by pairing generation with storage. More than 85 percent of unaffiliated shareholders approved the deal in November 2016; Tesla's directors settled the litigation in January 2020, and in 2022 the Delaware court ruled in Musk's favor as the sole remaining defendant.

As of the reported figures, Haidilao's non-hot pot revenue had grown sharply (227% year-over-year to 597 million yuan) even as total revenue and net profit both declined and store count contracted slightly, indicating the diversification strategy was underway but overall turnaround results were not yet resolved as of the report.

Pershing Square Holdings, Ltd. 4 INVESTMENT MANAGER The Board has delegated the task of managing PSH’s assets to the Investment Manager as set out in the Investment Management Agreement (“IMA”) entered into at the inception of PSH and subsequently amended. Although the Board does not make individual investment decisions, it is accountable for oversight of the Investment Manager. The Investment Manager is a fundamental value investor that utilises a range of engagement strategies to unlock long- term value for shareholders and, among other things, seeks to invest in excellent businesses, which it believes have limited downside. These businesses tend to be large cap companies domiciled in North America that generate relatively predictable and growing free cash flows, with formidable barriers to entry and a compelling value proposition. The Investment Manager continues to engage constructively with many of PSH’s portfolio companies through direct board representation in some situations, and less formal, private engagement in others. PORTFOLIO CHANGES The Board was pleased to see continued robust idea generation from the Investment Manager throughout the year. As discussed in my August letter, the Investment Manager exited its investment in Canadian Pacific in April, and it initiated a position in Amazon – a business that the Investment Manager had followed for some time.

In May 2001 Apple announced its own retail stores, designed for two purposes: to stem its declining share of the computer market and to answer the poor presentation of Apple products at third-party outlets. On January 9, 2007, the company shortened its name from Apple Computer to Apple Inc., Jobs telling the Macworld Expo audience that with the iPod, Apple TV, and the Mac, Apple was no longer just a computer company; the same keynote revealed the iPhone, combining a widescreen iPod, visual voicemail, and an internet communicator running a full browser. The iPhone went on sale June 29, 2007. The iPad was announced January 27, 2010, reaching stores that April, and rather than cannibalizing Mac sales produced a halo effect that lifted iMac and MacBook demand. On May 26, 2010, Apple's stock market value overtook Microsoft's; that quarter its revenues passed Microsoft's too, the first such reversal in two decades.

In June 2006 Gates announced he would transition out of his day-to-day Microsoft role to concentrate on philanthropy, splitting his responsibilities between Ray Ozzie, who took over management, and Craig Mundie, who took long-term product strategy; the two-year handover was completed on June 27, 2008. He stepped down as chairman in February 2014, handing the board chair to John W. Thompson and becoming a technology adviser to the newly appointed chief executive Satya Nadella, a position he has retained. In March 2020 Microsoft announced Gates would leave his board seats at both Microsoft and Berkshire Hathaway to devote himself to climate change, global health and development, and education. The Wall Street Journal later reported that his departure came before the board concluded an external law firm's probe, begun in late 2019, into an alleged inappropriate relationship with a Microsoft employee, leaving his four-decade operating role at the company fully behind.

Venu Madhav, the COO, anchors operations and regulatory compliance with over a dozen financial-market certifications, while Seema Patil — Nithin's spouse — moved from leading the quality team to a director role, indicating how the firm has kept an unusually small, promoter-trusted executive core through its growth phase.

The Internet initially caught Microsoft flat-footed, and Gates's response became a corporate legend. Windows 95 shipped on August 24, 1995 without a web browser, and the web's rise surprised the company, which then licensed Spyglass technology to build Internet Explorer rather than give it away for nothing. On May 26, 1995, Gates sent executives the Internet Tidal Wave memorandum, describing Netscape as a new competitor born on the Internet, admitting Microsoft had failed to grasp the Internet's importance, and assigning it the company's highest level of importance from then on. More than a million copies of Windows 95 sold in the first four days, and Microsoft launched MSN the same summer as a direct challenge to AOL. In 1998 Gates appointed Ballmer president while remaining chairman and chief executive himself, dividing leadership at the exact moment the antitrust trial began.

Netflix had long closely analyzed its customers' preferences, and Watch Now gave the company real-time data on behavior, such as which scenes customers replayed or skipped and when they stopped watching. In March 2011 it made a straight-to-series order from Media Rights Capital for the Spacey-led political drama House of Cards, outbidding the American cable networks; executives said customers' love of films by Spacey and the show's director David Fincher had driven the acquisition. The binge-watching tendency of its customers caused Netflix to release all thirteen episodes of the first season at the same time, a complete departure from broadcast scheduling. In November 2011 it added two more significant productions: Orange Is the New Black, based on Piper Kerman's memoir, and a fresh season of Arrested Development, the Fox sitcom that had been canceled. House of Cards was released on February 1, 2013, marketed as the first Netflix Original production, and the company said its originals drew audiences comparable to successful shows on cable and broadcast television.

The profile highlights a deliberate staged-city expansion model — focusing on one city at a time, especially for quick commerce, and expanding only where Swiggy's existing user base had already shown demand — drawing a parallel with DMart's focused area-by-area growth, a rare point of similarity between Indian consumer-tech and offline retail.

A January 2026 disclosure noted that Eternal's Q1 PAT had jumped on the back of Blinkit's improving operating performance — a clean inversion of the early-2020s narrative that quick commerce would structurally burn cash. The result validated Goyal's patience in funding Blinkit through three loss-making years before the unit inflected.

Nadar attributes his commercial success to the education and scholarships he received in his early years, and founded the Shiv Nadar Foundation in 1994 explicitly to widen that access — explicitly treating education as the highest-leverage form of capital allocation, not merely a charitable side-venture.

The 2022 Blinkit acquisition — an all-stock deal worth roughly 568 million dollars — wedged Zomato into quick commerce, the 10–15-minute grocery category that Albinder Dhindsa's startup was pioneering. Goyal's defence of the deal rested on the thesis that convenience, once tasted, becomes addictive; Blinkit would later become Eternal's largest business by order value.

The corporate biography concludes by describing Agarwal as the 'guiding force' behind Project Nand Ghar, positioning his philanthropic work as a direct extension of operating leadership rather than a separate retirement-era activity. This collapse of business and philanthropy into a single legacy narrative is the official brand strategy for the founder.

Back home in 1974, Jobs took a technician job at Atari in Los Gatos, where co-founder Nolan Bushnell judged him difficult but valuable, often the smartest person in the room and eager to let people know it. Mid-year he left for seven months in India seeking guru Neem Karoli Baba, whose ashram he found nearly deserted because the teacher had died, and returned with a shaved head, Indian clothes, and a commitment to Zen Buddhism under Kobun Chino Otogawa, including long retreats at the Tassajara mountain monastery. At Atari in 1975 Bushnell assigned him the Breakout circuit-board job, offering a bounty for every chip eliminated; Wozniak, sketching by day at HP, cut the design to forty-five chips inside four days. Jobs reported a $750 payout and split it with Wozniak, who learned only a decade later the actual bonus had been $5,000, an early glimpse of the transactional edge beneath the idealism.

September 2020 brought a 74% acquisition of Mumbai International Airport, India's second-busiest. In May 2022 the Adani family bought Ambuja Cements and ACC from Holcim for $10.5 billion via an overseas special-purpose entity, extending the infrastructure empire into building materials — a vertical that uses ports, power and logistics in concert.

Running a store in Bentonville while the Newport lease ran out 220 miles away forced Walton to learn delegation early, a discipline he considered the prerequisite for everything that followed. With the postwar baby boom swelling small-town trade, he and his brother James Bud Walton, a wartime Navy pilot, scouted aggressively for new Ben Franklin locations, opening a shopping-center store in Ruskin Heights, a Kansas City suburb, in 1954, and many franchises beyond it. Walton bought a small second-hand airplane so store-hunting trips could cover more ground; he and his son John became accomplished pilots who logged thousands of hours scouting locations for the family business. He encouraged store managers to invest, often as much as a thousand dollars, taking equity in their own store or the next outlet, tying managerial motivation to ownership. By 1962 the brothers held sixteen stores across Arkansas, Missouri, and Kansas — fifteen Ben Franklin franchises and one independent store, in Fayetteville.

Critics and several journalists have accused Ambani of close ties with political leadership, particularly with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, with commentaries referencing allegations of cronyism and disproportionate benefits flowing to Reliance under successive governments. Ambani has consistently denied improper relationships, and no court has adjudicated the central allegations, but the perception has shaped coverage of the group's policy wins in telecom, retail and energy.

[16:03] SETH KLARMAN: So I think Malcolm Gladwell would look and say 1982 was an interesting time to start an investment firm — that was certainly a wind at your back in terms of being successful. But, and you know this, how it works in the markets is you had no idea you were at the beginning of a long bull market. What you felt was the market hadn’t done that well for a long period of time and people were very skeptical about it. And this is probably a valuable insight: you could always point to things at any moment that don’t add up, that seem overvalued, that seem risky, and yet we get through most of those things. So at the time it didn’t feel like a gimme, it didn’t feel like a layup hand. But what ended up happening was, we tried to make money apart from the market. We weren’t buying an index — indexes weren’t big then anyway. We were buying idiosyncratic situations, looking for bottom-up mispricing, and that led to a building record. So while it looks just okay compared to the market over that period of time, I think we would have done okay whether the market had been up, down, or sideways. [17:13] BARRY RITHOLTZ: Really interesting. So given you were coming off of what was an epic bear market and just a whole lot of cross-currents — stagflation, super high rates under Volcker, you’re not that far away in ’82 from the end of Vietnam, Watergate, all that malaise — how did that environment affect you as a professional investor?

Rather than defend the legacy scooter business, Bajaj invested heavily in research and built a greenfield R&D facility from scratch, telling his engineers to design for global leadership instead of copying Japanese or Italian platforms. The output was the Bajaj Pulsar in the early 2000s — a motorcycle that effectively rebranded the company from a scooter maker to a performance-bike specialist and reclaimed share from Hero Honda and TVS.

In 1988 Walton stepped down as chief executive, handing the role to David Glass while remaining chairman of the board, and the first Walmart Supercenter opened that year in Washington, Missouri. The succession coincided with the culmination of the growth arc: by 1988 Walmart led all American retailers in profitability, though Kmart and Sears still outsold it in total value until late 1990 or early 1991, and by 1990 it stood as the largest American retailer by revenue. Through the same years the supply base was quietly going global — by 1984 Walton had begun sourcing between six and forty percent of his company's products from China — planting the tension between everyday low prices and domestic manufacturing that dominated his final public campaign on behalf of American-made goods. The same year brought a restructuring of senior management that elevated a cadre of executives to positions of greater responsibility.

By 2026, the product suite had expanded into IT service management with the ITAM product line, and FireHydrant, an AI-powered incident-management platform, was acquired in a deal that closed in January 2026 — pointing to an AI-led M&A agenda layered on top of the original SaaS portfolio.

When the California gold rush began in 1849, Vanderbilt abandoned regional steamboating for ocean-going steamships. Most migrants, and nearly all the returning gold, moved by steamship to Panama, crossed the isthmus by mule train and canoe, and sailed on; a Panama Railroad soon speeded the crossing. Vanderbilt judged Nicaragua superior, closer to the United States and nearly spanned by Lake Nicaragua and the San Juan River, and proposed a canal across it. He could not attract enough investment to dig, so he settled for the next best thing: a steamship line to Nicaragua plus the Accessory Transit Company, which carried passengers across the country by steamboat on the lake and river, linked to the Pacific port of San Juan del Sur by a twelve-mile carriage road from Virgin Bay. The route cut both miles and days from the journey, and the Commodore had built the fastest artery of the gold rush economy.

The crewed milestone closed a nine-year gap in American spaceflight. In May 2020 SpaceX launched NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken into orbit on the Crew Dragon Demo-2 mission, the first flight in which a private company carried astronauts to the International Space Station and the first crewed orbital launch to depart American soil since the Space Shuttle's 2011 retirement. The flight vindicated NASA's commercial-crew gamble: fixed-price contracts awarded to SpaceX in 2014 had been intended to produce service by 2017, and the delay had forced NASA to keep purchasing Soyuz seats from Russia. The first operational mission, Crew-1, launched that November. The company had already flown the Falcon Heavy debut in 2018, its inaugural mission carrying Musk's personal Tesla Roadster as a dummy payload, and in 2024 NASA awarded SpaceX an $843 million contract to build the spacecraft that will eventually deorbit the space station.

The piece highlights the post-founder risk: Freshworks must now prove that a professional, non-promoter-led management can keep the product simplicity that drove early growth while making the AI and enterprise investments required for the next leg — a transition risk that defines the company's current chapter.

Birla's forward roadmap focused on 'dogged focus on daily operations, service and network expansion' as the foundation for revival. The emphasis on operational grind over strategic repositioning signaled that the founder viewed Vi's next chapter as execution rather than further corporate restructuring — a quieter phase after nearly a decade of existential deal-making.

In November, the Investment Manager opportunistically deployed capital into Meta following a decline in the share price amid concerns around AI-related spending. Also in November, the Investment Manager announced that it had exited its investments in Chipotle and Nike, and in February 2026, it exited its investment in Hilton. Further information on the PSH portfolio can be found in the Investment Manager’s Report. CORPORATE ACTIONS The Board has undertaken a number of corporate actions over the past year. • PSH continues to believe that its ability to access low-cost, long-term, investment grade debt is a competitive advantage. We seek to maintain leverage generally between 15% and 20% of total assets, utilising investment- grade debt financing without mark-to-market or other margin-like covenants. PSH’s long-term debt management strategy is to manage leverage over time by growing NAV through strong performance and by laddering maturities through new debt issuances. In April, PSH completed a €650 million senior notes issuance due 2030, at a rate of 4.25%. In October, PSH completed a $500 million senior notes issuance due 2032, at a rate of 5.50%. PSH’s current debt profile is comprised of a structured set of maturities matching its long-term investment horizon, with a weighted average maturity of six years and a weighted average cost of capital of 3.6% as of December 31, 2025.

In August 2021 Birla stepped down as non-executive chairman of Vodafone Idea, a personal-capitulation signal in the face of AGR dues and brutal competition. The exit underscored the limits of the 2018 merger thesis: scale had not produced sustainable economics against Jio, and the promoter was unwilling to keep writing cheques without policy relief.

Zuckerberg's philanthropy began in 2010 with a hundred-million-dollar gift to Newark's public schools, announced weeks before The Social Network premiered, a timing he conceded he had worried about; he had considered donating anonymously to keep the gift separate from the film's unflattering portrait, and only relented after Mayor Cory Booker and Governor Chris Christie argued the city needed the signal. Journalist Dale Russakoff later judged much of the money wasted, a lesson in how outside capital struggles against local school politics. That same year Zuckerberg signed the Giving Pledge alongside Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, committing to donate at least half his wealth. In December 2015, on the birth of his first daughter, he and Priscilla Chan pledged ninety-nine percent of their Facebook shares, then valued around forty-five billion dollars, to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, structured not as a foundation but as a limited liability company.

The Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphony series succeeded, but Disney and Roy concluded that Pat Powers, whose Cinephone system had recorded their early sound cartoons, was withholding their rightful share of the profits. Disney asked Powers for higher payments in 1930 while urging Iwerks to speed production by drawing only key poses and letting assistants supply the inbetween drawings. Powers refused and instead signed Iwerks away to run cartoons under his own banner; the composer Carl Stalling resigned soon after, and Disney suffered a nervous breakdown in October 1931, which he blamed on overwork and Powers's business tactics. He and Lillian recuperated on an extended trip through Cuba and Panama. The loss of his closest collaborator and his chief distributor pushed the studio toward Columbia Pictures for distribution and left Disney permanently wary of intermediaries who stood between his studio and its audience.

Beyond Mamaearth, Ghazal has built an active angel-investor portfolio spanning consumer and D2C plays (P-TAL, FS Life, Bliss Club, UnderNeat), technology (unScript AI, Crib), health (Uvi Health) and agriculture (Humpy Farms). The March 2025 investment in UnderNeat — a shapewear brand launched by Kusha Kapila — reportedly involved a seed round of ₹8–10 crore alongside Fireside Ventures.

In October 2017 Volcan Holdings Plc, Agarwal's personal vehicle, took a 19% stake in Anglo American, making him the mining major's largest shareholder — a quiet move that surprised the market and signaled Agarwal's ambition to engage with global mining incumbents rather than just compete with them.

Varun led Honasa through its initial public offering in November 2023, with the IPO oversubscribed 7.61 times. The offer opened on 31 October 2023 and closed on 2 November 2023, with shares listing on BSE and NSE on 7 November 2023 at a market capitalisation of roughly ₹10,425 crore, making Honasa at the time the youngest Indian unicorn to list publicly.

The interview reflects her broader theme that strong leadership requires knowing when to stand firmly behind an idea and when to step back and reconsider it. Changing direction, in her framing, is not weakness — sometimes it means the business matters more than the person making the decision.

In 1997 Hastings and former Pure Software employee Marc Randolph co-founded Netflix, offering flat-rate movie rental by mail and combining two emerging technologies: DVDs, which were far easier to send through the post than VHS cassettes, and a website for ordering rather than a paper catalogue. The company headquartered itself in Los Gatos, California. Hastings attached to the founding a now-famous anecdote: he owed a video store forty dollars after misplacing a six-weeks-late Apollo 13 cassette, dreaded telling his wife, and, on the way to the gym, realized that a monthly fee letting members work out as little or as much as they wanted was the better business model for rentals. Randolph later said Hastings had invented the anecdote to explain the subscription model, and Blockbuster, unable to find the transaction in its records, demanded that Hastings stop telling the story. The disputed founding myth nonetheless captured the real insight: eliminate the late fee, and the rental business changes.

Musk's political evolution tracks his geographic and commercial migration. A registered independent while living in California, he donated to both parties and supported Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, Hillary Clinton in 2016, and Joe Biden in 2020, while endorsing Andrew Yang in the 2020 Democratic primaries. The break was incremental and public: he objected when Tesla was excluded from a 2021 White House electric-vehicle event that featured General Motors, criticized the administration that September, and opposed the Build Back Better Act that December. Since 2022 his contributions have mostly supported Republicans, with his first Republican vote going to Mayra Flores in a Texas special election and more than $50 million given to a conservative political action committee. In 2023 he backed Ron DeSantis for the presidency and hosted the campaign announcement on a Twitter Spaces event, extending the format to candidates of both parties.

Dalio describes Bridgewater as a global macro house, positioning around economic trends like exchange-rate moves, inflation, and GDP growth, with a strategy concentrated in currency and fixed income markets. He popularized the risk parity approach, which he uses for risk management and diversification inside Bridgewater, balancing a portfolio's risk across economic environments rather than simply spreading capital across asset classes. In February 2009, as the subprime collapse unfolded, he began using the term d-process to describe the deleveraging, deflationary dynamic then gripping the economy, arguing it was a phenomenon distinct from an ordinary recession, and the vocabulary entered his investment philosophy. The through-line of his method is the conviction that the economy behaves like a machine of cause-effect relationships that repeat, so studying many historical cases yields principles for navigating whatever comes next. That machine view sits behind the firm's prediction of the 2008 financial crisis, when the unfolding deleveraging matched patterns Bridgewater had already studied across decades of prior cases.

Starbucks built its digital franchise in deliberate steps. In May 2008 it introduced a loyalty program for registered Starbucks Card users offering perks including free wireless internet, no charge for soy milk and flavored syrups, and free refills on brewed coffee, iced coffee, and tea. In 2009 it began beta testing a mobile app for the card, a stored-value system through which customers spent prepaid funds, and it released the complete mobile platform in January 2011. Adoption compounded quickly: by December 2011 mobile transactions exceeded twenty-six million, and by July 2013 more than ten percent of in-store purchases were made on customers' mobile devices. The decision to tie payments to a closed-loop card before near-field payment standards matured gave the company a behavioral dataset and prepaid float that most retailers lacked. What began as a gift card became the spine of the order-ahead and rewards ecosystem that now drives a large share of United States transactions.

Schultz did not believe in franchising, and he made a point of having Starbucks retain ownership of every domestic outlet, keeping store economics, operating standards, and culture inside the company rather than licensing them to third-party operators. That choice shaped the brand's consistency during national expansion and distinguished it from most fast-food growth models, even as it concentrated capital demands on the balance sheet. His positioning of Starbucks as a social hub between home and work is widely seen as introducing the second wave of coffee culture in the United States, with Seattle as its capital. The pace of store growth under his leadership led observers to describe him as the Ray Kroc of his generation, a founder-executive whose name became inseparable from a category he did not invent but industrialized. The refusal to franchise remains a structural legacy of his tenure, tested repeatedly but never reversed at scale in the domestic market.

The late 2010s brought structural change and volatile results. In June 2018 Bridgewater told clients and employees it would change its corporate structure and become a partnership, by which time OMERS, the Singaporean sovereign fund GIC, and the International Monetary Fund had all taken stakes in the firm. The 2020 pandemic year brought heavy losses, 12.1 billion dollars for the year, with Pure Alpha II down 18.6 percent as of August, while the firm bet against European companies during the market turmoil. December 2021 brought a 7.8 percent annual return, its best since 2018, after eleven months of losses, though Bridgewater trailed the S&P 500 from July 2012 through August 2021. Nir Bar Dea, a retired major in the Israel Defense Forces, and Mark Bertolini were announced as co-chief executives in January 2022 after David McCormick resigned. Pure Alpha II returned 32 percent in the bear market of early 2022, and the firm finished the year with 126.4 billion dollars under management.

The Bar Dea era refocused the firm. Nir Bar Dea became sole chief executive in March 2023 and introduced a strategy centered on profitability: limiting the flagship funds, shifting more resources and staff into artificial intelligence operations, and expanding into Asia and equity markets. That same year the firm created AIA Labs, an internal team combining machine learning, large language models, and other AI tools to generate returns. As of April 2024 Bridgewater maintained the top ranking in hedge fund assets with roughly 124 billion dollars, down from about 162 billion in late 2019, and it assigned each of three chief investment officers a defined area: Bob Prince for portfolio resilience, Greg Jensen for the Alpha Engine including Pure Alpha and AIA Labs, and Karen Karniol-Tambour for Asia strategies. Dalio sold his remaining stake in the company and left its board, completing the multiyear succession. In January 2026 Bob Prince was appointed chair of the board, and the firm's research agenda centers on modern mercantilism, heavy concentration of portfolios in U.S. assets, and AI.

In August 2022 an Adani unit declared intent to buy RRPR Holding — owner of 29.18% of NDTV — and made an open offer for another 26%. NDTV's founders said Adani acquired the stake via a third party 'without discussion, consent or notice.' The Economist later described NDTV as previously 'critical of the government but is now supine,' raising editorial-independence concerns given Adani's perceived proximity to Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The story of Vodafone Idea's near-collapse and rescue is, in Birla's telling, a case study in why Indian telecom needed state intervention. Without the AGR freeze and payment moratorium, the merger created in 2018 would have tipped into insolvency — making the 2026 'idea whose time has come' rhetoric less a triumphant return than a survival that depended on regulatory mercy.

Decision — Reported re-buying GameStop post-shutdown. Context: Bloomberg Jan 26, 2026: “back hyping the stock.” Outcome (partial): Open — position size/exit unknown.

Starbucks began drafting corporate social responsibility plans in 1994 and built its coffee sourcing program, C.A.F.E. Practices, in partnership with Conservation International, which helped design and audit it. The system rates suppliers on 249 indicators across economic accountability, social responsibility, and environmental leadership in coffee growing and processing, with farmers earning high overall scores receiving higher prices than lower scorers. Social responsibility indicators have hardened over time into zero-tolerance rules requiring that workers be paid in cash, check, or direct deposit, receive at least the established minimum wage, and work in places free of harassment, abuse, and discrimination, with no employment under fourteen years of age. The company has moved roughly ninety percent of its coffee purchases to preferred C.A.F.E.-certified providers and approaches its stated goal of one hundred percent ethically sourced coffee. Critics, including academics who studied its Chiapas operations, argue the program greenwashes the supply chain more than it transforms it.

Zomato reported its first quarterly profit in 2023, a milestone Goyal attributed to scale efficiencies, advertising monetisation and a tightening of zone-level delivery economics. The break into the green was read across the startup ecosystem as evidence that Indian consumer-internet firms could graduate from cash-burn to operating profit without ceding growth.

Mathrubootham's career arc — Zoho (2001), Freshdesk founding (2010), rename to Freshworks (2017), Nasdaq listing (2021), CEO-to-chairman transition (May 2024), full retirement (December 2025), focus on Together Fund (2026) — is itself a template for the staged founder-exit playbook now recommended to Indian SaaS founders thinking through succession.

Zuckerberg met Priscilla Chan, a fellow student, at a Harvard fraternity party in 2003; they married on May 19, 2012, in the backyard of his Palo Alto home in a ceremony that doubled as her medical school graduation party, one day after Facebook went public. The couple have three daughters, born in 2015, 2017, and 2023, and Chan disclosed through the pregnancies that she had suffered three miscarriages before their first child. In 2022 Zuckerberg took up mixed martial arts and Brazilian jiu-jitsu, winning gold and silver medals at a white-belt tournament in May 2023 and earning his blue belt that July before an ACL tear in training postponed a planned mixed martial arts debut. He assembled a large estate on Kauai beginning in 2014, and after withdrawing quiet-title lawsuits against hundreds of native Hawaiian landholders amid criticism, he added a hundred and ten acres to the property in 2021.

By March 1976 Wozniak had finished the basic design of the Apple I and showed it to Jobs, who proposed they sell it despite Wozniak's initial skepticism. On April 1, 1976, Jobs, Wozniak, and administrative overseer Ronald Wayne founded Apple Computer Company as a partnership in the Crist Drive house, the operation starting in Jobs's bedroom and moving to the garage; Wayne exited within days, leaving the two Steves as the active co-founders. The name came from Jobs's stay at the All One Farm commune in Oregon. To fund the first boards, Wozniak sold his HP scientific calculator and Jobs sold his Volkswagen van. The plan was fifty-dollar bare circuit boards for hobbyists until retailer Paul Terrell ordered fifty fully assembled units at $500 each; roughly 200 Apple I computers were ultimately produced, enough to convert a garage project into a company with revenue and a roadmap.

External recognition has followed: Business World 40 Under 40, Business Today's Most Powerful Women in Business, Forbes Asia's Power Businesswomen 2022, and Entrepreneur India's Women Entrepreneur of the Year 2021. These accolades have compounded Ghazal's positioning as a leading Indian women founder, separate from the brand she co-founded.

When Microsoft went public in 1986, Gates retained 44.9 percent of the company, and the following year Forbes listed him as a billionaire with $1.25 billion, the youngest self-made billionaire in the world at thirty-one. He held the top spot on the Forbes 400 from 1993 through 2007 and again later, and Jeff Bezos finally displaced him as the world's richest person in October 2017, with Gates briefly regaining the position in November 2019 after a surge in Microsoft shares. He has described himself as having paid more tax than any individual, over six billion dollars, gladly, and advocates higher taxes particularly for the wealthy. His fortune also funded an unusual collector's streak, including the Codex Leicester, Leonardo da Vinci's scientific writings, bought at auction in 1994 for $30.8 million, and a Medina estate nicknamed Xanadu 2.0. He has since announced his intention to give away virtually all of his fortune over time and move off the world's-richest lists.

The Foundation reports that as of March 2026 Nadar had invested roughly US$1.83 billion through it, directly impacting around 57,000 students and alumni across six institutions covering the full education spectrum — a number that quantifies the scale of his philanthropic pivot from commercial IT into institution-building.

The international march was methodical and then sudden. In September 2014 it pushed into six new European markets, among them France, Germany, Austria, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Switzerland. In March 2015 it reached Australia and New Zealand; in September 2015 it launched in Japan, its first country in Asia; in October 2015 it added Italy, Portugal, and Spain. Then, in January 2016 at the Consumer Electronics Show, Netflix announced a major expansion into one hundred thirty additional countries, making the service available across the world except in China, Syria, North Korea, Kosovo, and Crimea. As part of that expansion it officially launched across Africa, with a focus on South Africa, Kenya, and Nigeria. The simultaneous global launch inverted the traditional playbook of country-by-country negotiation, betting that a single product, a single brand, and local-language originals could be programmed for the whole planet at once. It was the decision that turned Netflix from an American exporter of content into a global television network, and it set up the local-production engine that later produced hits from Seoul to Madrid.

Musk's personal disclosures have fed the operator mythology around his companies. Hosting Saturday Night Live in 2021, he stated on air that he has Asperger syndrome, a condition not diagnosed in childhood, and later described social cues that were not intuitive, a habit of taking words literally, and the years spent decoding what people actually meant. He became a United States citizen in 2002, lived in California from the early 2000s until late 2020, then relocated to Cameron County, Texas, saying California had grown complacent about its economic success. He has acknowledged doctor-prescribed ketamine for occasional depression. The record also lists recurring back pain with multiple spine surgeries, a severe malaria case contracted on a 2000 South Africa vacation, and a serious video-game habit spanning Quake, Elden Ring, and Polytopia that he credits with a restoring effect on his mental calibration. The disclosures round out the driven, unsleeping operator image his companies' product marketing does little to dispel.

Dalio's public image took a contested turn in November 2023, when New York Times journalist Rob Copeland published an investigative report and, the same month, an unauthorized book, The Fund, his account of the unraveling of a Wall Street icon. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with current and former employees, internal documents, and leaked emails, the book became an instant Times bestseller and argued that the celebrated radical transparency culture had fostered paranoia, surveillance, and backstabbing. The reporting also questioned whether investments flowed from a sophisticated system or from Dalio's personal picks and information derived from his associations with prominent government actors. Dalio rejected the book as fiction created as fact and a sensational, inaccurate tabloid, attributing it to a personal vendetta by a writer whose job application Bridgewater had rejected. Bridgewater separately called the book a false and misleading depiction of its past, and Copeland answered that neither the man nor the firm had offered a substantive factual critique of its claims. Despite threats of a multibillion-dollar lawsuit, no legal action was ultimately filed.

Hastings said that when he founded Netflix he had no idea whether customers would actually use the service, but he was a committed proponent of internet television and saw it as the future. He credited YouTube with his shift in strategy toward developing a video streaming service, reasoning that if audiences would watch lower-definition video online in those volumes, a licensed catalog could scale. Netflix accordingly launched a service in 2007 to stream movies and television shows to computers, and under his leadership the company amassed a collection of one hundred thousand titles and more than one hundred million subscribers. The trajectory vindicated a bet he had held since the DVD era: the red envelope was always a transitional technology, a way to build the customer base, the data, and the content relationships that a streaming business would eventually require. His willingness to run Netflix's most profitable business as a bridge to be crossed, rather than a fortress to be defended, became the defining strategic pattern of his tenure.

Beyond telecom, Ambani steered Reliance into retail (Reliance Retail, India's largest chain), media through Network18, and sports ownership of Mumbai Indians plus founding the Indian Super League football competition. He also joined Bank of America's board as its first non-American director and was elected a foreign associate of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering in 2016 for his work on refineries and petrochemicals.

How did that change how you looked at the world, and what lessons did you take from it? [17:45] SETH KLARMAN: I would tell you, I think every investor needs to be a student of history. It may not repeat exactly, but it certainly rhymes, and it is very valuable to understand — especially financial history for an investor. What were the worst moments? How did we go through a market crash in 1929 to 1933 and a Great Depression that lasted close to a decade? What must that have been like for the people at the time? How would one handle oneself if you were going into a period like that, when we know that even the greatest acclaimed value investor of all time, Benjamin Graham, went broke twice during that era? So it’s incumbent on all investors to be thinking, and maybe holding multiple inconsistent thoughts in their head at the same time: that I found this interesting opportunity today, this bargain-price stock for whatever reason — it’s out of favor, they cut their dividend, it’s a spin-off, it’s a bankrupt security that’s converting into a new equity. These things tend to get mispriced. But you’ve got a backdrop, from time to time. Today we have a backdrop of an expensive market and a bit of euphoric conditions. Is that dangerous? Dangerous. But we’re also at the cusp of maybe a groundbreaking new technology.

With Columbia Pictures distributing, the Mickey Mouse cartoons grew increasingly popular, including internationally, and the studio introduced new characters: Pluto in 1930, Goofy in 1932, and Donald Duck in 1934. Encouraged by a new contract with United Artists, Disney filmed Flowers and Trees in full-color three-strip Technicolor and negotiated a deal giving him sole rights to the three-strip process until August 31, 1935, locking rival studios out of color animation during the critical early years. Flowers and Trees won the inaugural Academy Award for animated short subject, and Disney received an honorary award for creating Mickey. The Three Little Pigs followed in 1933, described by media historian Adrian Danks as the most successful short animation of all time, and the staff approached two hundred by year end. Disney had learned that emotionally gripping stories, not gags, sustained audiences, and he invested in a dedicated story department with storyboard artists detailing every plot.

Friction inside the Accessory Transit Company broke into open war in 1852, when Vanderbilt clashed with Joseph L. White, one of its partners, and forced the firm to buy his ships at an inflated price. Early in 1853 he embarked with his family on a European cruise aboard the North Star, the steamship yacht he had built. In his absence White and Charles Morgan, until then Vanderbilt's ally, plotted against him and withheld money the company owed. It was a serious miscalculation. Returning, Vanderbilt retaliated by organizing a rival steamship line to California and slashing prices until Morgan and White paid him off. The episode displayed his signature pattern in disputes: rather than absorb a loss or litigate endlessly, he would rebuild the competitive weapon that had made his counterpart money, and then rent it back to them at a price of his own choosing.

In 2021 Grasim Industries entered the paints business with a Rs 10,000 crore investment paid over three years, taking on Asian Paints directly. The entry represented a classic Birla play — use group balance-sheet heft to break into an established category rather than build from scratch — and signaled willingness to disrupt incumbents in adjacent materials.

Two of Walton's most imitated cultural inventions remain visible in every American Walmart: the company calls its employees associates, and its stores station designated greeters at the entrances — a practice Walton pioneered and other retailers later copied. Trained to guide shoppers to the merchandise they need and to field questions, greeters convert the doorway itself into a service touchpoint and a loss-prevention post at the same time. The vocabulary matters as much as the practice: associate implied partnership in the profit-sharing and stock-ownership programs Walton considered central to the company, not hourly labor to be minimized. The signature blue vests that identified associates for years were retired in 2007, but the underlying idea — that frontline employees are the customer experience — survived every subsequent corporate overhaul. All stores across the United States and Canada carry the greeter post as a permanent fixture shoppers take for granted.

Starship is the vehicle on which Musk has staked the Mars ambition: a fully reusable, super heavy-lift rocket intended to replace the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy and enable large-scale transit of humans and cargo to the Moon and Mars, with planned capacity above 100 tons. Construction and testing began in 2019, consolidating at the South Texas launch site. The test campaign ran on iteration through failure: the April 2023 first flight test ended in an explosion over the Gulf of Mexico before the stages could separate, an outcome Musk and SpaceX still characterized as a success for its data; the November 2023 second flight ended with both vehicles exploding minutes in; and the March 2024 third flight reached its planned suborbital trajectory before the booster malfunctioned near landing and the ship was lost on re-entry. In October 2024 the fifth flight achieved the first tower catch of the Super Heavy booster, a recovery method no orbital rocket had attempted before.

On June 26, 1992, Starbucks completed its initial public offering and began trading under the ticker SBUX. The deal valued the company around 271 million dollars and raised capital that financed a doubling of the store count, funding the rollout that carried the brand from a regional Pacific Northwest retailer toward a national presence. The offering came amid a series of highly publicized coffee wars, as Starbucks' expansion put it into direct competition with entrenched players and independent cafés in city after city. Going public while the chain remained small gave Schultz the currency to professionalize management, build roasting and distribution infrastructure, and sustain the real estate pace that defined the decade. The IPO is the hinge between the entrepreneurial Starbucks of the Il Giornale era and the scaled consumer company that came to define specialty coffee worldwide, and it made the Bean Stock options granted to employees liquid and meaningful for the first time.

Wikipedia's record shows Freshworks' product diversification path — Freshservice launched 2014, Freshsales CRM in 2016, the corporate rename in 2017, the Device42 deal in 2024 — as a deliberately staged move from a one-product company to a multi-product platform targeting customer experience, employee experience and IT operations as adjacent segments.

By January 2024, Mamaearth had opened its 100th Exclusive Brand Outlet (EBO) at R-City Mall in Mumbai — achieved in under three years since the first store opened in early 2021. Honasa positions this as a key step in its omnichannel evolution, supplementing distribution across 100,000-plus FMCG retail outlets and 18,000-plus pin codes in 700-plus districts.

Karthik Rangappa, who single-handedly wrote Varsity, runs investor education at Zerodha; the decision to publish a large, free educational programme was both a brand move and a structural answer to the information asymmetry that had historically kept Indian retail investors away from markets.

The first true Walmart opened on July 2, 1962, at 719 West Walnut Street in Rogers, Arkansas, as Wal-Mart Discount City, carrying a deliberate determination to market American-made products, including a willingness to find American manufacturers who could supply the entire chain at prices low enough to meet foreign competition. Walton had studied the format obsessively: he acknowledged that the one-stop-shopping format followed the original innovative concept pioneered by the Meijer chain, whose growth had caught his attention. The Rogers store converted his Newport-era price instincts into a working discount format — volume buying, thin margins, name-brand merchandise — and set the template that would replicate across small towns for three decades. It was the fourth store concept of his career, opened when Walton was forty-four and eighteen years into his retail life, and the one that outgrew every predecessor.

In 2022 Vedanta and Foxconn jointly committed roughly $20 billion to build semiconductor and display plants in Gujarat, with Vedanta holding 60%. The deal was positioned as a strategic deep-tech bet for India, though execution and partnership frictions later tested the thesis.

Under Rahul Bajaj's leadership the company's turnover grew from roughly ₹7.2 crore to about ₹12,000 crore, a more than 1,600x expansion across five decades. The growth was driven first by the Chetak's licensed-era dominance and then, after 2001, by the Pulsar-led motorcycle portfolio that recaptured share in the post-liberalization market.

Ghazal's perspective is shaped by Mamaearth's experience with public criticism during the IPO valuation controversy. The ability to distinguish conviction from identity-protection became operationally relevant when critics publicly attacked the founder team's arithmetic — a moment where ego-driven defensiveness would have backfired.

Majety is reported to use premortems — pre-decision exercises that imagine what could go wrong before committing — as a risk-management tool, particularly when expanding into new verticals, navigating the IPO, or scaling Instamart amid competition from Blinkit and Zepto.

The Board believes that this amount of leverage is conservative, particularly given the quality, liquidity and mark- to-mark nature of PSH’s portfolio assets. • As discussed in my August letter, the Investment Manager made an investment of $900 million to acquire newly issued shares of HHH in May 2025. PSH did not purchase additional shares in this particular transaction. Following the acquisition, the Investment Manager and its affiliates, including PSH, collectively own 46.9% of HHH’s outstanding shares. The acquisition positions the Investment Manager to create significant shareholder value at HHH over time, benefiting PSH shareholders.

After stepping down as Eternal CEO, Goyal has begun preparing Temple — a forehead-worn wellness device measuring the body's metabolic state in real time, priced around a thousand dollars and targeted at athletes, founders and executives. The device marks Goyal's first major venture outside the food delivery orbit and a pivot toward deep-tech health hardware.

Gates's public image has swung across eras: from the hard-driving executive once caricatured as a tyrannical technocrat, he was remade in the 2000s into a celebrated techno-philanthropist, magazine-cover material whose opinions on global health and climate carried weight. The 2021 announcement of his divorce from Melinda French Gates brought a harsher turn, as coverage surfaced romantic pursuits of women who worked for him, a long-term extramarital affair, and a friendship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and his handling of pandemic-era controversies deepened the shift. His investment vehicle Cascade Investment made him the largest private owner of farmland in the United States, with roughly 242,000 acres across nineteen states, the single largest shareholder of Canadian National Railway, and a 16 percent holder of AutoNation. He flew commercial coach class on business trips until 1997, the year he finally bought his first private jet.

His brothers — Shekhar, Madhur and Niraj — stood beside him across the group, building what the company memoir describes as a corporate bond grounded in trust, humility and shared values. The sibling partnership allowed the Bajaj Group to extend into electricals, steel (Mukand) and financial services without the public sibling feuds that defined several other Indian family houses of the era.

Musk's artificial-intelligence position has cycled from patron to rival. In December 2015 he co-founded OpenAI as a not-for-profit research company intended to develop artificial general intelligence safely, pledging $1 billion of funding, of which he ultimately donated $50 million, and he left its board in 2018. After OpenAI's ChatGPT transformed the industry, Musk launched xAI in July 2023 to build generative models competing with the incumbents, funding it with investors drawn from his SpaceX and Tesla syndicates and hiring engineers away from Google and OpenAI. The strategy tied the new company to his existing platforms: xAI's Grok assistant was distributed through X Premium subscriptions, and in March 2025 Musk announced that xAI would acquire X itself in an all-stock transaction at a combined enterprise value of $45 billion, a billion more than he had paid for Twitter in 2022, folding the social platform directly into the AI company.

Vedanta's environmental and human-rights record drew sustained criticism. An Indian Supreme Court committee in 2004 cited thousands of tons of arsenic-bearing slag dumped near a Tamil Nadu factory; another in 2005 alleged forced displacement of indigenous families in Odisha for bauxite, with the Church of England selling its shares in protest. In Zambia, Vedanta was sued by 2,000 residents over Kafue River pollution from its copper mine.

Varun's leadership style is described as consumer-centric, data-driven and committed to purpose-led growth — exemplified by initiatives like Aqualogica's 'Water for All' campaign, which reportedly provided clean drinking water to over 10,000 people across ten adopted villages. This purpose framing has been central to Honasa's external positioning, not merely a CSR add-on.

Honasa's post-IPO period was harsh: by November 2024 the share price dropped from approximately ₹541 in September to ₹227, knocking market value down from around ₹15,000 crore to ₹7,300 crore — a ₹7,500 crore wipeout in two months. The company fell below $1 billion in market value and lost unicorn status, directly vindicating the IPO-era valuation critics.

On June 1, 2000, Schultz stepped down as chief executive, moving into the chief global strategist role to drive international expansion, with Orin Smith, his chief financial officer through the 1990s, succeeding him. The transition was framed as an orderly succession rather than a retreat, and Schultz remained chairman. International work had already begun paying off: Schultz had coordinated the first Starbucks store opening in China in January 1999, and spent the following year helping develop a customer base for coffee in a tea-dominated market. Through the late 2000s and early 2010s he directed the company to plan one to two store openings per day in mainland China, a cadence that reflected conviction the market would eventually rank among the company's largest. The 2000 handoff tested whether the culture he built could run without his daily presence, a question the following decade would answer unevenly.

All Weather launched in 1996 with an emphasis on low fees, global inflation-linked bonds, and global fixed-income holdings. It started as Dalio's personal trust and only later took outside clients, with the goal of creating high risk-adjusted returns exceeding the general market's. The fund held more than 46 billion dollars and ranked among the largest U.S. funds in 2011. When Lehman Brothers fell, in April 2009, it shifted into a safe portfolio mode holding nominal and inflation-linked bonds plus gold instead of equities, emerging market debt, and commodities. Its reported composition runs about 40 percent inflation-linked bonds, 30 percent Treasury bills, 20 percent Treasury bonds, and 10 percent gold. The approach then traveled to China: regulators there granted Bridgewater permission in June 2018 to build and market domestic products for qualified Chinese investors, and in October 2018 it launched Bridgewater All Weather China Private Fund Number 1, which had grown to 5.5 billion dollars by January 2024.

Walmart's founding strategic bet ran against the prevailing practice of American discount chains: they located in larger cities, so Walton located in smaller towns. The logic carried two reinforcing advantages. First, existing competition in small markets was limited, so a discounter arrived as the dominant force rather than one combatant among many. Second, when a store grew large enough to command a town's business and its surrounding trade area, rival merchants were discouraged from entering at all — scale itself became the moat before Walmart had scale anywhere else. Being near consumers in that era simply meant opening outlets in the small towns themselves. The strategy converted markets the urban chains treated as unworthy into a protected, compounding base of stores, and it remained the company's growth grammar through its rise to coast-to-coast coverage by the early 1990s, when stores in California and Pennsylvania completed the national map.

Pinocchio and Fantasia both lost money after their 1940 releases, partly because European revenues collapsed when war broke out in 1939, and by the end of February 1941 the studio carried dangerous debts. Disney and Roy answered the crisis by starting the company's first public stock offering in 1940, making Walt Disney Productions publicly held years before most studios, and by implementing heavy salary cuts across the payroll. The cuts, combined with what staff experienced as Disney's high-handed and insensitive manner, precipitated the 1941 animators' strike. The strike and the company's financial state drove several animators to leave and found United Productions of America, and Disney's relationships with much of his staff were permanently strained. The crisis marked the moment the founder's perfectionism collided with the arithmetic of a public company, a tension he never fully resolved across the remaining twenty-five years of his life.

The Economic Times piece positions her view against a backdrop of generic startup-leadership advice that has proliferated in the Indian ecosystem. By pushing back on a received wisdom ('leave your ego at the door'), she stakes out a more pragmatic position that acknowledges the psychological realities of founder life rather than moralising about them.

After Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Reliance continued buying Russian crude even as Western buyers pulled back; by 2025 India was sourcing about 42% of its oil from Russia versus 3% in 2021, with Reliance the largest Indian importer. The stance reflected a commercial willingness to navigate around Western sanctions — and to keep Jamnagar running at high utilization.

Adani has been described as close to Prime Minister Modi and the BJP government, leading to allegations of cronyism that he denies. The perception intensified as the group's market capitalization ballooned and as it won large infrastructure mandates across port, airport, power and renewable energy auctions during Modi's tenure.

Apple's first outside money came from Mike Markkula, a semi-retired Intel product-marketing manager and engineer, who also brought the company to investor Arthur Rock; after seeing the crowded Apple booth at the Homebrew Computer Show, Rock started with a $60,000 investment and joined the board. Markkula next recruited Mike Scott from National Semiconductor to serve as Apple's first president and chief executive in February 1977, a decision Jobs openly disliked, an early lesson that professional managers rather than founders were running the corporate show. The pattern repeated across Jobs's career: he recruited or inherited successive chief executives, from Scott through Sculley, Spindler, and Amelio, before taking the title himself in 1997 and holding it until weeks before his death. The Markkula-Scott phase professionalized bookkeeping, inventory, and channel strategy while the founders kept product control, the division of authority whose collapse later produced the 1985 rupture.

By 2026, the founders had broadened Swiggy into a multi-vertical platform spanning food delivery, Instamart for quick commerce, Dineout for restaurant discovery, Scenes for events and ticketing, and the now-discontinued Swiggy Genie for package delivery — a portfolio that illustrates the urban-convenience thesis the HBS case identified.

So over the 40 years it’s always been some of both — you’ve got a backdrop of something sometimes very depressed, sometimes very optimistic, but you’ve also got individual securities that are fluctuating around, maybe creating bottom-up opportunity. What I deeply believe is that value investors make money staying in the bottom-up. You might have a top-down view, you might say, yeah, it could be a bubble, it could be a problem, but bottom-up is where you’re going to devote your time. It keeps you anchored. If you have a portfolio of bargains, you’re probably going to do okay, if you’ve stress-tested them and if you’ve been intellectually honest about them and they really are bargains. [19:47] BARRY RITHOLTZ: So you mentioned Ben Graham. I’m curious as to who else were important influences on the development of your investment philosophy. I’ve read about Michael Price and Max Heine. Who affected you the most over the years? Who still affects you? [20:08] SETH KLARMAN: Reading Ben Graham was certainly a major influence on me, as he has been on essentially everybody in the value investing community. And then Warren Buffett, the real-life practitioner of Graham.

On public questions Dalio positions himself as a reformer rather than a revolutionary. He has said capitalism is generally the best economic system but argues it needs repair: in July 2019 he called for its refinement and described wealth inequality as a national emergency, and in May 2020 he stressed reforming capitalism rather than abandoning it. In October 2020 he cautioned people not to be blind to China's rise, arguing the country had continued to emerge as a superpower. His personal life anchors the picture. He shares a Greenwich, Connecticut home with his wife Barbara, whose lineage runs back to sculptor Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, and the couple have four sons. Devon, the oldest, was killed in a 2020 car crash at forty-two; their second son, Paul, born in 1979, is a film director. Dalio practices transcendental meditation and is a bowhunter, two habits he has linked to his equanimity under pressure.

The company's about page is deliberately understated — no growth-stage funding milestones, no valuation logos — reinforcing the founders' public position that the absence of external capital is itself a competitive choice that shaped how the firm could behave on pricing, product and storytelling.

Between 2017 and 2019 Netflix built out the content machine. It invested in exclusive stand-up comedy specials from Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock, Jim Gaffigan, Bill Burr, and Jerry Seinfeld. In February 2018 it acquired The Cloverfield Paradox from Paramount for fifty million dollars and released it days after debuting its trailer during the Super Bowl. In July 2018 Netflix earned the most Emmy nominations of any network for the first time, with one hundred twelve nods. In October 2018 it paid under thirty million dollars for Albuquerque Studios, pledging to spend over one billion dollars there across a decade for its first United States production hub. In May 2018 Barack and Michelle Obama signed a deal to produce series and films through their new company, Higher Ground Productions. In January 2019 Netflix was admitted to the Motion Picture Association of America, the first streaming service to join the studio trade group, a symbolic end to its status as Hollywood's outsider and a marker of how thoroughly the outsider had reshaped the industry's economics.

The Foundation states that HCLTech today is a US$14.8 billion global organisation with over 223,000 professionals operating from 60 countries — confirming the Forbes figures and reinforcing the scale at which Nadar's pivots toward engineering R&D and joint-venture-led growth were executed.

In February 2025 the listed entity renamed itself Eternal Ltd, with consumer-facing brands Zomato and Blinkit continuing under their existing names. Goyal framed the change as a structural recognition that the parent had become a portfolio of multiple consumer-internet businesses rather than a single food brand — an unusual mid-cap rename by Indian corporate-governance standards.

Fair trade became a measurable strand of the sourcing story in the 2000s. Starbucks introduced a fair trade product line in 2000, and of the roughly three hundred million pounds of coffee it purchased in 2006, about eighteen million pounds, or six percent, was certified. After a long-running dispute with Ethiopia, the company agreed to support and promote Ethiopian coffees and to acknowledge the country's ownership of designations like Harrar and Sidamo, a concession Ethiopia fought for to lift incomes for its impoverished farmers. In 2006 Starbucks said it paid 1.42 dollars per pound for its coffee, more than a third above the commodity price at the time, though the fully loaded retail equivalent, after transport, processing, rent, taxes, and labor, was 10.99 dollars per pound, a spread that kept the fairness debate alive. In 2022 the company stopped certifying its beans as Fairtrade in favor of its own verification programs, consolidating sourcing standards under its own audit.

In November 1855 Vanderbilt began buying back control of Accessory Transit just as the American military adventurer William Walker seized Nicaragua's government. Walker's ally Edmund Randolph coerced the company's San Francisco agent, Cornelius K. Garrison, into opposing Vanderbilt, and Walker annulled the transit charter, handing the rights and steamboats to Randolph, who sold them to Garrison; Charles Morgan was brought into the scheme in New York. Vanderbilt appealed in vain to Washington and London, then opened talks with Costa Rica, already at war against the filibuster alongside the region's other republics. He sent an agent whose raiding party seized the steamboats on the San Juan River and severed Walker's pipeline of reinforcements arriving from insurgent sympathizers in the United States. Walker collapsed and was expelled. When the new Nicaraguan government still refused to restore the transit, Vanderbilt simply opened a line by way of Panama, and eventually developed a monopoly over the California steamship business itself.

Pershing Square Holdings, Ltd. 5 In connection with the Transaction, HHH entered into a services agreement with the Investment Manager pursuant to which the Investment Manager will provide investment, advisory, and other ancillary services to HHH, and HHH will pay the Investment Manager a quarterly fee further described in the following joint press release: investor.howardhughes.com/news-releases/news-release-details/pershing-square-invest-900-million-acquire- nine-million-newly. To that end, the Board approved amendments to the IMA that provide reductions to the management fees otherwise payable by PSH to the Investment Manager. The reduction is an amount equal to the fees payable to the Investment Manager by HHH that are attributable to the HHH common stock held by PSH. Since the acquisition, the Investment Manager has made significant progress with HHH. In December, HHH announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire 100% of Vantage Group Holdings Ltd. (“Vantage”), a privately held leading specialty insurance and reinsurance company. The acquisition of Vantage by HHH will be financed by a combination of HHH’s cash on hand and an equity commitment from PSH of up to $1 billion of non-voting exchangeable perpetual preferred stock to be issued by HHH.

As Netflix grew, the company became noticed for innovative management practices, the results of a culture Hastings was exploring that he called freedom and responsibility. Netflix became known for offering mediocre employees large severance packages, ensuring that everyone remaining worked to further an innovative environment, and it eliminated sick and vacation time entirely, letting employees manage their own time off. Hastings created an internal culture guide by meeting with employees to discuss how the company worked; in August 2009 he posted that internal guide publicly online, an almost unheard-of act of transparency at the time. The deck eventually became a pre-employment screening tool that dissuaded incompatible candidates from applying at all. The public release turned a human-resources artifact into open doctrine: a company explaining, in its own voice and in writing, exactly what it demanded of the people it paid top of market, at a scale where culture substitutes for the process most corporations install instead.

Under Birla, UltraTech announced plans to expand grey cement capacity to 200 MTPA with a Rs 32,400 crore investment, acquired Kesoram Industries' cement assets for Rs 7,600 crore in November 2023, and by April 2024 reached 151.6 MTPA capacity. The cement push cemented UltraTech as India's largest producer and a global top-three player by capacity.

Goyal announced in January 2026 that he would step down as CEO and Managing Director of Eternal from 1 February, handing the role to Blinkit founder Albinder Dhindsa while remaining vice chairman for long-term strategy and governance. He described the move as a 'change in title, not in commitment,' signalling a founder-led succession choreography that recalled the Bansals' post-Walmart handoff.

The pandemic years brought triumph and then the seeds of correction. In July 2020 Netflix appointed Ted Sarandos as co-CEO alongside Hastings, the first formal step of succession; that September it signed a multi-million-dollar production deal with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. In 2021 Netflix earned the most Academy Award nominations of any studio, thirty-six, and won seven, the most of any studio; later that year it won forty-four Emmys, more than any network or studio, tying the single-year record CBS set in 1974. In September 2021 Squid Game, the South Korean survival drama created by Hwang Dong-hyuk, became the service's most-watched show within a week of launch, drawing more than one hundred eleven million viewers in its first twenty-eight days and surpassing Bridgerton. Netflix launched mobile games for subscribers in November 2021, bundling a small library, including Stranger Things titles, into the app. The momentum concealed a saturation problem that would explode in early 2022, when the post-pandemic reckoning arrived and the decade of uninterrupted growth stopped.

On April 12, 2018, two Black men were arrested at a Philadelphia Starbucks after a manager claimed they were trespassing, an incident that began when they asked to use the restroom without making a purchase. Video of the arrests spread and protests followed. Chief executive Kevin Johnson apologized and the company declined to press charges, and on the April 26 earnings call Johnson reported the company had seen no sales drop, reiterating full-year guidance and beating consensus expectations with two percent same-store sales growth. He then announced that some eight thousand locations would close on May 29 for a seminar on racial bias intended to prevent a repeat of the Philadelphia episode. On June 19 the company said it would close 150 locations in 2019, three times its typical annual count, concentrated in urban areas already dense with stores. The episode forced a public audit of what the third place owes the public that uses it.

He received the Padma Bhushan in 2001 and was repeatedly framed by industry bodies as a 'nation-builder' in the older nationalist-industrialist tradition of the Bajaj family. He insisted in public commentary that the Bajaj name carried a duty to the country that went beyond profit, reflecting the Gandhian inheritance of his grandfather Jamnalal Bajaj.

On November 20, 2024 the U.S. Attorney's Office in Brooklyn unsealed a five-count criminal indictment charging Adani and executives with paying over $250 million in bribes to Indian government officials across Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, J&K and Tamil Nadu to secure energy contracts. In May 2026 the second Trump DOJ moved to dismiss the case with prejudice, and in August 2026 Judge Garaufis approved the dismissal in a 45-page order he described as 'highly unusual' and strongly criticized.

In 1964 Disney produced Mary Poppins, the rights to which he had pursued since the 1940s; it became the studio's most successful film of the 1960s, although author P. L. Travers disliked the adaptation intensely and regretted selling the rights. The same year he delivered four exhibits for the 1964 New York World's Fair, funded by selected corporate sponsors: It's a Small World, a boat ride of audio-animatronic children built for PepsiCo's tribute to UNICEF; Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln, an animatronic Abraham Lincoln delivering excerpts from his speeches; the electricity-themed Carousel of Progress; and Ford's Magic Skyway portraying the progress of mankind. The fair functioned as a proving ground for audio-animatronics and ride systems, and elements of all four exhibits were reinstalled at Disneyland, with It's a Small World closest to its original form. Disney had effectively converted other companies' marketing budgets into research and development for his own park.

Jobs and Wozniak took the wraps off the Apple II at the West Coast Computer Faire in April 1977, the first consumer product sold by Apple and one of the first highly successful mass-produced microcomputers in the world. Wozniak designed the machine; Jobs oversaw its unusual case, and Rod Holt engineered its novel power supply. During development the two fought over expansion slots, Jobs wanting two for simplicity and Wozniak eight for flexibility, nearly splitting before settling on eight, an argument that previewed their lifelong disagreement about whether elegance or openness should win. The Apple II carried the company through its first growth decade, built the personal computer market for schools, small businesses, and homes, and made Jobs wealthy young: he was worth over $1 million at twenty-three and an estimated $250 million at twenty-five, among the youngest self-made names ever to reach the Forbes list of the nation's richest people.

In July 2024 the Aditya Birla Group launched jewellery brand Indriya with Rs 5,000 crore of investment — a direct entry into India's competitive jewellery retail market against Tanishq and Reliance Jewels. The move expanded the group's consumer-facing portfolio beyond apparel, attempting to convert Birla brand equity into discretionary-spend categories.

In May 2018, protests against Sterlite's Thoothukudi (Tuticorin) copper smelter on environmental grounds culminated in police opening fire, killing 13 people. The Justice Aruna Jagadeesan Commission later found no specific evidence directly linking Sterlite to instigating the violence, but the episode damaged Vedanta's social license and led to the smelter's closure.

When the Civil War began in 1861, Vanderbilt offered his largest steamship, the Vanderbilt, as a gift to the Union Navy; Secretary Gideon Welles refused it, expecting a short war and judging the ship too expensive to operate. Vanderbilt leased her to the War Department instead. After the Confederate ironclad Virginia shattered the Union blockading squadron at Hampton Roads, the conflict drew appeals for help from President Abraham Lincoln and War Secretary Edwin Stanton, and this time he completed the donation, re-equipping the vessel with a ram and handpicked officers. She helped bottle up the Virginia, then was converted into a cruiser to hunt the Confederate commerce raider Alabama under Raphael Semmes. Congress awarded him a Congressional Gold Medal, and he paid to outfit a major expedition against New Orleans. His youngest and favorite son, George Washington Vanderbilt II, a West Point graduate and heir apparent, fell ill and died without ever seeing combat.

To make small-town discounting work, Walton made logistics the core discipline rather than an afterthought. Stores were deliberately sited within a day's drive of Walmart's regional warehouses, and distribution ran through the company's own trucking service, so that volume buying and efficient delivery together permitted the sale of discounted name-brand merchandise. Growth followed a saturation pattern — stores clustered around each distribution center, filling a region before leaping to the next — which kept freight costs low and supervisory reach tight. The private trucking fleet mattered as much as the warehouses, keeping shelves stocked on the company's own schedule rather than common carriers'. The compounding showed in the store counts: one hundred ninety stores in 1977 became roughly eight hundred by 1985. Analysts later credited this contiguous, hub-and-spoke expansion, more than any single merchandising decision, as the structural reason Walmart outcompeted its rivals between 1980 and 2000.

By FY26, however, the financial narrative had reversed: revenue from operations reached approximately ₹2,391.94 crore (up 15.72% YoY) and net profit roughly ₹200.19 crore (up 175.41% YoY), with Q4 FY26 net profit of ₹69.44 crore (up 177.99% YoY). The rebound reframes the post-IPO drawdown as a cyclical correction rather than a structural failure.

By the middle of the 2000s, the growth machine showed strain. Coffee wars with McDonald's and Dunkin' eroded Starbucks' market share as rivals improved their espresso offerings at lower prices, and the stock fell seventy-five percent between 2006 and 2008. Revenue was still growing, but the growth depended heavily on new store openings, an unsustainable and inorganic pattern that flattered the top line while same-store economics deteriorated. The company Schultz had handed to Jim Donald in 2005 was opening stores faster than the brand could defend them, diluting the experience that justified premium pricing. Congestion at the espresso bar, automated machines, and a broadening merchandising push all fed a creeping sense that the stores had lost their distinctiveness. The deterioration set the stage for Schultz's return, framed not as nostalgia but as an intervention to stop a company from consuming its own brand equity to feed unit growth.

Gates has also built a substantial body of writing. The Road Ahead, published in November 1995 with Nathan Myhrvold and Peter Rinearson, summarized the personal-computing revolution and forecast a world reshaped by a global information superhighway. Business @ the Speed of Thought, written with Collins Hemingway and published in 1999, argued that digital infrastructure and information networks could give companies a competitive edge. Two decades later his subject matter turned planetary: How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, published in 2021, distilled more than a decade of studying climate change and investing in energy innovation, and How to Prevent the Next Pandemic, published in 2022, proposed a Global Epidemic Response and Mobilization team of full-time experts under the World Health Organization, with about a billion dollars of annual funding. In February 2025 he published Source Code: My Beginnings, the first of three planned memoirs.

Bridgewater's culture and its leadership churn are inseparable. In 2005 Dalio wrote a handbook called Principles in response to the firm's fast growth, revised in 2017 into the bestselling book. New York magazine called Bridgewater the largest and indisputably weirdest hedge fund in 2011 for its commitment to total honesty and accountability in minute detail: every meeting is recorded and viewable by any employee unless the topic is proprietary, investment decisions are made without regard to hierarchy, and any employee may respectfully say anything to anyone if prepared to be challenged in return. Staff use the dot collector, a tool that lets them give real-time assessments of each other's views. The firm hires analysts straight out of elite universities, buses them daily from Manhattan, and pays for transcendental meditation instruction, though about a quarter of new hires leave within their first two years. Its leadership history includes co-chief executives Greg Jensen, Eileen Murray, and David McCormick; James Comey served as general counsel from 2010 to 2013 before directing the FBI.

Musk's wealth is a function of concentrated, illiquid founder stakes rather than diversified holdings. As the largest shareholder of both Tesla and SpaceX, he watched Tesla rise from the most-shorted stock on the market to a $1 trillion market capitalization in October 2021, the sixth American company to cross that line, after entering the S&P 500 in December 2020 as the most valuable company ever added to the index. The Musk Foundation, which he funds and directs, is dedicated to renewable energy and crewed space exploration, to pediatrics and science and engineering education, and to developing artificial intelligence that is safe for humanity; by the end of 2024 it held more than $14 billion in assets, with donations since 2020 flowing largely to organizations affiliated with Musk and his businesses. The scale invites the scrutiny his biography records, including descriptions of Musk as an American oligarch and as a shadow president during a later presidential transition.

Dalio's compensation and giving have both run at extraordinary scale. He reportedly earned 1.1 billion dollars in 2014, and Forbes estimated his net worth at 15.4 billion in 2015, making him the second-wealthiest hedge fund manager after George Soros; he was estimated to have received 2 billion dollars in 2018 after his fund posted a 14.6 percent return. Ray and Barbara Dalio created the Dalio Foundation in 2003, later part of Dalio Philanthropies; the family has donated more than 5 billion dollars to it, and it has granted out more than 1 billion. In April 2011 the couple joined the Giving Pledge. Grants have included 10 million dollars for China's coronavirus recovery in early 2020, 4 million for Connecticut healthcare and nutrition, 50 million to launch NewYork-Presbyterian's Dalio Center for Health Justice, a 100 million dollar pledge to Connecticut public schools, and 185 million committed with Bloomberg Philanthropies over four years to protect the oceans.

Majety's recognition includes Forbes India 30 Under 30 earlier in his career, the Economic Times Entrepreneur of the Year award in 2019, and a place on the IIFL Wealth Hurun India 40 & Under Self-Made Rich List — honours that track his transition from a small Bengaluru startup into the front rank of Indian consumer internet founders.

In September 2020 Hastings and Erin Meyer, an INSEAD professor, co-authored No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention, a book on Netflix's culture and management principles built on interviews with current and former employees. The book became a New York Times bestseller, appeared on year-end lists for publications including NPR and The Economist, and was shortlisted for the Financial Times and McKinsey business book prize. The title condensed the philosophy Hastings had been refining for two decades: that freedom, candor, and top-of-market pay for stunning colleagues outperform the rule books and approval chains that most large companies install as they scale. The book marked the moment the Netflix culture stopped being an internal experiment and became an exportable management doctrine, argued in public, with case studies drawn from the company's own missteps, including the Qwikster episode, and from the failures of the process-heavy incumbents it had displaced.

External recognition has followed: featured in Economic Times' 40 Under 40 and Forbes' Tycoons of Tomorrow, and in January 2026 Varun joined Shark Tank India as a Shark on Season 5 on Sony Entertainment Television, positioning himself as a visible mentor for the next generation of Indian digital-first entrepreneurs.

• In June, the Board and the Investment Manager determined that it was appropriate, given the current market conditions and PSH’s available free cash, to authorize a share buyback program for $200 million of PSH’s outstanding Public Shares. In November, the Board authorized another $100 million program. Since PSH commenced its first share buyback program on May 2, 2017, PSH has repurchased 73,572,630 Public Shares for a total of $1.8 billion at an average price of $24.36. DISCOUNT TO NAV During the year, the discount narrowed from 31.2% to 24.1%. The Board closely monitors the discount to NAV at which PSH’s Public Shares trade. As discussed previously, the Board believes that the launch of additional funds managed by the Investment Manager will be a positive catalyst to narrow the discount to NAV at which PSH shares currently trade since a portion of the fees earned by the Investment Manager on new funds raised will reduce the performance fees paid by PSH. However, the Board continues to believe that the most powerful driver of long-term shareholder returns will be continued strong absolute and relative NAV performance. CORPORATE GOVERNANCE / BOARD In 2025, Jean-Baptiste Wautier and Bilge Ogut joined the Board, and our discussions have already benefited from their thoughtful contributions. The Investment Manager and the Board have maintained an open and productive dialogue, and the Board continues to work effectively and diligently on behalf of all shareholders.

It was always heartening to know that somebody like Buffett, who seemed to think similarly to how I thought — thought about downside risk, thought about the need to stay focused on individual companies and not worry so much about the overall market, the willingness to hold cash, and concurrently the willingness to not have an opinion on everything. I have a lot of ideas and I end up with no opinion, no position. But once in a while we find something that seems way off the beaten path that’s really interesting. To watch Warren Buffett do that — I’ve realized now that Warren probably had a certainty of the idea that he would compound capital over a long period of time. And I think that is something that Graham gave Warren, and Warren gave me as well: the idea that if you protect on the downside, if you don’t find yourself getting margin calls, frozen in place because you’re too exposed, or getting massive redemptions because you’re down so much — if you can position yourself that way, it can leave you in a position to play offense when even your best competitors might not be on the playing field. And that’s a huge advantage. So Graham and Dodd is kind of a North Star, a place where you can stay focused on what something’s worth. You can ignore the herd. You can ignore the siren song of growth at any price, of exciting new technologies and exciting IPOs.

The Foundation frames its mission as nurturing leaders in 'symbiotic growth' — a phrase that deliberately mirrors the partnership-and-alliance logic Nadar applied at HCL, suggesting a unified theory of institution-building that spans both his commercial and philanthropic vehicles.

On January 7, 2008, after an eight-year hiatus, Schultz returned as chief executive at the height of the financial crisis, succeeding Jim Donald. He led a mass dismissal of executives, closed hundreds of stores, and temporarily shut every United States location to retrain employees in making espresso, betting that a visible reset of craft would matter more than a quarter of lost sales. He redoubled the firm's fair trade and ethical sourcing policies across its supply chain in Africa and other coffee-producing regions, and within two years roughly doubled annual fair trade coffee purchases to an estimated forty million pounds. He arranged the appointment of the company's first chief technology officer, acknowledging that a retailer built on store experience now needed digital infrastructure. The program was more restructuring than turnaround theater, with costs, portfolio, sourcing, and leadership all rebuilt simultaneously while the consumer economy collapsed around the business.

In late 1965 Disney announced Disney World, a resort a few miles southwest of Orlando that would contain a larger and more elaborate Magic Kingdom, golf courses, resort hotels, and, at its heart, the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. He described EPCOT as a community that would never be completed but would always be introducing, testing, and demonstrating new materials and systems, and a permanent showcase for the ingenuity and imagination of American free enterprise. Through 1966 he cultivated corporations willing to sponsor EPCOT while remaining heavily involved in studio story development, including The Jungle Book. A heavy smoker of unfiltered cigarettes since the First World War, he was diagnosed with lung cancer in early November 1966, underwent cobalt therapy, and returned to work believing himself cured. On November 30 he was taken by ambulance to St. Joseph Hospital, where he died of circulatory collapse on December 15, 1966, at sixty-five.

I would like to thank my fellow directors for their dedication throughout the year. SHAREHOLDER ENGAGEMENT It was another year of record attendance at PSH’s investor meeting on February 11, 2026, and it was a pleasure to have an opportunity to spend time with so many of you. For those unable to attend, the Investment Manager presented a portfolio update, and the slides from that presentation are available on PSH’s website: www.pershingsquareholdings.com.

You can ignore all that because you have a confidence that I own something that’s going to be worth more a year or two from now than it is today. That’s the underpinning that lets you follow a value investment strategy. [22:11] BARRY RITHOLTZ: So you mentioned downside risk, and you referred to before, you began in 1982. Less than a decade later you publish Margin of Safety, 1991. What led you, at the ripe old age of 34, to write a book on risk management? What was the motivation? How was it initially received — because it’s become so sought after these days. What was the initial reception like? [22:44] SETH KLARMAN: In retrospect that looks pretty darn presumptuous. I got asked to write it by a classmate from business school who worked at Harper Collins at the time — or Harper & Row, maybe, before Harper Collins. She had seen some of my client letters and said, you seem like you’d be a good writer, and you’re a smart guy, maybe you’ll have something to tell the audience. What I really thought was, I’m just updating The Intelligent Investor for modern examples and a contemporary market, decades since that book was written. I thought maybe I’d make it a little bit more accessible for the average Joe. I don’t know whether it accomplished that, but that’s what I was trying to do. I didn’t think I would make money from writing the book — as you, as an author, know, we get like a buck fifty an hour. But it’s a great feeling, and it’s a ton of work, but ultimately worth it.

Agarwal pledged 75% of his family's wealth to charity, inspired by Bill Gates, and joined the Giving Pledge in 2021 with daughter Priya. The Anil Agarwal Foundation committed Rs 5,000 crore over five years for nutrition, women-and-child development, healthcare, animal welfare and grassroots sports — Carnegie-and-Rockefeller-style giving scaled to Indian context.

Honasa's 2026 portfolio spans eight brands — Mamaearth, The Derma Co., Aqualogica, Lumineve, Staze, BBlunt, Dr Sheth's and Reginald Men — with omnichannel presence across more than 750 districts. The launch of Reginald Men signals an explicit move into the men's grooming segment, extending the house-of-brands thesis into a new demographic.

Birla received the Padma Bhushan in 2023, India's third-highest civilian honour. He has also chaired IIM Ahmedabad's board and serves as chancellor of BITS Pilani, reinforcing the Birla family's long-standing role in Indian educational institution-building alongside the operating businesses.

Though he had stepped down from the Stonington presidency during the gold rush, Vanderbilt spent the 1850s on several railroad boards, among them the Harlem, the Hartford and New Haven, the Central of New Jersey, and the Erie. In 1863 he took control of the Harlem in a famous stock-market corner and was elected its president, later explaining that he wanted to prove he could take a railroad widely considered worthless and make it valuable. The Harlem held a singular asset: it was the only steam railroad entering the center of Manhattan, running down Fourth Avenue to a 26th Street station, with a connection at Chatham Four Corners to the lines running east and west. He installed his eldest son Billy, once scorned and sent to a Staten Island farm after a youthful breakdown, as vice president, and in 1864 sold his last ships to concentrate on railroads.

In one of his most-cited remarks, Bajaj warned that 'we have a legacy that can very easily be broken, but one that's very difficult to rebuild' — framing stewardship as a fragile, reversible state requiring constant attention. The quote is often invoked in Indian family-business governance discussions as a summary of the founder's burden of preserving institutional capital across generations.

In 1983 Jobs recruited John Sculley, president of Pepsi-Cola, to become Apple's chief executive with the famous pitch contrasting a career spent selling sugared water with a chance to change the world. The hire was meant to give the founder operational cover while he focused on the Macintosh; instead it created a rival power center with board backing. Their visions diverged sharply: Sculley favored open-architecture machines like the Apple II aimed at education, small business, and home markets less exposed to IBM, while Jobs wanted the closed-architecture Macintosh positioned as the business alternative to the IBM PC. The two divisions operated like separate companies, duplicating services, and the January 1985 annual meeting failed even to mention the Apple II group still providing 85 percent of sales, an omission that helped push Wozniak to leave amicably, sell most of his stock, and complain the company had been heading wrong for five years.

Forbes estimated Goyal's net worth at roughly 1.4 billion dollars as of mid-2026, mostly tied to his Eternal stake. He has since signalled appetite for a second act outside food delivery, including a forehead-worn metabolic-monitoring wearable called Temple priced at about a thousand dollars — an early-stage health-tech bet rather than a fully commercialised venture.

Gates spent years warning that the world was unprepared for a pandemic, telling a TED conference audience in March 2015 that the next global outbreak would catch governments flat-footed, a warning that preceded the arrival of COVID-19 in late 2019. During the crisis, media outlets treated him as an authority despite his lack of public office or medical training, and his foundation created the COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator in 2020 to speed the development and evaluation of new and repurposed treatments. He described frequent conversations with Anthony Fauci on vaccines and medical innovation. In April 2021 he drew criticism for arguing that pharmaceutical companies should retain vaccine patents and for opposing the TRIPS waiver, contending that safety protocols and the difficulty of transferring production, not intellectual property, were the real constraints on supply; his foundation had encouraged Oxford University to partner with a major manufacturer rather than give away its vaccine, and Oxford chose AstraZeneca.

In April 2022 Netflix stated that one hundred million households globally were sharing passwords, with thirty million of them in Canada and the United States, and its stock price fell thirty-five percent following the announcements. By June 2022 it had laid off four hundred fifty full-time and contract employees as it trimmed costs amid lower-than-expected subscriber growth. The correction produced a strategic overhaul. In July 2022 the company announced an advertising-supported subscription option, launched November 3, 2022 in twelve countries at $6.99 a month in the United States under the name Basic with Ads. In February 2023 it cut subscription prices in more than thirty countries, and it expanded paid-sharing rules from Canada, New Zealand, Portugal, and Spain to the United States and Brazil in May 2023. The measures worked: Netflix added 5.9 million subscribers in the second quarter of 2023 to reach 238.39 million, and after a record 18.9 million additions in the fourth quarter of 2024 it announced it had exceeded three hundred million subscribers worldwide.

The 2015 Race Together campaign pushed the company into one of its most criticized brand experiments. Baristas were instructed to write the phrase on customers' cups with the stated aim of sparking a national dialogue about race, and the initiative was heavily criticized and drew substantial backlash from customers and commentators who saw it as performative and poorly matched to a transaction that lasts seconds. The campaign sits in a longer pattern of racial-bias controversies the company has worked through publicly: the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission raised allegations over promotion data from 2007 to 2011 suggesting minority retail partners received fewer promotions than statistically expected, and individual cafés have faced recurring criticism over incidents of racial bias, including the episode that led to closing eight thousand cafés for a day of training in 2018. Race Together remains the clearest case of the company's ambition to lead cultural conversation outrunning its operational credibility with the customers it serves.

The Daily Observations is Bridgewater's flagship product and service: a private communication that distills the firm's decades of watching markets into an alternative take on investment trends, characterized as comprehensive, with some editions running as long as 43 pages. Central bank leaders and pension fund managers around the world are said to read it, and it has been described as one of the most widely forwarded pieces of market analysis in the industry. As of 2009 it reached readers inside the Treasury Department and the Executive Office of the President, and it remains the centerpiece of the company's outreach program. The research letter began in the firm's earliest apartment-office days, transmitted by Telex to a handful of corporate clients, and its circulation became the engine of Bridgewater's institutional franchise: pension funds, central banks, and sovereign wealth funds came to feel the firm's reasoning arrive every trading morning, long before many of them trusted it with money.

After selling Pure Software, Hastings found himself without a goal and became interested in education reform in California, enrolling in the Stanford Graduate School of Education. In 2000 Governor Gray Davis appointed him to the State Board of Education, and in 2001 he became its president. He put one million dollars of his own money, joined by six million from the Silicon Valley venture capitalist John Doerr, behind Proposition 39, the November 2000 measure that dropped the voter threshold for passing local school construction bonds from sixty-six percent to fifty-five. His board tenure ended in political defeat: Democratic legislators challenged his campaign for more English instruction and language testing for students still learning English, the State Senate Rules Committee refused to confirm him, the legislature rejected him, and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who had reappointed him, voiced disappointment. Hastings resigned. The episode taught him the limits of technical certainty in political institutions, a lesson he carried into later education philanthropy.

Walton married Helen Robson on Valentine's Day 1943, and the couple had four children: Samuel Robson, born in 1944; John Thomas, born in 1946; James Carr, born in 1948; and Alice Louise, born in 1949. Family and faith ran directly through the business from the very beginning. Sam and Helen were active in Bentonville's First Presbyterian Church, where Sam served as an elder and taught Sunday school to high-school students, and he consciously worked the concept of servant leadership — modeled on his understanding of Christ as a servant leader — into Walmart's corporate structure, emphasizing the importance of serving others as an operating principle. He also backed country music over the long term and admired Dolly Parton in particular; her 1967 debut LP became the very first album Walmart stocked widely, an early marker of the merchandising instincts he never lost.

Padma Bhushan recipient in 2008, Nadar is profiled by his Foundation as both a business pioneer and a philanthropist with global recognition — a dual framing that positions the philanthropy as the natural continuation of the commercial career rather than a separate end-of-career pivot.

Beyond the boardroom Bajaj was described as a devoted husband to Rupa (who died in 2013), a hands-on father and a quiet philanthropist, supporting causes through the Jamnalal Bajaj Foundation and community institutions around Akurdi and Pune. The personal positioning reinforced the founder-as-steward narrative that defined his public persona across five decades.

Once the Harlem was his, conflicts with connecting lines flared, and Vanderbilt won every battle: control of the Hudson River Railroad in 1864, the New York Central in 1867, the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern in 1869, and later the Canada Southern. In 1870 he merged his two key lines under the banner of the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad, an enterprise so vast that it stood among the biggest corporations the United States had yet seen. In 1869 he directed the Harlem to begin Grand Central Depot on 42nd Street, completed in 1871 as his lines' New York terminus; he sank the Fourth Avenue tracks in a cut that later became a tunnel, and Fourth Avenue became Park Avenue. The consolidation thesis was ruthless and simple: a single system reaching from Manhattan toward Chicago, professionally run, paying steady dividends, and it became the template for American big business.

Walton was treated for hairy-cell leukemia in 1982 and diagnosed with bone cancer in 1990, undergoing radiation and chemotherapy at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, and he died of multiple myeloma, a blood cancer, in Little Rock on April 5, 1992 — a week after his seventy-fourth birthday and three months shy of Walmart's thirtieth anniversary. Days earlier, according to his son, he was still reviewing sales data from his hospital bed. Word of his death went out over the satellite network to every one of the 1,960 stores of a company that then employed four hundred thousand people and generated nearly fifty billion dollars in annual sales across 1,735 Walmarts, 212 Sam's Clubs, and 13 Supercenters. In March 1992, a month before he died, President George H. W. Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his work in retail.

In January 2023 Birla's children Ananya and Aryaman Vikram Birla were appointed directors of Grasim, Hindalco, Aditya Birla Management Corporation and Aditya Birla Fashion & Retail — a formal succession signal placing the fifth generation on key operating company boards while the founder remained group chairman.

Disney's plans for a functioning futuristic city never came to fruition. After his death his brother Roy deferred retirement to take full control of the Disney companies, changed the Florida project's focus from a working town to an attraction, and at the 1971 inauguration dedicated Walt Disney World to his brother. Epcot Center opened in 1982 as a permanent world's fair rather than the functioning city Disney had described. Posthumous releases raised the number of feature films he had been involved in to eighty-one, and the 1968 short Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day earned him a posthumous Academy Award. After his death the studios produced live-action films prolifically while the quality of animated features was allowed to languish, until the trend reversed in the Disney Renaissance that began with The Little Mermaid in 1989. By 2014 the Disney parks around the world hosted roughly 134 million visitors a year, and his company had become one of the world's largest media conglomerates.

Starbucks made its deepest structural bet on China. Schultz coordinated the first store opening there in January 1999 and spent the following year cultivating a customer base for coffee in a tea-drinking society, a market most consumer companies of the era treated as optional. Through the late 2000s and early 2010s he directed planning for one to two store openings per day in mainland China, a cadence sustained for years. The strategic commitment culminated in July 2017, when the company acquired the remaining fifty percent stake in its Chinese joint venture from long-term partners Uni-President Enterprises Corporation and President Chain Store Corporation for 1.3 billion dollars, taking full ownership of what had become its second-largest market. The buyout closed an era of partnership-driven entry and converted China into a wholly owned growth engine, with thousands of stores, localized formats, and delivery infrastructure built around digital ordering in the years that followed.

Jobs took over the Macintosh project in 1981 from Jef Raskin, who had conceived it, exploiting Wozniak's leave after a plane crash to seize control of the program. On January 22, 1984, Apple aired the Ridley Scott-directed commercial titled 1984 during the Super Bowl, and two days later an emotional Jobs introduced the Macintosh at the Flint Auditorium shareholders meeting to what engineer Andy Hertzfeld described as pandemonium, the first mass-produced computer with a graphical user interface and mouse, priced at $2,495 and bundled with MacWrite and MacPaint. Initial acclaim and strong early sales collapsed in the second half of 1984 on low performance and a thin software library. The machine's redemption came in 1985 through desktop publishing: paired with the LaserWriter, the first laser printer with vector PostScript graphics, and Aldus PageMaker, the Macintosh launched an entire industry and kept Apple the second-largest personal computer maker into the 1990s.

Hastings is active in education philanthropy and politics, and the issue he advocates most strongly is charter schools, publicly funded but privately run schools. In July 2006 he donated one million dollars to Beacon Education Network to open new charter schools in Santa Cruz County, where he lives. A Giving Pledge member since 2012, he founded the Hastings Fund and pledged one hundred million dollars to children's education, saying the fund would donate in the best way possible for kids; its first two gifts, worth 1.5 million dollars combined, went to the United Negro College Fund and to the Hispanic Foundation of Silicon Valley, funding college scholarships for Black and Latino students. In March 2014 he argued for the elimination of elected school boards, extending to school governance the same skepticism of consensus process that shaped his management philosophy. The consistency is the point: whether running a company or funding schools, Hastings bet on talent density, clear accountability, and freedom from committee control.

And you get smarter from the act of writing about what you do. You can do what you do all day long without maybe fully forming the philosophy, but if you want to share it with anybody else, it makes you think more clearly about what you do. [23:59] BARRY RITHOLTZ: The former Librarian of Congress, Daniel Boorstin, used to say, “I write to figure out what I think.” And there’s a lot of truth to that. What was the initial reception like? Did people respond, or did it kind of land, and a handful of value geeks bought it but no one else? [24:16] SETH KLARMAN: It’s somewhere in between. What happened first was my editor got fired three different times, so I kept getting new editors. They had promised to back the book with advertising and they didn’t. So the book landed with a bit of a thud. It had maybe a very tiny second printing — I think they printed maybe 7,000 copies. I ended up buying a bunch of them back from HarperCollins by the time they took it off the market, and the rights somehow reverted back to me. What it did do, though, is it was bought significantly by competitors who used it to train their teams. And that was also — is that what I wrote it for? I don’t mind, but the starting goal, if you go back to the book, the first half of it was about the Street and about how they treat the average investor, and maybe the challenge of whether the investor’s getting a good deal.

Ghazal has publicly advocated what she calls the '85% Rule' — favouring consistent effort over perfection to avoid burnout, particularly for founder-mothers managing both business and parenting. The framework reflects an explicit operational philosophy rather than a PR line, and ties back to her repeated theme of sustainable productivity over heroic hustle.

In mid-2014 Schultz unveiled the College Achievement Plan, which teamed Starbucks with Arizona State University so that any employee working twenty or more hours weekly could qualify for free tuition through the university's online degree programs, extending the benefits philosophy of Bean Stock and part-time health coverage into higher education. The move positioned Starbucks as a career destination rather than a transitional employer and generated substantial brand dividends. It also burnished a compensation story that had grown unusual for a public company chief: reporting in 2018 indicated Schultz had taken a one-dollar annual salary in recent years, tying his personal economics to equity performance rather than cash pay. The tuition program, the options program, and the healthcare commitment together formed a coherent thesis he argued for decades, that investing in frontline workers ahead of what the market required was the cheapest durable competitive advantage available to a consumer brand.

Pershing Square Holdings, Ltd. 6 PSH’s 2026 AGM will be held on May 7, 2026. Details of the event will be posted on www.pershingsquareholdings.com. I will report to you on the first half of 2026 in August, and the Investment Manager will keep you informed of any significant developments in the portfolio before then, when appropriate. /s/ Rupert Morley Rupert Morley Chairman of the Board February 18, 2026

By early 1985 the Macintosh's failure to dent the IBM PC had strengthened Sculley's hand. In May, encouraged by director Arthur Rock, Sculley proposed reorganizing Apple to strip Jobs of the Macintosh group and park him over new-product development, a role that would have rendered the founder decorative. Jobs answered with a plan of his own to oust Sculley, but the scheme leaked; confronted, Jobs said he would leave, and the board declined his resignation and asked him to reconsider, while Sculley made clear he held the votes. On September 17, 1985, Jobs submitted his letter of resignation to the board, and five senior Apple employees resigned with him to join his next venture. The ouster became the hinge of his biography: twelve years in exile, then a return with the operating system, the design taste, and the scar tissue that would save Apple.

Hastings scaled his giving dramatically in the 2020s. In June 2020 he donated 120 million dollars, split equally among the United Negro College Fund, Morehouse College, and Spelman College, the largest individual donation ever to support scholarships at historically Black colleges and universities; the same year he and his wife gave thirty million dollars to GAVI to support the COVAX COVID vaccine initiative. In 2016 he established a donor-advised fund at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, seeded with one hundred million dollars, and in 2024 he moved two million Netflix shares, worth about 1.1 billion dollars, into it. In March 2025 Bowdoin College, his alma mater, announced a fifty-million-dollar gift from Hastings to create the Hastings Initiative for AI and Humanity, the largest in the school's history. He lives in Santa Cruz with his wife, Patricia Ann Quillin, and two children. The scale and focus of the giving tracked the Netflix share price, and the causes stayed constant: education, global health, and his own formative institutions.

Pershing Square Holdings, Ltd. 7 Investment Manager’s Report LETTER TO SHAREHOLDERS(5) To the Shareholders of Pershing Square Holdings, Ltd.: In 2025, Pershing Square Holdings generated NAV performance of 20.9% and a 33.9% total shareholder return as a result of the narrowing of the discount to NAV at which PSH shares trade.6 In comparison, the S&P 500 generated a total return of 17.9% for the year.7 Investors who invested in Pershing Square, L.P. at its inception on January 1, 2004 and transferred their capital account to PSH at its inception on December 31, 2012 (“Day One Investors”) have grown their equity investment at a 16.2% compounded annual NAV return over the last 22 years compared with a 10.7% return had they invested in the S&P 500 over the same period.8 With the power of compounding, our 16.2% compounded annual NAV return translates into a cumulative total NAV return since inception of 2,644% (27.4 times) versus 836% (9.4 times) for the S&P 500 over the same period. Using PSH’s stock price return rather than our per-share NAV performance, Day One Investors have earned a 14.9% compounded return, a 21.1 times multiple of their original investment.9 This lower return reflects the 24.1% discount to NAV at which PSH’s stock currently trades.

Following Sophia's death in 1868, Vanderbilt traveled to Canada, and on August 21, 1869, in London, Ontario, married Frank Armstrong Crawford, a cousin from Mobile, Alabama, more than four decades his junior. His second wife encouraged the act that softened his historical reputation: a one-million-dollar gift to Bishop Holland Nimmons McTyeire to found Vanderbilt University in Nashville, at that date the largest charitable gift in American history. He also gave fifty thousand dollars to her congregation, the Church of the Strangers, and land for the Moravian cemetery on Staten Island where he chose to be buried. He died at 10 Washington Place on January 4, 1877, aged eighty-two, after roughly eight months confined to his rooms, with exhaustion from chronic disorders cited as the immediate cause. His estate, estimated at one hundred and five million dollars, was the largest in the world at the time.

The second half is maybe an investment approach, a value-oriented approach, and how an investor might think about doing that, even if they’re not a professional investor. So it was successful in a weird way. Because it didn’t get republished, it developed a bit of a cult following, and that’s kind of amusing and interesting to me. Of course, we’ve reprinted some on our own, so we’ve made it available to our clients and to summer interns and to anybody that’s connected to the firm. [25:47] BARRY RITHOLTZ: So in 2023, the seventh edition of Security Analysis, Ben Graham’s framework for investing, was edited by you, and in a lot of ways substantially re-jiggered. How different is this version than Graham’s? Obviously the market’s changed, the economy — it’s so much different than when he was writing. How did you approach this? [26:13] SETH KLARMAN: So the earlier edition, the sixth edition, I was co-editor with Jim Grant and Bruce Greenwald, and the seventh edition they asked me to edit on my own. As editor, we didn’t follow the process you might follow, because we kind of thought of Security Analysis as the Bible, and we thought we should leave it alone. What we should do is have modern-day expert investors write commentary about the different chapters and sections of the book. So that’s what we did. The sixth edition and the seventh both have some really great selections by investors, some of whom are well known, but some of whom aren’t known at all.

Schultz again stepped down as chief executive in December 2016, becoming executive chairman, and across the 2008 to 2017 span of his second tenure he oversaw nearly one hundred billion dollars added to Starbucks' market capitalization. From the eleven coffeehouses of 1987 the company reached twenty-eight thousand stores in seventy-seven countries by his retirement. On June 4, 2018, he announced he would leave active management after thirty-seven years, with Kevin Johnson, president and chief operating officer for the prior two years, becoming chief executive and Myron Ullman taking the chairmanship, as Schultz weighed a presidential campaign. He returned once more as interim chief executive in March 2022 after Johnson's retirement, handed off to Laxman Narasimhan in April 2023, and stepped down early on March 20, 2023, weeks before testifying before the Senate committee on health, education, labor, and pensions. Each departure tested the institution rather than the man.

Disney was shy, self-deprecating, and insecure in private while adopting a warm, outgoing public persona; biographer Richard Schickel argued he hid his diffidence behind the role of Walt Disney, and Disney himself acknowledged the gap to a friend, noting that the public figure did not smoke or drink while he did both. Colleagues described exceptionally high expectations and little direct encouragement: animator Norman recalled that Disney's phrase that'll work signaled high praise, and that instead of verbal approval he gave financial bonuses or recommended people to others, expecting praise to reach them secondhand. He ran the studio on relentless quality escalation and standards that no one could permanently satisfy. Accusations of racism and antisemitism have been contradicted by many who knew him, including Jewish colleagues in influential positions, while historians still argue over whether he was a purveyor of homely patriotic values or a representative of American cultural imperialism, proof of how completely the man dissolved into the brand.

Apple acquired NeXT in December 1996, returning Jobs to the company he had co-founded, and after the board ousted Gil Amelio as chief executive on July 9, 1997, Jobs became de facto leader, formally interim chief executive on September 16. He moved fast: in March 1998 he terminated the Newton, Cyberdog, and OpenDoc projects to concentrate resources on returning to profitability, and employees joked darkly about sharing an elevator with him in case the doors opened without their jobs, his summary executions being rare but a handful sufficing to terrorize a company. He rewrote the Macintosh clone licensing program to make it prohibitively costly, ending the clonemakers' free ride on the Mac OS. Much of NeXT's technology, most importantly NeXTSTEP, was folded into what became Mac OS X. At Macworld in January 2000 he dropped the interim label and quipped about serving as iCEO, the pun marking a permanent restoration.

On January 27, 2019, Schultz told 60 Minutes he was exploring a run for president as an independent centrist, having hired veteran political consultants Steve Schmidt and Bill Burton to assess the candidacy and reportedly prepared to spend three hundred to five hundred million dollars of his own fortune. The reaction from Democrats was hostile, with critics arguing a third-party candidacy would split the anti-Trump vote and re-elect the president. His first Seattle town hall drew protesters carrying signs reading venti mistake and grande ego, even as his speech itself was received respectfully. In February he said he would stay out of the race if Democrats nominated a centrist, and in May he delayed the decision. On September 6, 2019, he formally ruled out a run, concluding it was not the best way to serve the country at that time; the progression of Joe Biden toward the nomination, a politician ideologically closer to Schultz, shaped the exit, and he endorsed Biden in September 2020.

Vanderbilt's will left ninety-five percent of the estate to his son William and four grandsons, while his surviving son Cornelius Jeremiah and nine daughters received comparatively little, in some cases less than their own nephews. Three of the disappointed heirs sued, claiming their father had been of unsound mind and under William's influence and that of a corrupt spiritualist, alleging staged seances in which a spirit in the form of their dead mother endorsed William as the trustworthy heir. Rather than endure further public airing, William settled, adding two hundred thousand dollars in cash and a four-hundred-thousand-dollar trust for each challenger. Biographer T. J. Stiles credits the Commodore with vastly expanding the nation's transportation infrastructure, embracing new technologies and new forms of corporate organization, and helping create the corporate economy that defined the United States into the twenty-first century. Rankings of all-time American wealth place him second only to Rockefeller as a share of the economy.

My former colleague David Abrams is one of them. David’s contribution in the sixth edition is one of the most brilliant things I’ve ever read. So I felt like we were moving Graham and Dodd into a different era. The thing that’s beautiful about Graham and Dodd is it was written a hundred years ago, give or take, and it was written during the Depression. Things that made sense in a depression haven’t made sense every day since then, because we haven’t been in a depression most of the time since then, if at all. So it was an update — taking what’s valuable, why people revere the book as a Bible, but also making it more accessible and more relevant to the modern day. We expanded it to cover some topics that weren’t covered. It certainly has more international investing, which wasn’t really focused on by Graham. It talks about some private investments, some of the changes in financial markets, the latest manias and fads and all of that, but also the changes in market structure, changes in asset classes that have come into existence. All of that is a valuable updating of the literature, and helps keep something relevant that deserves to be relevant — while updated, because in its original Graham and Dodd 1934 form it wouldn’t be very useful to people. [28:20] BARRY RITHOLTZ: Really, really interesting. Coming up, we continue our conversation with Seth Klarman, CEO and portfolio manager at the Baupost Group, discussing the firm’s evolution and philosophy.

10 The Financial Times Hedge Fund List Each year, the Financial Times (“FT”) publishes a list of the top 20 hedge fund managers by ‘overall profits in absolute dollar terms since inception,’ rather than by rate of return, a methodology developed by Rick Sopher of LCH Rothschild.11 The FT list calculates the current year’s and cumulative profits generated for investors rather than a fund’s net rate of return as alternative measures of a hedge fund manager’s long-term performance. The FT method helps to differentiate among hedge fund managers with similar long-term records by highlighting those with large net profits, distinguishing them from managers who generated their highest returns when they were managing smaller amounts of capital. While the FT measure is a useful one, particularly when combined with an investment manager’s net returns for the year and since inception, it is important to note that a couple of factors can tip the scales on this measure. All other things being equal, the longer the fund manager has been in business and the more assets under management, the easier it is to rank favorably on the list. This year, Pershing Square was ranked fifteenth on the list with gains of $3.1 billion and cumulative gains since inception of $23.3 billion.12 We achieved this result with the smallest amount of year-end assets in our core strategy compared to the 20 managers in the group (the list overstated our year-end 2025 core strategy assets of $17.0 billion by about $3.

Schultz has written four books that mix memoir with corporate philosophy. Pour Your Heart Into It, written with Dori Jones Yang in 1997, tells the founding story through the Il Giornale merger and the benefits programs. Onward, published in 2011 with Joanne Gordon, recounts the 2008 turnaround and drew a divided reception: the Los Angeles Times called it self-flattering, Publishers Weekly found it personal, suspenseful, and surprisingly open, and Fast Company later ranked it among the books that best anticipated the future of workplace leadership, with sale proceeds donated to the Starbucks Foundation. For Love of Country, co-written with Rajiv Chandrasekaran in 2014, focused on veterans rather than business. From the Ground Up appeared in 2019, was read widely as a campaign book ahead of the election, reached the Wall Street Journal and New York Times bestseller lists, and drew a politically charged reaction on Amazon, where negative reviews from Democratic voters left it rated below two stars.

6 billion with the inclusion of PSH’s debt outstanding), and we tied with one other manager for youngest firm (the mean launch year on the list excluding Pershing Square was 1990).13 In short, we are pleased with our ranking on the FT list, but even more so when our small size and youthful firm age are considered. We would suggest that in future years the FT and Rick consider creating an alternative ranking which considers these factors, as adjusting for age and size in the calculation may provide a more insightful measure of long-term hedge fund performance. Stock Market Dynamics In our 2024 first half letter, I wrote: The stock market has increasingly been characterized by a growing percentage of the market capitalization of companies being held by effectively permanent owners, principally index funds.of

Jobs's design aesthetic drew on the Zen Buddhism he studied in India and under Kobun Chino Otogawa, and on his stated ambition, echoing Edwin Land, to stand where humanities meet sciences. Wozniak insisted Jobs never coded and did no original engineering; early employee Daniel Kottke likewise cast Wozniak as the innovator and Jobs as the marketing mind. Yet Jobs is named as inventor or co-inventor on 346 United States patents and applications spanning devices, touch interfaces, keyboards, adapters, staircases, clasps, sleeves, and packaging, with roughly 200 shared with design chief Jonathan Ive, and his contributions concentrated on the look and feel of products rather than utility-patent engineering. Even hospitalized and terminally ill he sketched devices to hold an iPad in a hospital bed and redrew an oxygen monitor for simplicity. Since his death he has been granted 141 further patents, bringing his total beyond 450.

I’m Barry Ritholtz, you’re listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. [SEGMENT BREAK] [29:10] BARRY RITHOLTZ: My extra special guest this week is Seth Klarman. He’s CEO and portfolio manager at the Baupost Group, a legendary value and distressed investment shop out of Boston, running over $22 billion in assets. So let’s talk a little bit about the way you think of opportunities and risks. During the ’08-’09 financial crisis, you raised about $4 billion, and the research I read had you deploying $100 million a day into distressed assets. That seems like a big chunk of money. First of all, are those numbers remotely accurate? Is that ballpark? [29:57] SETH KLARMAN: It’s ballpark. What I would tell you first of all is, we had been closed for new clients much of our history, but we kept a list in case. So when the market started to fall apart after Bear Stearns, and then after Lehman, there were all kinds of things going on and people were in great stress as we entered the uncertainty of an economic decline that could have pretty epic proportions. As it turned out, it certainly was the worst decline since the Great Depression, and it stands out as the mother of all bear markets for anybody in the last hundred years. So the challenge was, maybe it’s time to take some capital, and the odds are increasing every day that we’re going to be able to deploy it fruitfully. So what you said is about right.

In October 2003 Jobs was diagnosed with cancer, and in mid-2004 he told employees he had a tumor in his pancreas — a rare, less aggressive islet-cell neuroendocrine type, distinct from the usually fatal form of the disease. Biographer Walter Isaacson reported that Jobs resisted his doctors' recommendations for nine months, trying a vegan diet, acupuncture, herbal remedies, and treatments found online, before undergoing a Whipple procedure in July 2004 that appeared to remove the tumor; he received no chemotherapy or radiation, and Tim Cook ran the company meanwhile. Speculation mounted as his keynotes turned gaunt, and in August 2008 Bloomberg briefly published a prepared obituary with blanks for age and cause of death, which Jobs answered by paraphrasing Mark Twain on exaggerated reports of his death, then closed another presentation with a slide reading 110/70, his blood pressure. In January 2009 he took a six-month leave; Cook, who shared his rare blood type, offered a portion of his own liver and was refused. Jobs underwent a liver transplant in Memphis that April, with a prognosis described as excellent.

Pershing Square Holdings, Ltd. 8 companies, and are important marginal buyers and sellers of a security. These shorter-term investors – which include so-called market-neutral and quantitative funds – use large amounts of margin, derivative, and total return swap leverage in their strategies. As highly leveraged market participants, these investors’ tolerance for mark-to-market losses is small, which contributes to stock price volatility as they can become effectively forced sellers when companies disappoint, even in the short term. This phenomenon of massive short-term volatility in even the largest, most well-capitalized and most closely followed companies has only increased over the last two years. As a result, the stock market at times feels ‘broken;’ that is, stocks can trade in, what appears to us, a completely irrational fashion in the short term when a company fails to meet and/or exceed analysts’ or investors’ expectations. While short-term disappointments can be a harbinger of future underperformance, the degree of downward volatility in many cases appears irrational – well in excess of reasonably anticipated potential intrinsic value risk or impairment due to the potential disappointment. In many cases, the market has responded in a negative way to news that we viewed favorably, and with the passage of time, the initial negative market reaction has often proven to be an overreaction.

[30:49] BARRY RITHOLTZ: So Bear Stearns, if I’m remembering correctly, was spring of 2008, Lehman was September of ’08. That’s not a lot of time from there until March ’09, when everything really bottoms. I have three questions about this. The first is, how quickly were you able to raise capital, get the docs signed, and be prepared to deploy that as opportunities arose? Doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of time. [31:20] SETH KLARMAN: The team worked heroically, and we were able to raise very significant capital within a quarter. [31:29] BARRY RITHOLTZ: Wow, that’s really quickly. Now you mentioned the team. I have heard some really interesting rumors and legends. How did you put this team together? What were their marching orders? How did everybody operate in that period of absolute turmoil and mayhem? [31:47] SETH KLARMAN: So we were already an established firm. We’d been up and running for a couple of decades by then. So I had a team in place, and they were deeply knowledgeable — experienced distressed-asset expertise in the group. Not everybody on the team has that, but a very high percentage of the team has that. People within Baupost are like versatile athletes. We’re nimble, we’re agile, and we cross-train — kind of like baseball teams are doing now in the minor leagues. They don’t want you to just be a third baseman, they also want you to play outfield and maybe second if need be.

The same with us: we have people that sit in four different groups, as you mentioned, but all of them can work on distressed situations. And people in the private investments especially love when we’re super busy in the public markets, and we call them in to work on a distressed credit. [32:42] BARRY RITHOLTZ: So a big chunk of capital, very aggressively deployed, in a moment in time when so many people seemed to be just paralyzed and frozen with fear. Was it just the value analytical framework, or was it a little broader and deeper than that? [33:01] SETH KLARMAN: Yeah, I think, Barry, that the way you’re conveying it probably comes across as, we come in with giant satchels of money and hand over fist. It wasn’t like that at all. It was the same cerebral, methodical, painstaking environment that we have every day. We see things trading at lower prices, and we notice that, and we look at the fundamentals. Everything we do at Baupost is bottom-up. Nothing’s top-down. We’re not saying, probably a good time to be a contrarian — none of that. We’re saying, oh, I can buy this bond at 70 that I think is covered at par. People are worried maybe it could have a blip or a problem for a while, but people aren’t really doubting that there’s something there. As the economy got worse, people may have started to doubt more and more, and prices come in more and more.

On January 17, 2011, Apple announced another medical leave so Jobs could focus on his health, with Cook again running day-to-day operations while Jobs stayed involved in major strategic decisions. He still appeared at the iPad 2 launch on March 2, presented iCloud at the developers' conference on June 6, and pitched Apple's proposed new campus to the Cupertino City Council on June 7. On August 24, 2011, he resigned as chief executive, writing to the board that if there ever came a day when he could no longer meet his duties and expectations, he would be the first to let them know, and that unfortunately that day had come. He became chairman and named Cook his successor, and worked for Apple until the day before his death. He died at home in Palo Alto on October 5, 2011, of respiratory arrest from a relapse of the tumor, his sister Mona Simpson reporting that his final words, hours earlier, were monosyllables repeated three times. Flags flew at half-staff at Apple and Microsoft; California declared October 16 Steve Jobs Day.

We believe that current market dynamics are due to the ever-growing percentage of capital controlled by highly-leveraged market participants who have extremely short-term objectives, and are incentivized or required to exit when certain stop loss triggers are hit due to margin and/or total-return swap leverage and/or risk limits, amplified by the reduction in float due to growing index ownership. The market increasingly appears like a casino where money is wagered over the course of a day, hours, minutes or even seconds. This mismatch between stocks, which represent perpetuity interests in businesses that are inherently long-term assets, and their temporary ‘owners,’ creates growing opportunities for the patient investor with stable capital. Because of our permanent capital structure, the increasingly volatile market dynamics will likely continue to offer us occasionally extraordinary opportunities to buy the highest quality durable growth companies in the world at bargain prices. Market Valuation Since the onset of COVID-19, equity markets have delivered strong returns. From 2020 through 2025, the S&P 500 has generated a 112% total return or 13% per annum.14 While the past five years have experienced enormous volatility due to significant geopolitical, pandemic, and inflation-related challenges, the overall result has been a strong, multi-year advance in the index. Stock market performance has been particularly robust over the last three years.

Jobs kept his giving private and thin. Shortly after leaving Apple in 1985 he formed the Steven P. Jobs Foundation to focus on nutrition and vegetarianism, but closed it within the year as NeXT absorbed him; on returning to Apple in 1997 he eliminated the company's philanthropic programs, which were never restored, and Stanford Social Innovation Review later listed Apple among America's least philanthropic companies. He declined to sign the Giving Pledge that Warren Buffett and Bill Gates launched in 2010. He gave $50 million to Stanford's hospital, and Bono credited Apple-driven efforts with tens of millions of dollars for AIDS and HIV relief in Africa that inspired other companies to join. His honors tell the public story: the National Medal of Technology in 1985, awarded jointly with Wozniak by President Reagan; Inc. magazine's Entrepreneur of the Decade in 1989; Fortune's most powerful person in business in 2007; and, posthumously, the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Biden in 2022 and induction as a Disney Legend in 2013.

So we were literally able to buy mortgage securities, residential mortgage securities; we were able to buy corporate debt, especially the auto finance companies, the financial arms of General Motors and Chrysler and Ford. And when Lehman goes broke, that had pieces within its capital structure that got very interesting. So we were seeing all kinds of things, and we were kind of kids in a candy store. Sadly — right, it’s a tough time, people are hurting — but also, as an investor, you’re a fiduciary and you’ve got to put money to work to benefit your clients. So in every case we were stress-testing: hey, if the world got even worse, if this turned out to be 1933, will this investment be okay? That’s the only place where we’re making decisions — if the downside is protected, and if we can see lots of paths to winning, then we’re very interested. So we found a lot to do in distressed. We also owned equities, we also found private investments, and there were just all kinds of things worth doing in that era. The challenge in investing, for everybody, is you want to make sure that those environments are going to happen once in a while, and you need to make sure you don’t blow up during them, and if possible you make sure you’ll have capacity to buy when the best opportunities become available and your competitors are sidelined. That’s the moment investors need to at least have in their heads: how are you going to handle that environment?

The S&P 500’s total return over this period was 26% in 2023, 25% in 2024, and 18% in 2025 including dividend reinvestment. This sustained high level of performance has naturally led some observers to question whether market valuations have become detached from fundamentals. In our view, while the stock market could decline materially from current levels for reasons that are today unknown, the stock market’s advance has been largely supported by earnings growth rather than speculative excess. Of the S&P 500’s roughly 13% average annual return from 2020 through 2025, approximately 10 percentage points were attributable to earnings-per-share growth while only about three percentage points came from P/E multiple expansion. In other words, the market has not been driven principally by investors simply paying a higher multiple for earnings, but rather by the growth in profits of the index’s components. The S&P 500’s ~10% earnings-per-share growth over the past six years compares with ~7% in the five years prior to COVID and roughly ~8% since 1990. In the last two years, earnings-per-share growth has been even higher with 13% growth in 2024 and 14% in 2025. In the next two years, stock market analysts estimate that earnings per share will continue to grow at 14%.

Because if you’re too exposed, if you’re getting margin calls, if you’re getting massively redeemed because you took the wrong clients and they’re short-term, then you’re going to be out of commission on that day. So to be around on that day and be able to do what we do — we just did the same thing we do every day, you did it in a little bigger size. [35:45] BARRY RITHOLTZ: So I’m kind of fascinated by the dynamic tension between fundamental bottoms-up research on a credit-by-credit or equity-by-equity basis versus the top-down. You’ve said that you really don’t think about markets or investing from a top-down perspective, but it seems that everybody who panicked, everybody who helped create those distressed assets, was either responding or over-responding to the top-down environment. How do you look at that sort of environment? [36:21] SETH KLARMAN: There are several layers to that. First of all, people were responding to all kinds of things. They were responding to redemption requests by their mutual fund shareholders. They were responding to credit downgrades, so it wasn’t just nervousness that things are going to be bad — this bond is no longer investment grade, and maybe my mandate is I can only own investment-grade bonds; or this bond has defaulted and I can no longer hold it. So you have forced selling all over the place.

Observers on both sides described Jobs's power of persuasion as a reality distortion field, on fullest display in the keynote addresses nicknamed Stevenotes at Macworld Expos and developer conferences. He wore a daily uniform of an Issey Miyake black mock turtleneck, Levi's 501 jeans, and New Balance sneakers, telling biographer Walter Isaacson he liked the daily convenience and the signature style of a personal uniform. He closed his January 2007 Macworld keynote by quoting hockey star Wayne Gretzky's line about skating to where the puck is going to be rather than where it has been, and applied it to Apple's whole history. His long public feud with Michael Dell ran from a 1987 jab about un-innovative beige boxes through Dell's 1997 advice to shut Apple down and return money to shareholders; when Apple's market value passed Dell's in 2006, Jobs emailed staff a short, gleeful note that Dell had proven imperfect at predicting the future.

Pershing Square Holdings, Ltd. 9 This increase in earnings growth is one of the most important developments in the market over the last several years, and it is not evenly distributed across the index. A substantial portion of the market’s elevated growth in earnings has been driven by the top ten largest companies in the S&P 500, which have had a disproportionate impact on the index’s performance and its price/earnings multiple in light of the index’s capitalization-weighted composition. Collectively, the ten largest companies, which account for nearly 40% of the capitalization of the overall index, are expected to grow their earnings per share by more than 20% for each of the next two years, which is nearly triple the level of growth expected for the remaining 490 companies in the index. We believe this concentration of performance and market value is not a temporary phenomenon, but rather a reflection of the durable structural advantages enjoyed by the highest-quality mega cap companies, which include their global scale, dominant market positions, access to low-cost capital, and leadership in artificial intelligence and related technologies. If the S&P 500 can sustain structurally higher earnings growth driven disproportionately by the top handful of these companies, we believe the market’s P/E multiple is justified and can remain sustainably higher than historical averages.

And forced selling — you never want to be a forced seller, and you especially want to be able to buy from forced sellers in any asset class if that comes along. I’m not a mountain climber or a big hiker, but if you’re going to climb a mountain, you want to look bottom-up: is this the right trail, is it safe, do I have my equipment, am I prepared? And then you also want to have the top-down view — what’s the weather? What if it suddenly gets snowy up there, if the wind’s 60 miles an hour, how am I going to handle that? So you kind of want to have in your head the weather forecast. I’m always thinking about, is this environment safe? In today’s market, it feels stretched, but it also feels like we’re on the brink of an unprecedented technology, an era that might be one of very substantial prosperity, but also one of risk to society and great change. So bottom-up still feels like the right way to invest, but you still need your eye on the weather in the financial markets. That means, where’s GDP going, what’s the national debt, where’s inflation going to take us? I always have an eye on that stuff, but we’re not investing our portfolio based on that — the same way we don’t invest based on a macro view that this country would be a good place to invest in. Rather, we notice a security bottom-up and say, wow, that seems egregiously mispriced. I wonder if there are more mispricings. Maybe we should look at that market a little bit closer.

We have increased our exposure to a number of these high-quality, higher-growth mega cap companies with the purchase of Alphabet in early 2023, Amazon in April of 2025, and Meta (together “The Three”) late last year. In each case, we acquired our stakes in these companies at opportunistic prices due to short-term dislocations in their share prices: Alphabet shortly after the release of ChatGPT by OpenAI, Amazon in the days after President Trump’s launch of global tariffs, and Meta when the market responded negatively to its capex spending program. We have long admired The Three, but only recently did we have the opportunity to acquire them at large discounts to their intrinsic values. We believe that The Three offer substantially higher long-term growth than the substantial majority of S&P 500 companies, while trading at modestly higher earnings multiples despite what we believe to be their long-term sustainable competitive advantages. In the first six weeks of the year, the stock prices of each of Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta have declined due to their announcements of large AI-related capex programs well in excess of market expectations. We believe the market’s negative response to these large capex announcements is misguided. The Three have a long-term track record of allocating capital intelligently and have been explicit in stating that their capex investments are in response to massive increases in demand and/or internal use cases that offer high rates of return.

[38:36] BARRY RITHOLTZ: So let’s talk a little bit about cash. I think a lot of investors look at cash as a drag on their performance — the net return is usually zero or close to zero relative to inflation. How do you think of cash? It’s always been such a historically important part of your toolkit. What sort of optionality does it create, versus the career pressure of staying fully invested at all times? [39:06] SETH KLARMAN: You’re nailing it with your question. You’ve covered all the parts of holding cash. Cash can be valuable optionality. Just imagine you have a reasonably concentrated portfolio, and a large position or two comes off the books. Should you put it to work in a nanosecond? Or can you wait until something really interesting comes along? That’s the origin of us holding cash — positions would come off and we’d hold some cash until something great came along. But not just a couple of percent. With concentrated positions, we have 5% and 10% positions in the portfolio. When two or three of them come off, cash goes from next to nothing to 15% or 20%. So that’s the origin, that’s how we got started with the idea that we would hold some cash from time to time. That said, I would accept that I almost certainly made a mistake in holding cash to that extent. There were times when we were 30% cash and even higher, and I viewed it as valuable optionality.

Importantly, The Three have the financial wherewithal to comfortably make these investments. When a business you own, managed by a management team you trust, announces a large increase in capital spending due to increased demand for its products or services, you should be applauding rather than booing. If, however, the surprise in capital spending is due to an unexpected increase in capex due to larger than anticipated maintenance capex requirements, then boos are appropriate. As long as a company’s increased capex spending is on projects that are expected to deliver returns comfortably in excess of the company’s cost of capital and the company has the financial wherewithal to make these investments, the company’s growth and intrinsic value should increase as a result. We believe the large recently announced capex programs at Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta meet these standards and will contribute to accelerated and sustained increases in their long-term intrinsic values and further improvements in their competitive positions. Howard Hughes Holdings Since our initial investment in Howard Hughes Holdings (“HHH”) nearly 15 years ago, we have believed that the company’s unique portfolio of master planned communities represents one of the highest-quality collections of real estate development assets in the country.

The problem is the optionality didn’t pay off very well for big swaths of time — especially in a period of suppression of interest rates and the Fed printing a lot of money in the U.S., running large deficits, where we really haven’t had a serious downturn in almost two decades. So that amount of cash became painful. The argument for holding cash, when the client says “I’m not paying you to hold cash,” my answer would be, I’m not getting paid to hold cash, I’m getting paid to use my judgment on when to deploy the money and in what to deploy it. So I feel like that’s right, but I felt like I was not optimizing for our clients in an environment that stopped being as volatile as the one I’d grown up in. So we changed our strategy somewhat. We made our liquid books more liquid, especially our public equity book, where we used to own companies with, you know, $500 million or $1 billion market cap. Now we own much bigger market-cap holdings on average. That liquidity in the public equity book has made us feel better that we can pivot on a dime with a large percentage of our book. So we don’t need as much cash to be able to take advantage of a sudden opportunity that shows up. [41:21] BARRY RITHOLTZ: A lot of larger equity funds, when they’re sitting in cash, use the SPDR ETFs, rolling into SPY, so they’re not falling behind a benchmark, and then it’s deep and liquid if they want to deploy that.

Yet, despite the attractive long-term economics of these communities, HHH’s share price has persistently failed to reflect the company’s intrinsic value and attractive business attributes. We attribute the trading discount to the inherent complexity of the business, the company’s exposure to vacant land and real estate development, and the long-term nature of the company’s business model to which investors assign a high cost of capital.

In a momentum market, is that a bad strategy, or are you just adding risk to avoid the cash risk? [41:46] SETH KLARMAN: We think about our benchmark as an absolute return, not a relative return. So we’re not very interested in keeping up with the market. The market’s going to do what it does — and especially a market this concentrated in a handful of names, which it’s really been for a number of years, with the big names that carry the market often, not always, but often expensive, overpriced. We just think that’s not the right way to think about it. We want to earn absolute return. We want to beat inflation by hundreds of basis points. And if we’re doing that, we’re not going to worry about whether that’s ahead of the market or behind. I think over the fullness of time, a good absolute-return strategy is going to beat the market too. [42:28] BARRY RITHOLTZ: So let’s talk about some of the opportunity sets that you look at. You mentioned equities, we talked about distressed debt. You also make real estate investments, other private investments. How do you think about capital allocation across these buckets? Are you using percentage terms, or are you just purely opportunistic? [42:50] SETH KLARMAN: So we came about these through our experiences. We didn’t just wake up one day and say, let’s be in four different areas. Rather, we noticed that over the transom, interesting private investments were coming into the portfolio.

Pershing Square Holdings, Ltd. 10 In May, Pershing Square Holdco, L.P. (“Holdco”), the management company or “GP” of the Pershing Square funds, acquired a $900 million stake in HHH increasing our total ownership to 47% of HHH (15% by Holdco and 32% by the Pershing Square funds). As part of the transaction, I returned to the company as Executive Chairman along with Ryan Israel as Chief Investment Officer. We have also made available to HHH the full resources of Pershing Square as part of a services arrangement in which we receive management fees. We have reduced the management fees paid by PSH dollar-for-dollar by the fees paid to Pershing Square by HHH that are attributable to the HHH common stock held by PSH, which will reduce PSH’s management fees while allowing us to accelerate value creation at HHH. Our approach to the transformation of HHH is not meaningfully different from that of other companies in which we have invested that were underperforming their potential. In these other examples, we have worked to address a business’ underperformance by making changes to governance, management, capital structure, cost structure, and/or strategy. The only difference here is that the new additions to management are comprised of Pershing Square employees. The HHH board has also been refreshed with three additional members, Susan Panuccio, the former CFO of News Corp.

We were getting phone calls: hey, would you inject capital into this business? Would you buy this portfolio of venture investments from a failed company that needed to sell them? Would you buy 22% of a company owned largely, 78%, by a large Middle Eastern company, with 22% up for sale? Well, at three times EBITDA, maybe you would. So literally, by seeing examples one at a time, bottom-up, we started to figure out that there were more things to focus on than just the public equity markets. One of our specialties is distressed credit, and we became really good at it. We’ve got smart people, we’re very patient. Sometimes there’s nothing to do, there’s nothing distressed; other times there’s an avalanche of opportunity. In all of our areas, we built teams of versatile people, so that our team is basically a generalist team, and the same person can work on a private investment, a credit investment, an equity investment. Real estate is a bit more specialized than that, but even within real estate, many people have a land person and a hotel person — we don’t do that. Everybody works on everything. So we have the team in place and we’re able to respond bottom-up. The bottom-up approach to opportunity lets us allocate capital better than if we were doing it top-down. A lot of people will look at historic returns and say the expected return for owning private equity will be mid-teens or upper-teens, the expected return for venture capital will be better than that. We don’t do that.

; Thom Lachman, the Chairman and CEO of Duracell, a Berkshire Hathaway company; and Jean-Baptiste Wautier, the former Chairman of the Investment Committee and CIO of BC Partners, a large European private equity firm. JB also serves as a director of PSH. Our long-term objective is to transform HHH into a modern-day Berkshire Hathaway: a diversified holding company built upon a foundation of high-quality, durable growth companies that can compound their intrinsic values at high rates over the long term. In December, HHH took an important step forward in executing its new strategy by entering into a definitive agreement to acquire Vantage Group Holdings, Ltd. (“Vantage”), a specialty insurance and reinsurance company, for $2.1 billion. We believe Vantage is an ideal platform to begin HHH’s transformation. It is well diversified across specialty lines of insurance, has an excellent and experienced management team, and benefits from established regulatory licenses, strong credit ratings, and a growing presence in the market. In light of its short operating history – Vantage was launched in 2020 – it has limited risk associated with long-dated legacy insurance exposures. The Vantage acquisition is expected to close in the second quarter of 2026, subject to regulatory approvals. The transaction will be funded with approximately $1.2 billion of cash from HHH’s balance sheet, together with up to $1.0 billion of preferred equity from PSH (the “HHH Preferred”).

Decision — Disclosed new 6,153,119-share PDD block (~$469M). Context: 13F filed Aug 14, 2026; 8 US holdings. Outcome (partial): Open — newly disclosed.

We really don’t know what asset class is going to do, because we think that’s very time-specific and very valuation-dependent. Rather, we see what’s available right this second. By looking bottom-up, opportunity after opportunity, I think we can paint a really clear picture. So right this second, real estate’s been in tough shape since COVID, especially commercial office. People started working from home and that hasn’t fully returned, and in certain markets especially there’s too much space. A lot of people that have been in real estate have not done that well — a lot of people got in at a wrong vintage, and a lot of properties have become structurally obsolete. So that sounds like a mess — why would you touch it? But it also means that competition is hardly looking. So we think there are opportunities right now, for example in assisted living. The population is aging. You can make a very strong case for fundamentals. Rents haven’t moved up in years, and there’s probably pent-up growth in rents to come. COVID was obviously a giant problem, because any facility tended to empty out as people pulled their relatives out to save their lives during COVID, understandably. A lot of newly built facilities from that era, from 2021, 2022, never got filled, and a lot of them have run into bankruptcy or financial distress. So it’s been an opportunity to build a position in an area with strong fundamentals.

The HHH Preferred is structured to provide bridge equity to HHH while offering PSH a return similar to a direct investment in Vantage plus a small premium in the likely event it is repurchased by HHH over the next several years. If HHH does not fully repurchase the HHH Preferred from PSH, it converts into common stock in Vantage at the initial acquisition price, and PSH has registration rights which can facilitate a public listing of the company. As part of our services arrangement with HHH, Pershing Square will manage the assets of Vantage for no incremental cost. We intend for Vantage to invest 100% of its insurance float in short-term U.S. Treasurys, and over time, its surplus capital in common stocks, similarly to how Berkshire Hathaway has managed its insurance subsidiaries’ assets. We expect that our approach to managing Vantage’s assets will allow it to earn a substantially higher return on equity than a typical insurer, which should enable it to compound its book value at a high rate over time. If we are successful in achieving our expectations for Vantage, it will materially accelerate HHH’s growth profile, diversify the sources of its revenues and earnings, reduce its cost of capital, and accelerate HHH’s long-term growth in intrinsic value and share price. The Current Economic and Market Backdrop We believe that 2026 could be a very strong economic year. There are a number of geopolitical, economic, and political factors and forces that contribute to our view.

Pershing Square Holdings, Ltd. 11 Big Beautiful Bill which will lead to large tax refunds early this year and provide massive incentives for investment, (3) the President and this administration’s highly pro-business posture which drives business confidence and includes a Federal Trade Commission which for the first time in four years is supportive of mergers and acquisitions, unleashing a large number of strategic and other transactions, (4) a massive deregulation initiative led by Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, (5) reduced and stable inflation data that will allow the Federal Reserve to lower rates, (6) the extraordinary scale of data center and energy investments due to AI, (7) the productivity benefits of AI, (8) the wealth effects from stock market and private company valuation gains, (9) the potential for a peace dividend in the Middle East, South America, and potentially Europe as it appears the Russia/Ukraine war is closer to resolution, and (10) the accelerated pace of innovation, software development, and discovery due to AI. All of the above are occurring in a year with mid-term elections that typically swing against the incumbent administration. As such, the Trump Administration is extremely motivated to deliver on promises made and will likely take additional actions that will drive the economy.

The past is the past, but moving forward, it looks like they’re going to have real ramp for rents and for occupancy. We’re seeing opportunity here and there to add to a portfolio of assisted living. Similarly, we like certain parts of the real estate office market, especially some outside the major cities, in a few select markets though. And we’re seeing more in other submarkets within real estate. Real estate, as you know, is a giant market — it’s probably got a market cap around as big as the public equity market — but it has a very different capital structure in terms of who the players are and how much capital they can tap, and the opportunity set. So real estate’s interesting. We like looking at it, and we have a team that’s agile and could deploy capital quickly when something comes along. In private investments, it’s opportunistic, and there have been some things to do lately as capital’s pulled back from private investments. For example, in energy and midstream, that’s led to some things that have trickled down to us that we’ve been very excited about — very high return and well-hedged, so downside-protected. So we’re just opportunistic investors. I would say, though, using my top-down lens that you mentioned, we are certainly nervous. We’re in a bit of an economic boom, possibly an inflationary boom. Who knows what’s going to happen with the Strait of Hormuz, and the result of that. And the demand for AI and AI-related investments is so all-encompassing.

In light of our view that the market is not overvalued and the fact that there are many of the highest-quality growth companies available at prices which offer 20%-30%+ rates of long-term returns at current valuations, including many within our current portfolio, we are constructive on the current economic and market backdrop and on Pershing Square Holdings. 2025 was a great year for Pershing Square. We would not be able to achieve our objectives were it not for the long-term commitment of our shareholders. We are very grateful for your support. Sincerely, William A.Ackman

It’s almost as if the market has said, we want the AI winners, we’re going to dump anything that looks like an AI loser, and maybe we’ll throw out some babies with the bathwater and we don’t care. So we think there’s opportunity even in some larger-cap, high-quality equities that are being thrown out as people want to make the high returns from speculating on AI right now. [48:27] BARRY RITHOLTZ: We’re going to talk a little bit about the current environment in greater detail shortly. I just have to ask one more question about contrarian approaches and opportunity for value investors. The risk is always a value trap — sometimes the market’s negative judgment is actually right. How do you prevent something that’s cheap from suckering you into something that’s on the way to becoming much, much cheaper? [48:58] SETH KLARMAN: You’re asking about something that we’ve had a bit of a painful lesson in over time, which is, cheap is not really a strategy. We tend to look at our investments not as, are they at a discount from what we think they could be worth, but rather, what is our expected go-forward return from here. And we tend to also ask that our investments have catalysts. When we lay out a thesis in an investment conversation, it’s very clear not just how undervalued it is, but why is this going to work? What’s going to drive it?

Pershing Square Holdings, Ltd. 12 PORTFOLIO UPDATE (15) Performance Attribution Below are the contributors and detractors to gross performance of the portfolio of the Company for 2025 and year-to-date 2026.(16) January 1, 2025 – December 31, 2025 January 1, 2026 – February 10, 2026 Alphabet Inc. 10.3 % Brookfield Corporation 0.7 % Federal National Mortgage Association 5.8 % Share Buyback Accretion 0.1 % Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation 5.0 % Bond Interest Expense (0.1)% Brookfield Corporation 3.5 % Universal Music Group N.V. (1.1)% Uber Technologies, Inc. 2.7 % Amazon.com, Inc. (1.4)% Amazon.com, Inc. 2.4 % Uber Technologies, Inc. (1.5)% Share Buyback Accretion 1.2 % Federal National Mortgage Association (1.6)% Hilton Worldwide Holdings Inc. 1.0 % Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (1.8)% Universal Music Group N.V. 0.7 % All Other Positions and Other Income/Expense 1.6 % Meta Platforms, Inc. 0.7 % Restaurant Brands International Inc. 0.5 % Bond Interest Expense (0.8)% Nike, Inc. (2.5)% Chipotle Mexican Grill, Inc. (4.6)% All Other Positions and Other Income/Expense 0.6 % Contributors Less Detractors (Gross Return) 26.5 % Contributors Less Detractors (Gross Return) (5.1)% Contributors or detractors to performance of 50 basis points or more are listed above separately, while contributors or detractors to performance of less than 50 basis points are aggregated, except for share buyback accretion and bond interest expense.

If we can’t make an argument for why it’s turned around in the next year or two, it might be nice that it’s trading at a five-year low, but that doesn’t mean it’s not going to be at a seven-year low and a ten-year low. Our time horizon is not that long. We can’t just hold things that don’t perform for five or ten years. Very few people can do it today, and that’s not holding our feet to the fire. All organizations need to demand accountability from the teams. So we always are asking ourselves a different question about what is going to drive the success of this investment, rather than just letting cheap be enough. It’s not enough. [50:18] BARRY RITHOLTZ: Very interesting. Coming up, we continue our conversation with Seth Klarman, CEO and portfolio manager at the Baupost Group, discussing the state of investing in today’s environment. I’m Barry Ritholtz, you’re listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. [SEGMENT BREAK] [51:12] BARRY RITHOLTZ: My extra special guest today is Seth Klarman. He is the CEO and portfolio manager of value investing legend the Baupost Group. The firm manages about $22 billion in client assets. So we’ve touched briefly on things affecting today’s environment — the price of oil and inflation. We have a Middle East war. We’re still dealing with a new set of tariffs. It seems like every week there’s a different macro headache. How do you think about the current environment?

Is it something that has to be dealt with but sort of compartmentalized? Or do you just look at it as yet another input into fundamental values? [52:10] SETH KLARMAN: So I think AI is a sea change. I’m not a tech guy, and I’m not a personal user at the cutting edge of technology, but I’ve spent a huge amount of time — the advent of AI has forced me, and probably everyone, to just add more time to their day to stay current. I’ve never seen a technology with this kind of importance and potential game-changing magnitude. So I read everything I get my hands on. I listen to a lot of podcasts as well, I read a lot of books and magazine articles. I’m consumed, because even though I don’t think Baupost, as a value firm, is going to find too many ways to get long AI exposure, we don’t want to be behind the curve. We don’t want to not know what we don’t know. So the team is doing a fabulous job thinking about AI, thinking about ways to incorporate it into our processes, but also especially thinking about the implications of AI on our portfolio companies. We have found ways to have a little bit of long exposure in things, for example like data centers, where we own a few private investments at what we think is a very considerable discount to where data centers tend to trade. We’re not sure what the right discount is, or what the right long-term cap rate is, but we think owning it at a significant discount is a good thing.

Past performance is not a guarantee of future results. All investments involve risk, including the loss of principal. Please see accompanying endnotes and important disclaimers on pages 120-123. New Equity Positions: Meta Platforms, Inc. (“Meta”) At the end of last year, we initiated a significant position in Meta, a company we have followed closely for many years. Alongside Alphabet, another one of our core holdings, Meta is the dominant leader in the highly attractive and secularly fast- growing digital advertising space. The company principally owns and operates a “Family of Apps” (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) with an entrenched global user base of over 3.5 billion daily active users. This vast, diverse, and highly engaged audience is the source of a powerful network effect: as more users engage more deeply with Meta’s apps, the apps become incrementally more valuable to both users and advertisers, creating an exceptionally durable competitive advantage. The company's deep insights into consumer behavior and interests allow advertisers to precisely target specific demographics and intentions, making Meta an indispensable and essential marketing platform for businesses seeking highly effective ad spend. Our opportunity to invest in Meta arose following the company’s Q3 2025 earnings call in October when it announced it would spend significantly more on AI initiatives in 2026 than investors had expected, leading to a 20% share price decline.

As a result, we were able to establish our position in Meta at a very attractive valuation of just 20 times earnings per share, earnings which include the significant losses from its Reality Labs segment that amount to nearly 25% of the company’s overall profit. Excluding the Reality Labs losses, the implied market valuation for Meta’s core advertising business was less than 16 times earnings per share. This valuation represented a significant discount to the S&P 500 for one of the world’s great businesses that is currently growing its revenues in excess of 20% per annum.

So we have some exposure, but mostly we’re trying to own a portfolio where we have avoided AI losers, and maybe occasionally found something that the market thinks is an AI loser that we think isn’t, and to otherwise have things with ancillary exposure to AI where we can turn into AI winners, but not pay much for the privilege. So it’s a piece of what we do. In the meantime, obviously you referred to tariffs and the volatility of the president and this administration. There are things coming out of left field all the time. Some of it is policy, some of it is distraction — I think maybe deliberate distraction. And it’s very hard to deal with that. I, like most investors, have said, I need to make a mental note of it, I need to think about who I want to vote for next time there’s an election, but I also need to not get distracted by this, and most of it doesn’t end up mattering on an investment-by-investment basis. So it is a time of tremendous change, high degrees of volatility. And you see the stock volatility is unbelievable. When they love a stock, they can’t get enough of it and it goes through the roof, and when they turn on a stock, it gets clobbered. So the individual stock dispersion is very high, while the overall market volatility is actually quite low. [55:06] BARRY RITHOLTZ: Really interesting. Let’s talk about another distraction and what it might mean. We’re recording this a couple of days before the SpaceX IPO.

It’ll broadcast a couple of days after the SpaceX IPO. This is not only a giant trillion-dollar valuation, but it’s got a lot of hair on the deal, with this tiny float and the Nasdaq waving the rules to put it into the indexes. How do you look at an event like this in terms of the overall gestalt of the market? I know the old line is they don’t ring a bell at the top, but at a certain point, how do you perceive something like this? Does it trouble you? [55:56] SETH KLARMAN: So my compliance team is very clear that I can’t talk about an individual security, and we own no SpaceX, privately or in any other form. What I would say to you is, I share your sense that this is the kind of bell that might ring at the top. It is an unprofitable company in aggregate. It is an enormous valuation. We both read in the paper this morning that Goldman estimates what growth would have to be in some parts of their business — like 100x — to justify the current price for a long period of time. And those projections have a way of not happening. It’s not impossible, but it’s hard. I think investors might be missing just how much money is being sucked out of the system between large IPOs — this won’t be the last one, OpenAI and Anthropic are coming, and there’s a ton of other IPOs that are stuck in institutional investors’ portfolios that they’d love to get off at any point. The float might be tiny today, but you have a large number of shareholders, private investments.

Pershing Square Holdings, Ltd. 13 In our view, concerns surrounding Meta’s elevated spending overlook the transformative potential of AI to accelerate near- term revenue growth and reinforce its long-term competitive moats. We believe Meta is one of the clearest beneficiaries of AI and is already seeing material impact across its core business drivers: content recommendation, user engagement, ad monetization and new product innovation. Improved AI content recommendation systems are driving material growth in user engagement, especially for the video format with time spent watching videos on Instagram up more than 30% year-over-year. Moreover, as content on Meta’s platforms has increasingly broadened from the “social graph” (friends/family/followed accounts) to include a wider range of interest-based content from a diverse group of creators, AI recommendation engines enable the company to better understand, surface, and curate content that users desire. Likewise, AI greatly improves ad monetization by leveraging Meta's rich first-party data to deliver more relevant and targeted ads. Automation capabilities – from the company’s Advantage+ suite to its generative AI ad creation tools – facilitate an end-to-end self-serve model for advertisers. We are also encouraged by AI's potential to unlock new commercial use cases and engagement modes.

We read again this morning that 10% or 15% of some endowments’ entire endowment is in the one name SpaceX. So they’re going to want to sell. Employees are going to want to monetize and go from being wealthy on paper to wealthy in a bank deposit. So that’s a lot of stock for sale. And we have to sell that stock while apparently Google and Facebook need more money, and OpenAI and Anthropic need more money, and utilities need more money for power, and chip companies need to build new factories in America. There’s so much demand for money. I think we’re in a vulnerable place, where ultimately supply and demand for money determines the cost of capital. That’s true in the bond market, and it’s in effect in the stock market. So we might be looking at some supply-demand excess where prices soften just because there’s so much supply of securities and the need to monetize is so great by these private companies. [58:18] BARRY RITHOLTZ: So let’s talk about another imbalance between supply and demand through history, because Baupost has been around for over four decades. You’ve traded and invested through and survived all sorts of different market regimes — inflation, disinflation, the dot-com bubble, the financial crisis, QE and ZIRP, COVID, and more recently the return to, let’s just call it, normalized interest rates. Has anything changed since 1982? Is it just the same screaming from one crisis to another? Or do things eventually sort of moderate, do we learn from these experiences?

For instance, the rollout of Business AI on Meta’s messaging platforms could be a game-changer for businesses to pursue scalable, low-cost customer engagement and wearables like Meta Ray-Bans, which present new avenues to leverage AI interactively in the real world. We believe the substantial upside potential from AI, both within Meta’s compute-constrained core business and in its new initiatives, supports front-loading investments in infrastructure and talent. After Meta’s next year's planned spending ramp, we expect the company to resume its rapid long-term earnings growth algorithm. Notably, in its year-end earnings call at the end of January, management stated that the near-term acceleration in revenue growth would allow it to continue to grow operating income in 2026 despite significantly elevated levels of investment spending. In addition, the company noted that losses at the Reality Labs division will peak in 2026 and moderate in future years. Should Meta’s high levels of revenue growth slow down or the returns on its AI investments be lower than anticipated, we are confident the company will be able to retain the operational levers – reminiscent of the 2023 “Year of Efficiency” – to moderate expenses, maintain profit margins, and deliver continued strong earnings-per-share growth. Our investment in Meta highlights our approach of closely following a watchlist of high-quality businesses and waiting patiently for an attractive entry price.

What’s the same, what’s different? [59:11] SETH KLARMAN: I think all investors should be students of history, as we talked about. Over the course of history, there are cycles. You’re going to have a cycle where you’re at war, and then another cycle where people are tired of war and you have peace for a while. At some point you have peace long enough that people forget how bad war is, and you end up in another war. You have those similar cycles whether it’s government spending, inflation and deflation, that sort of thing. Even the nature of debt — debt feels great when nobody’s asking you to pay it back, or interest rates are low. At some point that becomes pernicious and a giant problem. So we’re likely to always see those cycles, at least as long as humans are in charge of markets. How do you navigate it? You navigate it by realizing that you may not see the cycle with clarity while you’re in it, but you know there are cycles, you know that what seems to be true today for all time probably won’t be true for all time, and you hold on to that. So again, it goes to the idea of holding inconsistent ideas in your head at the same time: this is both true, and likely at some point to become less true or untrue, and you don’t know exactly how. So how do you hold the portfolio? You diversify. When things are up a lot and become more expensive and the go-forward return is low, you take profits, you trade out.

Having recently trimmed and sold other holdings, we held sufficient cash to move quickly and invest in a business we have long admired that has experienced a significant decline in its share price in recent months due to near-term concerns, which we do not believe will impact the longer-term Meta story. Current Equity Positions: Alphabet (“Google”) Alphabet, the parent company of Google, delivered strong business performance in 2025, highlighting its unique ability to leverage core strengths in data, distribution, infrastructure, and research expertise to successfully capitalize on its vast AI potential. AI is having a profoundly transformative impact on the company’s core advertising platform. Google’s unrivaled digital “real estate” and consumer mindshare allow for the deployment of AI products at a massive scale. In Search, this is most evident in the global roll-out of AI Overviews. Now reaching more than two billion users in more than 200 countries, AI Overviews is the world’s most widely used AI product by a significant margin. Notably, its introduction has accelerated query growth in Search, with the most pronounced effects seen among younger demographics. Similarly, in YouTube, Google’s focus on multi-modal AI, specifically image and video generation, has driven material improvements to recommendation algorithms and creator tools.

Pershing Square Holdings, Ltd. 14 Google’s product innovation cycle benefits tremendously from the pioneering work of DeepMind, a frontier AI research lab which the company presciently acquired in 2014. Late last year, DeepMind launched Gemini 3, the company’s most advanced foundational AI model, which promptly topped the leaderboards in major evaluation benchmarks. More importantly, as a sign of improving product velocity, Google quickly integrated Gemini 3 into Search and its broader app ecosystem simultaneously with its release. We believe Google’s AI leadership is increasingly gaining external validation, most notably through the recently announced partnership with Apple to power Siri with Gemini. Within the company’s Cloud segment, Google’s full-stack approach to AI is increasingly becoming a key differentiator. The combination of cost-advantaged technical infrastructure, bolstered by proprietary TPU semiconductor chips, and world-class models has propelled Google Cloud into a $70 billion run-rate revenue business, which grew at an impressive 48% rate in Q4 2025. With that increasing scale, the Cloud segment’s profitability has rapidly improved to 24% profit margins in 2025 from break-even profitability when we initiated our position in the company in 2023.

When things are out of favor so badly that the returns look high, maybe there’s a time to step in and buy during a period when others are dumping. So I think it’s that. Stay focused on the bottom-up. Remember broadly the weather — so when you go camping, you do prepare appropriately for stormy days, not just in the mountains but in the financial markets. And look on the downside as best we can by doing deep fundamental analysis, by knowing our names unbelievably well, by not being afraid to sell them when the price is up, and the same as we buy more when the price is down, by finding securities that are maybe more senior in nature, whether in public or private markets, and by macro-hedging the portfolio to an extent, because we know that those rainy days are going to happen. So we’re buying macro protection when vols are low and people think nothing bad is going to happen, so we can sell that at a gain — both because the price moved, and because vol moved up during a stormier moment in the markets. [61:38] BARRY RITHOLTZ: So we now have a new Fed chair, and that’s a great leaping-off point. There’s a lot of skepticism broadly, but you’ve been pretty skeptical about Fed policy since the financial crisis. How do you think rates have affected investors? What’s been the impact on behavior? And are we at a point now where rates are more or less normalized? How do you look at the present environment?

While Alphabet’s share price appreciated meaningfully in 2025 to reflect its strong product and business momentum, we believe it continues to trade at an attractive valuation for a business of its quality, leadership position in AI and ability to grow earnings per share at a high-teens rate over the medium term. Amazon.com, Inc. (“Amazon”) Amidst tariff-related market volatility in April 2025, we were able to initiate a position in Amazon at a highly compelling valuation. Amazon operates two of the world’s great, category-defining franchises between its Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud business and its e-commerce retail operations. Both businesses are underpinned by decades-long secular growth trends, occupy dominant market positions, and leverage their immense scale to continually enhance their customer value proposition. AWS is the leader in the highly concentrated cloud hyperscaler market, benefiting from the long-term migration of IT workloads to the cloud. Amazon.com is also the world’s largest e-commerce retailer, enabled by a one-of-a-kind logistics network that fulfills over $700 billion in gross merchandise value annually. Despite these compelling attributes, concerns around AWS’s growth trajectory, compounded by broader tariff-related market volatility, presented a compelling entry point in April 2025 and we were able to initiate our position at a valuation of only 25 times forward earnings, which was near the lowest valuation multiple in the company’s history.

[62:07] SETH KLARMAN: You know, I believe in people taking responsibility for their actions. I believe that we are a healthier system when there’s a reckoning for excess, for egregious speculation, and for over-leverage. So I kind of hated that the Fed took rates — I totally understood why the Fed took rates down to zero after the great financial crisis, and that it was really the only way to hold things together, give time to heal. But by leaving rates there for an extra decade, after there was no crisis, I think we stoked a problem. We incentivized speculation and maybe disincentivized responsibility. We saw that firsthand in 2022, when the market had gone higher and higher and you had those SPACs and all kinds of garbage-y companies trading at very high prices, the meme stocks. And then it blew up in 2022 — a lot of stocks down, you know, 50, 70, 80, 90, 95%. That’s what happens when you get that kind of unregulated speculation. I think today we are back speculating, in an area that feels more legitimate. It’s hard to say exactly what’s going to happen with the continued development of AI, with the possibility of AGI coming, and what that will mean. We don’t know whether it’s going to lead to massive unemployment, or whether it’s going to lead to incredible prosperity, or whether it’s going to create even more dispersion in the economy between the people who are doing well and the people who are not — the K-shaped economy. That’s a real source of concern.

So there’s always going to be that kind of uncertainty. I think what we should agree on is that there’s going to be a path that nobody today, in 2026, could say with any precision what things are going to look like in two or four or ten years. And the dilemma with that is, people are paying very high prices as if the future is extremely predictable and clear, when obviously, given what’s going on, it is anything but that. [64:22] BARRY RITHOLTZ: So before I get to my favorite questions, I just have two or three other questions I have to ask you that are a little more personal, starting with: you very famously kept a low profile in a business that has historically rewarded publicity. Was that a conscious decision? Was that a strategic approach? And why be a little more publicly stoic? [64:54] SETH KLARMAN: So I’m probably a little bit more the introvert. I’m not looking to be on TV or in the papers. I also think a lot of the work we do is better off when everybody isn’t looking to copy our investments. If you want to accumulate a stock, you’re better off if everybody doesn’t know that you’re trying to do that — you’re going to get a better price, like in any business transaction. That said, we’re not a recluse. Everybody knows where we are, everybody knows members of our team, we’re very well known on the Street. You just don’t see me on TV talking about it all the time. I don’t know why that’s a bad thing. It feels to me like a good thing.

We believe that investor concerns at the time underestimated both the inherent resiliency of Amazon’s business model and its significant growth runway. While it remains early in our holding period, the company’s strong operating results since our purchase have helped to validate our investment case. We expect increasing AI adoption to materially extend and potentially accelerate AWS’s growth trajectory. AWS is currently a ~$140 billion run-rate revenue business that grew at an impressive 20% rate in 2025. In fact, from Q2 2025 to Q4 2025, AWS’s growth accelerated from 17% to 24%. Notably, this impressive growth has been achieved despite persistent capacity constraints, as customer demand for compute continued to outpace new supply. To that end, Amazon announced a meaningful increase to its capital expenditure program to accelerate the build-out of new capacity. AWS has doubled its data center capacity since 2022 and is on track to double it again by 2027. We expect this new capacity to be rapidly absorbed by the scaling of AI inference workloads, and believe the current investment cycle to frontload infrastructure investments will deliver strong future returns. In Amazon’s retail operations, the company’s broad merchandising mix has limited the impact of tariffs on results to date. Over the long term, we believe the revenue growth outlook remains bright, and we are encouraged by the opportunity for significant margin expansion in its retail segment.category

[65:38] BARRY RITHOLTZ: And beyond investing, you and your wife have been very active philanthropists. The Klarman Sell Observatory — there’s been just a run of different things. How do you think about philanthropy? How do you think about capital allocation? And how do you make sure that the money that’s going to these causes is being well spent? [66:00] SETH KLARMAN: On our third date, my wife and I were taking a walk on Cape Cod on the beach, and she said — we were just getting to know each other, obviously, third date — she said, what do you hope for in your life? I said, I hope that if I’m able to provide for my family and there are still resources beyond that, I want to give back. And that just comes from my fundamental view — I guess it’s how I was raised — that some of us are going to be fortunate and be in that position, at a time when not everybody is, and it’s both a privilege and a responsibility to give back. You can’t take it with you, and you probably don’t want to. It’s not a good look to spend it all ostentatiously in your lifetime — that’s not my nature. So I’ve always been working to make money to give away, and it’s what keeps me focused today. I love investing as a puzzle, but I love knowing that if we do it well, we serve our clients, and I’m going to have money that I’m going to be able to add to what we give to charity. Charity is a calling. It feels very, very important to me personally. This is a broken world.

Pershing Square Holdings, Ltd. 15 offerings, continues to invest in its logistics network to allow for same-day shipping to an increasing percentage of its customer base, and leverages AI investments to improve the overall customer purchasing experience. We estimate that Amazon’s retail business’s structural profit margin potential to be meaningfully higher than its current ~7% level achieved this year after adjusting for differences in its business mix relative to peers and factoring in its fast-growing, high-margin advertising revenue. Moreover, the company is seeing large productivity gains from warehouse automation and its one-of-a- kind logistics network. As a proof point, per-unit shipping costs have been steadily declining for the last eight quarters in a row. While Amazon’s share price has appreciated from our initial cost, it continues to trade at an attractive multiple of approximately 26 times earnings per share, a highly discounted valuation relative to peers and its expected earnings per share growth rate of 20%+ over the medium to longer term. Brookfield Corporation (“BN” or “Brookfield”) Brookfield is a high-quality, asset-rich, rapidly growing business that has a long-term track record of excellent capital allocation.

There are all kinds of problems, from climate change to a poor education system to challenges to democracy, the threat in America to the way you and I have known it our whole lives, the country that I want — you probably want — future generations to grow up in. America has been amazing for me. I have been such a beneficiary of growing up in this country and having unprecedented opportunities that, if I was in another country, I wouldn’t have had. So I’m grateful for that, and I want to make sure everybody has the same chance. But we also have to be realistic: the American dream is broken for a lot of people. People are less likely today to be able to say that their kids and grandkids will be able to eclipse them, and I think we need to restore that, and we have a lot of hard work to do. So our philanthropy goes into many different areas — some, as you said, in science; some in terms of thinking about democracy and making sure the system holds; some in healthcare; some to the universities that were good to me and my wife. We spread it pretty well, because we believe that a lot of causes will come together to be able to lift up people throughout the country. One of the things we do is a musical instrument fund, because our son is extremely musical, and it reminded us that every kid that is passionate about music should have a chance to have an instrument.

We initiated our position in Brookfield in 2024 during a period of substantial dislocation where BN traded at a deep discount to intrinsic value – essentially valuing its vast invested capital base at close to zero after accounting for its 73% ownership in its asset management franchise, Brookfield Asset Management. Brookfield delivered strong performance in 2025 driven in equal measure by earnings growth and multiple expansion. Distributable earnings (“DE”) – a proxy for recurring economic earnings – showed solid gains, though the headline numbers still obscure the significant latent earnings power at the company. Growth was principally driven by the rapid scaling of Brookfield’s captive annuities and insurance business (“Brookfield Wealth Solutions,” or “BWS”) as BN continues to expand its operations and reposition acquired investment portfolios for higher long-term yields. This growth is expected to accelerate further upon the closing of the Just Group acquisition. This transaction will expand BWS’s fixed-annuity portfolio by ~30% to ~$180 billion and firmly position Brookfield as a major player in the attractive U.K. market where BN is already one of the largest real estate and infrastructure investors.

The decline in earnings contribution from Brookfield’s real estate businesses partially offset BN growth in 2025 and reflects targeted balance sheet simplification actions and softer macroeconomic conditions at Brookfield’s small but highly cash generative residential homebuilder business. Importantly, growth in 2025 remained meaningfully below our view of Brookfield’s structural potential and management’s long-term targets. The company’s current level of Distributable Earnings do not reflect the likely step-function increase in future carried interest realizations, nor the full earnings power of BWS insurance float. In addition, we believe Brookfield’s single largest business, Brookfield Asset Management, which comprises more than 50% of Brookfield Corporation’s total value, is positioned for growth in fee earnings of 20% or more this year. In total, we expect BN’s DE growth to meaningfully accelerate this year with the potential to grow 25% or more, a level that is consistent with management’s targeted 25% annual growth rate over the medium term. Despite Brookfield’s strong growth outlook, its valuation remains compelling. Brookfield presently trades at 14 times our estimate of distributable earnings per share, or only 11 times when adjusted for the steady-state earnings power of BWS and a normalized level of carried interest.

We also do capital gifts to institutions throughout Massachusetts, in some of the harder-hit towns during COVID, or just economically depressed areas — there’s just not a lot of money there. So, kind of as a value investor, I’m seeing an opportunity to refurbish the civic center, or this library in a small town in Massachusetts. It just feels great to know that the people in Pittsfield will have as good a library as the people in Boston. [69:16] BARRY RITHOLTZ: Really interesting. So there’s a question I want to end with before we do our final wrap-up, but there’s a question I want to ask, and we’ll just move it back a couple of beats, because that’s a tough answer to follow — and it’s just Boston sports. I feel obligated to ask during the finals. So you’re a big Boston guy, and you mentioned you were a big fan of the sports pages and all the statistics. What do you think of what’s going on in sports these days? The Celtics didn’t go as far as some people thought. We’re now down two to one in the finals. How are you looking at basketball? What do you like in sports these days? [70:06] SETH KLARMAN: So my two biggest sports passions are baseball — I’m a small owner in the Red Sox — and horse racing. I’ve been fortunate to have some really high-quality thoroughbreds over the years. We won a few races Belmont Stakes weekend, not the Belmont, but a few other stakes races this past weekend. So those are my favorite sports. The Celtics season was disappointing.

We continue to believe Brookfield is an extremely attractive investment with ~20% compounded growth in cash flows over the medium-term and the potential for substantial earnings multiple expansion from current levels.

They played so well the first three quarters of the season, and sadly when their superstar Jayson Tatum came back, I think it got them out of their game, where they had been introducing younger players into the mix, passing the ball a lot, and really winning in an exciting way. So maybe the chemistry just didn’t go as well as they had hoped, and then when Tatum got hurt right at the end of the playoffs, we bowed out. I think sports is great. It’s a place where blue Americans and independent Americans and red Americans can all root for the same team, and can be excited about a sport, and can do it in a way that’s gracious and accepts winning but also accepts losing. Sports is a great equalizer and a great unifier. So I love sports. It serves a lot of positive purposes in a society. It’s a little crazy, because we’re rooting for strangers we’ve never met who represent our city, but it is a powerful way that I think can unite a city. [71:32] BARRY RITHOLTZ: So baseball this year just seems to be so odd. The Mets are having a hard time, the Red Sox — I have no idea what’s going to happen with them this year. What do you think about what’s happening in baseball in 2026? [71:48] SETH KLARMAN: Yeah, I think it is partly small numbers, that we’ve only played 60 or 65 or 70 games, so still a lot of season to go. But statistics, you know, things can mean-revert, eventually catch up.

[72:06] BARRY RITHOLTZ: Is that the same way that — all of us have to decide whether we believe in hot streaks or not, right? It looks like a thing, but in fact, is there really a shooting streak, or is it simply…? [72:19] SETH KLARMAN: And to every good shooter — you get a little overconfident and start taking worse shots. It’s when you take high-percentage shots and you take them consistently. So I think baseball will always surprise you. It’s a perplexing game, where what you draw up on paper doesn’t happen. And it also doesn’t happen in the locker room, where the players can’t understand, “I could hit last year and now I can’t hit.” Part of it is that the opponents adjust. If you’re a rookie like Roman Anthony, and you come up and you hit .300 for two months — he’s hurt now, but the pitching figures out your weak spots and they make you look bad, and then you adjust and you make the pitchers look bad. So there’s that perpetual back-and-forth between defense adjusting and then offense adjusting, and where it ends up determines who goes in the Hall of Fame. [73:18] BARRY RITHOLTZ: Really interesting. All right, let’s jump to our favorite questions we ask all our guests, starting with: who are your mentors who helped shape your career? [73:27] SETH KLARMAN: So I worked for Max Heine and Michael Price at Mutual Shares right out of college, and that was an incredible couple of years.

Pershing Square Holdings, Ltd. 16 Fannie Mae (“Fannie”) and Freddie Mac (“Freddie”) Fannie and Freddie common share prices increased significantly in 2025 as the Trump administration reiterated its commitment to an eventual privatization of the companies. Statements by President Trump, Treasury Secretary Bessent, Commerce Secretary Lutnick, and FHFA Director Pulte have emphasized three key objectives: (1) enhance home affordability by compressing the spread of mortgages over Treasuries, (2) demonstrate a near-term mark to market for the taxpayers’ ownership in the GSEs, and (3) maximize the long-term value of the taxpayers’ investment. On November 18, 2025, we published a simple and straightforward plan that would achieve all three objectives, which we shared in a public presentation on X. This plan includes the following steps: (1) account for the repayment of Treasury’s Senior Preferred Stock, (2) exercise Treasury’s 79.9% common stock warrants in Fannie and Freddie, and (3) relist Fannie and Freddie on the New York Stock Exchange. All three steps can be taken immediately by Treasury and FHFA at President Trump’s direction. This plan would keep the GSEs in conservatorship until the administration can carefully execute an exit, which eliminates timing pressure, maximizes optionality, and avoids any risk of disruption to the mortgage or MBS markets.

If this plan is implemented, the Trump administration could begin working on the necessary actions to achieve a successful exit from conservatorship within the next couple of years. These actions would include revising the capital rule to allow the GSEs to earn adequate returns without raising guarantee fees, modifying the existing Preferred Stock Purchase Agreements to act as an ongoing, paid-for government backstop, codifying and communicating the regulatory powers that FHFA would retain post-conservatorship, and recruiting and incentivizing world-class management and boards of directors for Fannie and Freddie. As we previously disclosed in our X presentation, we believe this plan would drive a re-rating of Fannie and Freddie common shares above $40, roughly five times current levels, implying a valuation of over $300 billion for the taxpayers’ 79.9% stake in the companies. We believe a share sale to investors, whether through a “re-IPO” to raise primary capital or a secondary sale of a portion of Treasury’s ownership, is neither feasible while the entities remain in conservatorship, nor necessary as the companies are recapitalizing rapidly through retained earnings. Hertz Hertz is a leading vehicle rental provider in the early stages of a turnaround led by a strong management team. The company has successfully navigated a challenging period, reached important operational milestones, and is now profitable with a strengthened liquidity profile.

I stayed in close relationship with them over the years — they’ve been great friends and mentors to me. Warren Buffett, who I didn’t know until later in my career, but reading about Warren, reading his annual reports and his old shareholder letters, was very inspiring, and also reminded me of the idea of quality companies, which was not something that Graham and Dodd talked about that much, but was something that Warren taught us all about. So they were the people I would list as mentors. And then I also developed mentors who were kind of peers. I had a tiny firm. I didn’t get trained officially at any big Wall Street firm, but I was able to form friendships with people who ran other funds. Some of those people you probably know — somebody like Richard Perry, or somebody like Frank Brosens, or somebody like Paul Singer — have all been mentors in various ways over the years, in a way that hopefully I’ve provided something to them as well. Finding kindred spirits out there makes all of us both enriched by the experience, but also wiser. [74:45] BARRY RITHOLTZ: Good answer. Let’s talk about books. You mentioned you’re a big reader. What are you reading now? What are some of your favorites? [74:53] SETH KLARMAN: So right now I’m finishing Lloyd Blankfein’s memoir. I’m also reading Michael Pollan’s latest book about consciousness, which is really interesting.

It combines some things I’m intrigued by, including the idea of what plants are up to — plants turn out to be a lot more conscious and a lot more aware of their environment than you might think when you just walk by them and think of it as lawn. There’s a lot more going on with plants. I love history. My favorite is probably Battle Cry of Freedom, about the Civil War. I read a fair amount of everything. I love the Red Queen, evolutionary biology. I’m a pretty good reader of fiction as well — biography, memoir, across the board. [75:42] BARRY RITHOLTZ: You mentioned podcasts. What are you listening to? Or what are you watching and streaming these days? [75:47] SETH KLARMAN: My favorite streaming — I think this may be a golden age of TV streaming. We loved The Pitt, the Pittsburgh general hospital emergency room. It’s just a remarkable series. Noah Wyle, but also a great surrounding cast, just off the charts. We also love Shrinking. [76:10] BARRY RITHOLTZ: Yep, that was a lot of fun. Final two questions. What sort of advice would you give to a recent college grad interested in a career in investing? [76:21] SETH KLARMAN: First of all, go somewhere that you would want your capital invested. If you wouldn’t put your money there, don’t go there. And don’t be afraid to go somewhere out of favor.

The company successfully completed its fleet refresh and is now in an enviable position with an average vehicle age of less than one year. This younger fleet has driven depreciation costs well below management’s target. Negotiations for this year’s vehicle purchases are also essentially complete, and the management team is confident that these agreements will support continued strong unit economics with depreciation remaining below target levels. Operationally, Hertz has made significant strides, achieving 84% utilization this quarter, best-in-class amongst peers and the company’s highest level since 2018. These improvements led to its first profitable quarter in two years. We believe Hertz is on a clear path to delivering mid-single-digit EBITDA margins this year, with a line of sight toward achieving $1 billion in EBITDA in the coming years with continued growth afterwards. Over the course of this year, we see tangible demand drivers that support this growth trajectory including a recovery from the travel slowdown related to the trade war and government shutdown, fiscal stimulus, and the U.S. hosting of the World Cup this summer, which should lead to incremental volume and better pricing.

Two years ago, you would have asked me, and I would have said, well, biotech is hitting lows every day, as though there’s never going to be any new drug discovered or anything good happening in that sector. I would have said, take a close look. Now it’s on fire — a lot of takeovers, a lot of people are doing really well. I think it pays to be a little contrarian, and go somewhere where they’re going to be mentors to you, where they’re willing to be patient with you, where they’re not going to just expect you to make money the first six months you’re there. That’s where you’re going to be able to build a career and learn a lot. [77:08] BARRY RITHOLTZ: Final question. What do you know about the world of markets, risk, and investing today that would have been useful to know 40-plus years ago, when you were first getting started? [77:21] SETH KLARMAN: I’ve thought about that. It’s a really good and hard question. What I think is, I wish I knew the importance of the economic engine that Silicon Valley is, that American creativity and ingenuity is. It’s why I worry so much about the bad things happening in our country that are threatening our democracy. The ability to try and fail, the ability to innovate, the desire to innovate, the startups that unleash the passion of brilliant, hardworking people who want to cause their dream to happen — that is the driver of this economic engine that keeps not only winning, but keeps outpacing everywhere else in the world.

Pershing Square Holdings, Ltd. 17 Beyond the core rental business, we believe Hertz has the potential to meaningfully grow through high-margin ancillary services. The company is currently building out the infrastructure to sell more used cars directly through its retail channels. The company has partnerships with Amazon and Cox, and a “rent-to-buy” program which is now live in over 100 cities. We believe this retail strategy can evolve into a meaningful profit center, leading to structurally lower depreciation costs and providing a platform to sell additional Finance and Insurance (F&I) products. In addition, we believe Hertz is uniquely positioned to be a critical partner for mobility companies rolling out autonomous vehicle fleets. The company’s expertise in vehicle maintenance and the scale of its parking and service facilities make it an ideal partner to manage these complex fleets. Both of these initiatives have the potential to further leverage Hertz’s fixed-cost base and diversify its revenue streams. The company is also now in a much stronger liquidity position. In September, we helped facilitate a convertible bond issuance by increasing our economic exposure to the company through the purchase of swaps on its shares. Simultaneously with the issuance, the company entered into a capped-call transaction, which ensures the convertible bonds are not dilutive unless the stock nearly triples from current prices.

Israel has maybe a mini version of that, but it hardly exists in the rest of the world. It certainly doesn’t exist in Europe much. And it’s really sad, because the opportunity that is present for young Americans, to help to dream and to start something, is just an amazing engine for their lives, for their communities, for future philanthropy, for tax receipts. It’s across the board. And I wish I’d understood it better. I would have owned some venture capital in my foundation. I would have been recommending that institutional portfolios diversify into at least a piece. Now, venture capital is the last thing a value person is going to say is a bargain, you should go long. But I do think that, as a value investor, maybe too much paint-by-numbers, I wasn’t focused enough on the engine that is venture capital. [78:58] BARRY RITHOLTZ: Fascinating. Seth, thank you for being so generous with your time. We have been speaking with Seth Klarman, CEO and portfolio manager of the Baupost Group. If you enjoyed this conversation, well, be sure and check out any of the 651 we’ve done over the previous 12 years. You can find those at Apple iTunes, Spotify, Bloomberg, YouTube, wherever you get your favorite podcasts. I would be remiss if I didn’t thank the crack team that helps me put these conversations together each and every week. Alexis Noriega is my video producer. Sean Russo is my researcher. Anna Luke is my podcast producer. I’m Barry Ritholtz.

As a result of this opportunistic and economically advantageous financing, Hertz has ample liquidity to address near-term liabilities and maturities while also continuing to grow its fleet this year. Given the combination of improving industry structure, sound execution, and significant strategic optionality, we believe Hertz continues to offer an attractive, asymmetric return profile and we remain excited about the company’s future. Howard Hughes Holdings (“HHH”) 2025 marked a pivotal year for HHH as it began its transformation from a real estate company into a diversified holding company. In May 2025, Pershing Square Holdco, L.P., the owner of Pershing Square Capital Management, L.P. (PSCM), invested $900 million of primary capital into HHH as part of a plan to transform HHH into a diversified holding company seeking controlling stakes in high-quality, durable growth companies. As a result of the transaction, Pershing Square’s beneficial ownership of HHH, including PSH’s and PSCM’s private funds’ interest, increased to 47%. Bill Ackman rejoined HHH’s board as Executive Chairman and Ryan Israel joined HHH’s board and executive team as Chief Investment Officer. The full resources of PSCM have been made available to support HHH in its transformation in exchange for a base and variable management fee.

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We in turn are reducing the management fees we receive from PSH dollar-for-dollar by the fees paid to PSCM by HHH that are attributable to the HHH common stock held by the Company. We had previously communicated that our first initiative for HHH would be for the company to acquire a diversified property casualty insurance company whose assets we will manage. To that end, in December 2025, HHH signed a definitive agreement to acquire Vantage Group Holdings Ltd. (“Vantage”), a leading specialty insurance and reinsurance company backed by Carlyle and Hellman & Friedman, for $2.1 billion. The transaction is expected to close in the second quarter of 2026, subject to customary regulatory approvals and closing conditions. We believe the acquisition of Vantage is an ideal transaction to begin HHH’s transformation into a diversified holding company. The addition of a higher-return, faster-growing insurance operation accelerates HHH’s overall growth profile and increases and diversifies HHH’s sources of long-term value. HHH’s holding-company ownership of Vantage provides long-term capital support which will materially strengthen Vantage’s credit profile and underwriting flexibility. In our view, an emphasis on underwriting profitability—driven by disciplined risk selection, pricing, and portfolio optimization rather than growth—will improve Vantage’s ability to effectively navigate the insurance cycle.will

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Pershing Square Holdings, Ltd. 18 manage Vantage’s investment portfolio for no additional fees. Over time, Vantage’s investment portfolio is expected to be principally invested in cash, short-term Treasurys, and a portfolio of common stocks. Float (loss reserves) will be invested in cash and short-term Treasurys, to avoid duration, credit or liquidity risk. We will seek to increase the proportion of Vantage’s investment portfolio allocated to common stocks, where PSCM has a 22-year track record of generating superior investment returns, subject to regulatory and credit rating considerations. The $2.1 billion acquisition will be financed with capital from HHH’s balance sheet and up to $1 billion of non-interest- bearing, non-voting preferred stock issued by HHH to PSH (the “HHH Preferred”). The HHH Preferred will be split into 14 equally sized tranches that HHH will have the right to repurchase at the end of each fiscal year for the first seven years post- closing of the transaction. The repurchase price for each share of the HHH Preferred will be cash consideration equal to 1.5 times Vantage’s book value at the repurchase date, multiplied by the ownership percentage of Vantage represented by the HHH Preferred shares (on an as-exchanged basis, subject to a minimum repurchase price equal to the original issue price plus 4% per annum).

Decision — Announced wind-down of Aquamarine after 28 years; family-office conversion. Context: Trigger: cancer diagnosis (grade 4 glioblastoma); “one of the bravest investor letters” (Rubinstein). Outcome (known): 2025 return 11.3%; final letter posted Feb 2026.

Over time, we expect HHH to fully exercise its call options on all tranches of PSH’s preferred stock and increase its economic ownership of Vantage to 100%. The terms of the HHH Preferred were approved by the independent directors of both PSH and HHH. We believe that the HHH Preferred is a highly compelling investment, both on its own merits and in the significant value creation it will catalyze for HHH. Economically, we expect the HHH Preferred to resemble an investment in the overall PSH portfolio over time. Its prospective returns should reflect growth in Vantage’s book value, which should increasingly resemble overall PSH portfolio returns (subject to various insurance regulatory requirements) as we invest Vantage’s equity capital in a portfolio of common stocks similar to those in PSH. In addition, HHH Preferred returns will benefit from effectively lower price-to-book-value multiple at entry (we estimate that the actual purchase price for Vantage at closing to be less than 1.4 times book) to HHH’s contractual, pre-determined purchase price of 1.5 times. The acquisition of Vantage is a milestone event in the transformation of HHH into a diversified holding company.

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The combination of Vantage’s insurance expertise, Pershing Square’s fee-free investment capabilities, and the structural advantages of holding-company-ownership create the opportunity to build a large and highly profitable insurance subsidiary, and an important source of long-term value creation for Howard Hughes. Restaurant Brands International (“QSR”) QSR’s franchised business model is a high-quality, capital-light, growing annuity that generates high-margin brand royalty fees from its four leading brands: Tim Hortons, Burger King, Popeyes, and Firehouse Subs. Despite a challenging consumer backdrop, the company reported strong results of 3% comparable sales growth and 8% operating profit growth in 2025, in line with its long-term algorithm. The company’s two largest businesses, Tim Hortons and the International division, which collectively represent nearly 70% of the company’s profits, are materially outperforming peers. Tim Hortons delivered comparable sales growth of 3%, outperforming the broader QSR industry in Canada while the international business delivered comparable sales growth of 5%, notably outperforming McDonald’s. The turnaround at Burger King U.S. is also gaining traction, with the brand growing at a healthy rate, while the system remains committed to remodeling the majority of its restaurants in the coming years.

At the same time, the management team is taking actions to simplify the business and return QSR to its historic fully franchised capital-light business model. The China business has returned to consistent growth, and its recent sale to a new master franchisee should serve as a catalyst for accelerated expansion, with the new partners providing a capital commitment of $350 million to more than triple the store base over the next decade. We expect this renewed pace of store growth will allow QSR to return to its historic mid-single-digit unit growth rate in the coming years.

Pershing Square Holdings, Ltd. 19 In the U.S., the acquired Carrols stores are outperforming the broader Burger King system, validating the unit economics of the company’s remodel program and its recent investments in the system. As a result, QSR’s plan to refranchise these stores to smaller, operator-led franchisees is proceeding ahead of schedule. The company will host an investor day at the end of February, where we expect management to provide further detail on the building blocks of its future growth strategy while reaffirming its long-term targets of at least 8% annual operating profit growth. Despite these strong results and inflecting trends, QSR trades at only 16 times our estimate of earnings per share, which represents a discount of nearly 30% to peers with comparable long-term, earnings growth potential. With a strong operating model, improving financial performance, and a deeply discounted valuation, QSR remains a highly attractive investment. Uber Technologies (“Uber”) Uber is the world’s leading mobility and delivery platform. The company operates a high-quality, capital-light, high-growth business which benefits from robust structural network effects. We acquired our position in early 2025 at an attractive valuation, capitalizing on the dislocation driven by misplaced market fears regarding the perceived threat from autonomous vehicles (“AVs”).

Uber’s share price appreciation from our average cost at announcement through year end reflected the company’s substantial operating profit growth, but was somewhat offset by a modest decrease in the valuation multiple due to lingering investor concerns regarding the impact on Uber’s long-term growth from future competition by perceived AV competitors, such as Tesla and Waymo. Uber delivered exceptional financial performance in 2025, including new all-time highs on multiple key operating metrics. Constant-currency bookings grew 20%, driven by a 16% increase in monthly active users and deepening engagement per user, driving a 20% increase in annual trips of 13.6 billion on Uber’s network. Robust top-line growth combined with strong cost control and operating leverage generated operating profit growth of ~50%. Operating results accelerated throughout the year and the outlook for 2026 remains strong, with operating profit growth that we estimate could again exceed 30%. In 2025, AV technology made great strides with increasing evidence that it is approaching super-human safety standards across multiple vendors. Beyond Waymo and Tesla, a host of small companies are making significant advancements as artificial intelligence and end-to-end neural networks provide new opportunities for AV technology. We believe it is likely that AV technology will ultimately be broad-based and spread among a much larger number of companies than many industry observers previously expected.

Many of these AV companies are now advancing autonomous pilots in real world settings, with a path to ramping commercialization over the next 12 to 24 months. The proliferation of AV companies is supported by Nvidia’s recently launched open-source Alpamayo AV model, a world model which accelerates development lead-times and broadens access to AV technologies. Nvidia is also creating a reference hardware architecture that allows automotive manufacturers to act with confidence around longer-term decision making to advance their own AV futures. Supporting this effort is Uber’s newly launched AV Labs, which leverages Uber’s massive data – billions of miles of real-world and long-tail driving data – to create data factories that accelerate AV development. We continue to believe that significant commercialization barriers remain, including the lack of a harmonized regulatory framework, a dearth of cost-effective manufacturing, and expensive and cumbersome development lead times for physical infrastructure and operations. As a result, we anticipate that the near-to-medium-term trajectory of AV expansion is likely to see a continued measured roll out of AVs within defined geographic operating zones, consistent with recent actions by Waymo, Tesla and others.

Pershing Square Holdings, Ltd. 20 Importantly, we believe a third-party partnership model is the clear value-maximizing strategy for all industry participants, a “win-win” outcome with strong industrial logic. Uber offers AV partners the unique ability to rapidly scale their physical assets through a dense high-utilization network which is responsive to consumer expectations for high availability, low-latency, and low prices, all within the context of extremely variable demand patterns. In mid-2025, Uber exclusively launched Waymo’s commercial operations in Austin and Atlanta, integrating hundreds of Waymo vehicles into Uber’s hybrid fleet. Uber recently released data showing that vehicles operating on the Uber network are already achieving a ~30% higher utilization than comparable first-party fleets (which should further increase over time), a critical proof point of Uber’s value proposition. AV hardware is capital-intensive with high fixed costs, so maximizing utilization is the key to profitability. Uber’s marketplace allows AV operators to achieve utilization rates that are not possible to replicate in a standalone first-party network. So long as AV operators generate a revenue uplift that exceeds the “take-rate” that Uber charges, the company is providing AV operators a very strong economic value proposition. Businesses such as online travel agencies, and even Uber Eats, demonstrate the success of the third-party marketplace model when the value proposition is strong.

We anticipate that over time Uber and Waymo will further expand their partnership to include additional cities and geographies. Beyond Waymo, Uber is laser focused on advancing and partnering with many smaller AV companies. In 2025, Uber broadened its go-to-market AV approach, announcing new and expanded partnerships with Avride, Baidu, Lucid, May Mobility, Momenta, Nuro, Nvidia, Pony.ai, Waabi, Wayve, WeRide and others. Overall, Uber is advancing dozens of geographically focused commercial pilots with a host of regional partners, creating line-of-sight to tens of thousands of autonomous vehicles covering major metropolitan cities operating on Uber’s network within the coming years. We believe that as AV technology becomes more widespread, the value of the “driver” will lessen, and the overall marketplace network will become an increasingly important point of differentiation. We believe that AV technology will not be a winner-take-all model and that third-party networks, and Uber in particular, have a valuable role to play. The stock market clearly underappreciates the durability of Uber’s moat, the magnitude of its earnings growth, and the strategic role it will play in shaping the future of mobility. Uber currently trades at less than 20 times our estimate of earnings per share, which is a bargain relative to our expectation that Uber will generate 30% or greater annual earnings per share growth over the medium-term.

We believe that the combination of Uber’s rapid earnings-per-share growth and the potential for significant valuation multiple expansion, as investors better appreciate the sustainability of Uber’s future growth prospects and competitive positioning, should drive substantial future share price appreciation. Universal Music Group (“UMG”) Universal Music Group is the world’s leading music entertainment company and a high-quality, capital-light business that can be best thought of as a rapidly growing royalty on greater global consumption and monetization of music. While UMG’s share price performance over the last year has been disappointing, we fortunately monetized a meaningful portion of our investment at significantly higher prices last March, generating positive attribution for the year. Importantly, the business has made considerable progress that we believe the market has not yet fully appreciated. We expect growth to accelerate this year as the company begins to realize the benefits of several strategic initiatives. Over the last year, UMG signed a number of “Streaming 2.0” deals with major digital service providers (“DSPs”) such as Spotify, Amazon, and YouTube, which incorporate wholesale price increases that will lead to higher subscription revenue growth.

This is a fundamental shift in the industry's economic model as for the first time UMG has negotiated higher rates that ensure the company and its artists capture a larger share of the revenue pool regardless of when retail price increases occur. In addition, these new agreements will allow for better customer segmentation through new product tiers.offering

Pershing Square Holdings, Ltd. 21 targeted products for “superfans,” the small minority of listeners who drive a disproportionate share of total music spend, the music industry will also be able to better monetize fans previously ignored by the one-size-fits-all monthly price point of a music subscription. Despite these developments, the shares have further weakened this year, and the company now trades at only 18 times our estimate of earnings per share, the lowest valuation since UMG became a publicly traded company. We believe this is largely the result of two technical overhangs and the market’s concern that AI-generated music will disrupt the business. The first overhang is due to uncertainty regarding a potential sale of stock by UMG’s largest shareholder, Bolloré, who through the Bolloré Group owns 18.5% of the company. After Cyrille Bolloré stepped down from UMG’s Board of Directors in July following an adverse court ruling that could have required the Bolloré Group to spend up to €2.5 billion to buy out Vivendi’s minority shareholders, market participants have speculated that Bolloré might fund the forced buyout by selling some of its UMG shares. Although the Bolloré Group has more than ample cash and the French Court of Cassation recently struck down the ruling that would have required a mandatory offer, the matter has been sent back to lower courts, prolonging the uncertainty. The second overhang is the delay in UMG’s U.S. listing due to the government shutdown.

Both of these are transitory issues that we believe will be resolved over time. We exercised our registration right to catalyze the U.S. listing because we believe it will increase demand from U.S. investors, improve analyst coverage, and enable UMG to be included in major U.S. indices. The second concern, that AI will disrupt the music business, is misplaced in our view. Technology has long been used to make music creation easier and has even spawned entirely new genres like electronic music. We believe AI has the potential to meaningfully accelerate human creativity and lower production costs, which artists can use to create more music. At the same time, with over 100 million songs now being uploaded annually to DSPs, the role of a label like UMG in helping an artist 'break through' the noise and go global has never been more vital. While a few fully AI-generated songs and artists have begun showing up on charts, and will likely continue to do so, these often drop off after an initial period of novelty, and nearly all of these songs go unheard. We remain convinced that human artists will continue to represent the vast majority of commercially relevant music as AI cannot replicate the personal fan connection and cultural relevance that makes music meaningful to society. UMG has also done an excellent job of both litigating against bad actors and licensing new deals with responsible partners.

The company has recently signed deals with new AI-native DSPs that monetize this music creation with AI at a higher per-user level than traditional streaming, all while creating “walled gardens” that protect artist rights. UMG also possesses a vast catalog library that can both be made available to fans looking to experiment with AI tools and allow the company to revitalize this historic IP through new releases. We expect the company will continue to announce new deals with partners launching new and exciting tools. Separately, UMG has ensured that deal renewals with traditional DSPs include dilution and rights protections. DSPs like Deezer and Spotify have already begun to demonetize background music and tracks that fail to hit minimum streaming thresholds. Ultimately, there is a natural ceiling to the amount of AI content a service can host; if it becomes too large a percentage of a platform's library, it degrades the listening experience and increases hosting and ingestion costs for the provider. Given UMG’s dominant market position and decades-long runway for sustained earnings growth, we believe the current valuation represents a very large discount to intrinsic value.

Pershing Square Holdings, Ltd. 22 Recently Exited Equity Positions: Hilton (“HLT”) We exited our investment in Hilton after a highly successful, more than seven-year holding period. Hilton is a quintessential Pershing Square investment: a high-quality, asset-light, high-margin business with significant long-term growth potential and superb management. We initiated the position in 2018 at an attractive valuation of less than 23 times our estimate of earnings per share for the following year. At the time, HLT traded at a discount to both its historical average and our estimate of intrinsic value, as investors were concerned about a potential macroeconomic slowdown and failed to appreciate the high-quality nature of the company’s fee-based business model and highly attractive earnings algorithm. Over the subsequent years, Hilton generated excellent financial results, anchored by best-in-class net unit growth which drove fee revenue growth of approximately 70%. Strong top-line performance was enhanced by exceptional cost control, with corporate overhead essentially flat over the past seven years, driving operating profit growth of 85%. Earnings growth was further supported by best-in-class capital allocation – Hilton retired more than 20% of its outstanding shares at highly accretive prices – driving a 150% increase in earnings per share over our holding period.

These results are particularly impressive considering the lodging industry was uniquely impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, a crisis which CEO Chris Nassetta and his team navigated with exceptional skill. Our investment returns further benefited from a significant expansion in Hilton’s valuation multiple from 23 times earnings per share at entry to 32 times at exit as investors increasingly recognized the quality of the company’s consistent and high-growth earnings algorithm. While we remain admirers of the franchise and believe strongly in its long-term growth, we exited the position earlier this year as we believed HLT’s current valuation made it unlikely that the future share price growth would meet our high returns thresholds. We continue to monitor the business and believe the company is positioned for continued success. Other Exited Equity Positions: As we previously disclosed, we completed the sale of Chipotle, Canadian Pacific, and Nike during 2025.

Pershing Square Holdings, Ltd. 23 PUBLIC COMPANY ENGAGEMENT SINCE INCEPTION(17) Long Positions 2004 2004 2004 2004 2004 2005 2005 2006 2006 2007 2008 2008 2008 2009 2010 2010 2010 2010 2010 2011 2011 2012 2013 2013 2013 2013 2014 2014 2015 2015 2015 2016 2017 2018 2018 2018 2018 2019 2020 2020 2020 2021 2021 2023 2023 2024 2024 2024 2024 Short Positions* 2004 2005 2007 2007 2007 2012 * Short Positions includes options, credit default swaps and other instruments that provide short economic exposure. The Investment Manager has no current intention to initiate a public equity short position. The companies on this page reflect all of the portfolio companies, long and short, as of February 10, 2026, in respect of which (a) the Investment Manager or any Pershing Square fund, as applicable, has designated a representative to the board, filed Schedule 13D, Form 4 or a similar non-U.S. filing or has made a Hart-Scott Rodino filing; or (b) the Investment Manager has publicly recommended changes to the company’s strategy in an investment-specific white paper, letter or presentation. Past performance is not a guarantee of future results. All investments involve risk, including the loss of principal. Please see accompanying endnotes and disclaimers on pages 120- 123.

Pershing Square Holdings, Ltd. 24 Principal Risks and Uncertainties The Board has ultimate responsibility for the Company’s risk management. The Board recognizes that identifying the inherent risks related to the business and operations of the Company and developing an effective strategy to manage and mitigate these risks is crucial to the ongoing viability and success of the Company. In order to identify these risks, the Board reviews the management of investment risk and the operations of the Investment Manager at each quarterly Board meeting. In addition, the Board has established a Risk Committee, which at least annually carries out a robust assessment of the existing and emerging risks facing the Company, including those that could threaten its business model, future performance, solvency or liquidity. The Risk Committee’s assessment identified 45 existing risks relevant to the Company’s business, including risks arising from the Company’s investment activities, structure and operations as well as risks relating to shareholder engagement and regulatory compliance. The Risk Committee has considered the cause of each risk, the likelihood of the risk occurring, and the severity of the impact on the Company if the risk occurs, both before and after taking into account the mitigating controls that are in place. Based on this assessment, the Risk Committee has identified the subset of risks set out below as the principal risks faced by the Company.

The discussion of each principal risk below also includes the effect of any applicable emerging risks identified by the Committee. Risk Description Mitigating Factors Investment Risk The Company’s investments are exposed to the risk of the loss of capital. There is no assurance that the Company’s portfolio investments will increase in value and shareholders may lose all, or substantially all, of their investment in the Company. Failure to appropriately integrate risks into investment decisions or to manage risks to which the Company’s investments are exposed, including Environmental, Social and Governance (“ESG”) risks such as climate change, may have a material negative impact on the Company’s performance. The Board and Investment Manager have identified potential changes to U.S. trade and immigration policy and the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) as emerging risks to the Company’s investments. The Investment Manager is an experienced investor and makes investment decisions in accordance with its investment principles as described in the Company’s Investment Policy. The most important criterion in the Investment Manager’s investment selection process is its view of the long-term quality of a business, which is informed by, among other things, the Investment Manager’s assessment of the potential impact of risks to the business, including ESG risks, and how these risks are managed by its board and management.

The Investment Manager assesses risks to the long-term success of the Company’s investments by performing extensive research prior to making an investment decision and by ongoing monitoring to deeply understand each business and the industry in which it operates. The Investment Manager’s approach to the management of ESG risks as a component of investment risk is further described in its ESG Statement available on the Company’s website. The Board receives quarterly updates on the performance of the Company’s portfolio positions, including the effect of emerging risks on the portfolio. The Investment Manager assesses the potential impact of emerging risks on the portfolio and seeks to make portfolio investments that are resilient to disruption by, or may benefit from, emerging risks. The Investment Manager believes the portfolio is well-positioned to harness AI’s growth opportunities and does not believe the portfolio will be significantly impacted by anticipated changes in U.S. trade and immigration policy, but will continue to monitor these areas. The long-term interests of the Investment Manager are aligned with the Company’s shareholders as a result of the substantial investment made by the Investment Manager’s personnel in the Company.

Pershing Square Holdings, Ltd. 25 Risk Description Mitigating Factors Investment Manager’s Authority The Investment Manager has broad investment authority in executing the Company’s strategy and may use whatever investment techniques it believes are suitable for the Company, including novel or untested approaches. In addition, the Company’s strategy depends on the ability of the Investment Manager to successfully identify attractive investment opportunities. Performance fees may incentivize the Investment Manager to take on excessive risk within the portfolio. The Board receives a report from the Investment Manager at each quarterly Board meeting, or as necessary, on developments and risks relating to portfolio positions, financial instruments and the portfolio composition as a whole. The Investment Manager engages in a thorough diligence process for novel investment structures and is an experienced investor. The Investment Manager seeks to limit the impact of unsuccessful novel investments on the Company’s performance by sizing them appropriately and regularly reevaluating any unrealized losses. The Investment Manager has no current intention to initiate a public equity short position. The performance fee calculation takes into account unrealized gains and losses, and no performance fee is paid unless NAV appreciation exceeds the high water mark. Investment team compensation is based on performance of the overall portfolio rather than any individual position.

The long-term interests of the Investment Manager are aligned with the Company’s shareholders as a result of the substantial investment made by the Investment Manager’s personnel in the Company. Portfolio Concentration The Investment Manager may invest a significant proportion of the Company’s capital in a limited number of investments, including asymmetric hedges, subject to the Company’s Investment Policy. Because the Company’s portfolio is highly concentrated, it is sensitive to general market fluctuations and its investment results may be volatile. A concentrated portfolio also exacerbates the risk that a loss in any one position could have a material adverse impact on the Company’s assets. The Investment Manager performs extensive research prior to making new investments, along with ongoing monitoring of positions held in the Company’s portfolio. The Investment Manager is mindful of sector and industry exposures and other correlations between businesses in which the Company invests. The Investment Manager will reduce position sizes accordingly in investments with greater leverage, business complexity or other factors that create a risk of substantial permanent impairment of value. The Board reviews portfolio concentrations and receives a detailed overview of the portfolio positions no less than quarterly, and more frequently as necessary.

The Investment Policy prohibits investments by the Company in, or giving exposure to, the securities of any one issuer representing more than 25% of the Company’s gross assets (assets on the statement of financial position prior to deduction of liabilities) measured at the time of making the investment.

Pershing Square Holdings, Ltd. 26 Risk Description Mitigating Factors Corporate Engagement The Investment Manager is an engaged investor and may advocate for managerial, operating and governance changes, which may require the substantial use of time, resources and capital and may involve litigation by or in opposition to the target company’s management, board or shareholders. The Investment Manager has significant experience engaging constructively with the management of portfolio companies, and management has been supportive of its role in the substantial majority of such engagements. The Investment Manager takes an active role where it believes the commitment of time, energy and capital is justified in light of the potential reward. The Investment Manager does not currently intend to initiate public equity short positions. The Board is kept informed of and reviews the Investment Manager’s active engagements with portfolio companies. NAV Discount The Public Shares of the Company have in the past, currently and may in the future trade at a significant discount to NAV, which may affect demand for the Public Shares. For a summary of actions the Company has taken to address the discount, please see “Discount to NAV” in the Report of the Directors. The Board monitors the trading activity of the shares on a regular basis and reviews the discount to NAV at its quarterly meetings.

The Company has retained advisers to engage with existing and potential shareholders and to assist in its consideration of potential measures to reduce the discount of share price to NAV. Regulatory Risk Regulatory risk can negatively impact the Company in a number of ways. For example, changes in laws or regulations could have a detrimental impact on the Company’s ability to freely acquire and dispose of certain securities or deploy certain investment techniques. In addition, failure to comply with laws or regulations can subject the Company to reputational damage and prosecutions. Prior to initiating an investment, the Investment Manager considers the possible legal and regulatory issues that could impact its ability to achieve its objective with respect to such position. The Investment Manager’s legal and compliance team (supported by professional external advisers) monitors regulatory changes on an ongoing basis and informs the Board of emerging risks. The Board and the Investment Manager maintain policies and procedures designed to prevent violations of applicable laws and regulations. The Board is provided with the Investment Manager’s compliance manual and periodic updates thereto. The Board is apprised of any regulatory inquiries or material regulatory developments and receives quarterly updates from the Investment Manager’s Chief Legal and Compliance Officer.

Pershing Square Holdings, Ltd. 27 Risk Description Mitigating Factors Key Personnel The departure of Mr Ackman and Mr Israel or of a significant number of members of the investment team could have a material adverse effect on the Company’s ability to achieve its investment objective. To mitigate the risk of Mr Ackman’s unforeseen departure, the Investment Manager appointed Ryan Israel, the longest-tenured member of the investment team, as Chief Investment Officer in August 2022. Physical security arrangements at the Investment Manager’s premises and for key personnel have also been enhanced. The Investment Manager completed a reorganization of its ultimate ownership structure in 2024 such that future ownership changes, including with respect to Mr Ackman’s ownership, will not be deemed to result in an assignment of the Investment Management Agreement (“IMA”) or a change of control under the indentures governing the Bonds. The investment team and other senior personnel of the Investment Manager are experienced, longstanding employees, and there is limited turnover. While Mr Ackman has ultimate discretion with respect to all investment decisions, each member of the investment team plays a material role in the construction and management of the portfolio. The Investment Manager has structured the incentive compensation of key personnel to promote their retention and contribute to the long-term success of the Company.

Sound corporate governance principles and segregation of duties are well established and effectively practiced. The Investment Manager maintains a contingency plan to facilitate an orderly transition in the management of the Company’s affairs and communications to shareholders upon the occurrence of Mr Ackman’s death or permanent disability. Tax Risk The Company may conduct its affairs in a way that places its tax status at risk. Changes to the tax laws of, or practice in a tax jurisdiction affecting the Company could adversely affect the value of the Company’s investments and decrease the post-tax returns to shareholders. Investments in the Company may not be tax efficient for certain shareholders. The Investment Manager may make an investment or trading decision which takes into account tax consequences for some investors and/or is tax efficient for some shareholders, but which may result in adverse tax or economic consequences for other shareholders. The Company aims to avoid adverse tax consequences and engages experienced tax advisers as appropriate.

Pershing Square Holdings, Ltd. 28 Risk Description Mitigating Factors Market Risk Adverse changes affecting the global financial markets and global economy may have a material negative impact on the performance of the Company’s investments or may cause the prices of financial and derivative instruments in which the Company invests to be highly volatile. The Board and the Investment Manager have identified changes in U.S. trade and immigration policy as emerging risks to the stability of global financial markets. The Investment Manager monitors emerging risks to global markets as part of its portfolio management process and seeks to build a portfolio that has limited exposure to changing market conditions. While the Company is not committed to maintaining market hedges at any time, the Investment Manager may seek to opportunistically invest in hedges to protect the Company’s portfolio against specific macroeconomic risks and capitalize on market volatility. In order to mitigate market-related downside risk, the Company may acquire put options, short market indices or baskets of securities and/or purchase index or single-name credit default swaps, interest rate or currency hedges, or engage in other hedging strategies. Information Security An information security breach results in the disclosure of the Company’s sensitive information and/or access to core systems being disrupted or denied.

The Company’s sensitive information is primarily maintained by the Investment Manager and the Administrator, which have implemented robust information security controls, frequent testing, periodic assessments and advanced monitoring of cybersecurity threats. The Investment Manager maintains real-time backups of file data and daily backups of servers. The Investment Manager reviews the information security controls of service providers with access to sensitive Company information to ensure appropriate protections are in place. All core operating systems are regularly backed up. The Investment Manager assesses emerging threats to its information security, including the heightened risk posed by ransomware and other types of cyber attacks and has implemented additional monitoring of network traffic and integrated AI into its monitoring of user activity and phishing campaigns. The Information Security Committee of the Investment Manager meets semi- annually or more frequently as needed to evaluate information security risks and to review the effectiveness of the Investment Manager’s information security controls. The Investment Manager has retained an experienced Chief Technology Officer for best-in-class leadership in this area. The Board receives quarterly updates on information security and a periodic overview of the Investment Manager’s information security program.

Pershing Square Holdings, Ltd. 29 Risk Description Mitigating Factors Service Providers Key service providers perform inadequately or expose the Company to risk. An external incident (e.g. pandemic, natural disaster, cyber attack) significantly disrupts key service providers. The Investment Manager has adopted a vendor supervision policy and performs due diligence on service providers, including information security and business continuity reviews, in accordance with its assessment of their risk to the Company. The Investment Manager’s business continuity and incident response planning includes plans for disruptions to key service providers. The Investment Manager monitors key service providers through frequent contact and reports to the Board as needed. The Board advises on the engagement of service providers as appropriate and the Management Engagement Committee reviews key service providers at least annually. Insurance The Company is liable for claims due to the failure of an insurance underwriter or inadequate insurance coverage. The Company and the Investment Manager maintain insurance policies with reputable insurance underwriters. Insurance arrangements and limits are reviewed annually by the Board to ensure they remain appropriate. Public Relations Adverse media coverage or social media of the Investment Manager or its personnel causes reputational damage to the Company.

The Investment Manager has retained an in-house Director of Communications, outside public relations firms and a specialist law firm to monitor media coverage, advise on strategy and actively engage with media sources as needed, including pursuing corrections to inaccurate or unfair coverage. The Company does not use X or social media and communicates with shareholders via press releases and at investor calls/meetings. Announcements (other than routine or portfolio-related) are approved by the Chairman or Senior Independent Director prior to release. PSCM’s social media accounts are used only for business-related communications that have been reviewed by internal legal counsel. The personal X account of the Investment Manager’s CEO is monitored for any regulatory compliance issues. The Board receives quarterly updates on any material public relations issues affecting the Investment Manager or the Company.

Pershing Square Holdings, Ltd. 30 Directors RUPERT MORLEY Independent Director Chairman of the Board Chairman of the Nomination and Management Engagement Committees Mr Morley, a UK resident, has been an independent Director of the Company since April 2021. Mr Morley is a trustee of Comic Relief and chair of its investment advisory group. He previously served as chairman of the board of Bremont Watch Company and CEO of Sterling Relocation, Hamptons estate agency and Propertyfinder.co.uk and managing director of Swan Hellenic Cruises. He also previously served as operations director of Brierley Investments Limited, a non-executive director of Thistle Hotels, English Welsh & Scottish Railways and Graham-Field Health Products and president of the Fédération Internationale des Déménageurs Internationaux (FIDI). He has a degree in economics from Cambridge University and an MBA from Harvard Business School where he was a Kennedy Scholar. HALIT COUSSIN Director Ms Coussin, a U.S. resident, has been a Director of the Company since November 2024 and serves as the Chief Legal Officer and Chief Compliance Officer of the Investment Manager. She is also a director of Pershing Square Holdco GP, LLC. Prior to joining the Investment Manager, Ms Coussin served as an associate attorney at Schulte Roth & Zabel, where her practice focused on advising hedge fund managers on a variety of regulatory and compliance matters. Ms Coussin received her LL.M. from New York University in 2000 and her LL.B.

Pershing Square Holdings, Ltd. 31 CHARLOTTE DENTON Senior Independent Director Chairman of the Remuneration Committee Ms Denton, a Guernsey resident, has been an independent Director of the Company since May 2024. She has served on boards for nearly twenty years in both regulated and non-regulated businesses (including listed funds) in both executive and non-executive capacities. Since 2019 she has been a non-executive director of various entities including the GP boards of Private Equity group Hitec as well as other private companies. She is currently the chair of Achilles Investment Company and audit chair for Starwood European Real Estate Finance, both of which are listed in London. During Ms Denton’s executive career she worked in various locations through roles in diverse organizations, including KPMG, Rothschild, Northern Trust, a property development startup and a privately held financial services group. Ms Denton holds a degree in politics from Durham University. She is a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales, a Chartered Director and a Fellow of the Institute of Directors as well as a member of the Society of Trust and Estate Practitioners. ANDREW HENTON Independent Director Chairman of the Audit and Risk Committees Mr Henton, a Guernsey resident, has been an independent Director of the Company since September 2020.

Mr Henton has wide board experience of both regulated and non-regulated businesses (including listed funds) in both executive and non-executive capacities. He is a director of Bank of NT Butterfield & Son (listed on the New York Stock Exchange) and chairs the board of Onward Opportunities (a UK listed investment company). Mr Henton also currently serves on the boards of several private entities, including SW7 Holdings Limited and Longview Partners (Guernsey) Limited. Between 2002 and 2011, Mr Henton held various positions at Close Brothers Group plc, latterly acting as Head of Offshore Businesses. During this time, he led the creation of Close Private Bank, which provided asset management, banking, and administration services to high net worth and institutional clients. Mr Henton previously spent four years working in HSBC’s Corporate Finance division and three years as a fund manager with Baring Private Equity Partners. He graduated from Oxford University in 1991 and subsequently qualified as a Chartered Accountant with PricewaterhouseCoopers in London, specializing as a corporate tax consultant.

Pershing Square Holdings, Ltd. 32 BILGE OGUT Independent Director Ms Ogut, a resident of Zurich, Switzerland, has been an independent Director of the Company since August 2025. Ms Ogut has over 25 years of industry experience and currently serves as an investment partner at Groupe Bruxelles Lambert, a publicly listed investment holding company on Euronext Brussels. Ms Ogut served as an advisory partner to Partners Group throughout 2025, concluding this role at the end of the year. From 2013 to 2024, she held several senior leadership roles at the firm, including Head of Technology Investing and Head of Private Equity Europe. After joining the firm, she led a number of strategic investments and played a key role in developing the firm’s technology investing strategy. During her tenure, she served on the Private Equity Investment Committee, the Global Investment Committee, and chaired the Technology Specialist Investment Committee. She served on the boards of Forterro and Unit4, and previously held board roles at Civica, CPA Global, and Vermaat. She also served as an independent board member of PartnerRe, a global reinsurance business. Earlier in her career, Ms Ogut was a Managing Director at Warburg Pincus, focusing on the TMT sector. She co-led Standard Bank’s private equity business and began her career in Goldman Sachs’ TMT group, gaining foundational experience in principal investing and capital markets.

She holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and bachelor’s degrees from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and College of Arts and Sciences. JEAN-BAPTISTE WAUTIER Independent Director Mr Wautier, a resident of London, has been an independent Director of the Company since May 2025. Mr Wautier is an investor and philanthropist, and co-founder of the Wautier Family Office, which was established in 2024. He is currently chairman of luxury fashion house GEDEBE and a non-executive director at the architectural practice Studio Razavi + Partners, as well as chair of the investment committee at Sci Ventures and chairman of Aspire. He became a director of Howard Hughes Holdings, Inc. in May 2025. Mr Wautier is also a Senior Lecturer at Sciences Po University in Paris and an Executive Fellow at Adam Smith’s Panmure House. Mr Wautier began his career at Arthur Andersen before moving to Morgan Stanley. He then joined private equity firm IK Partners in 2000, before moving to BC Partners in 2004, where he served as chairman of the investment committee and chief investment officer in the United Kingdom between 2013 and 2023. He also served as a member of the management committee in the United Kingdom between 2018 and 2023, before leaving BC Partners in 2024. Mr Wautier holds a Master’s (Political Science and Government) and a Master of Science (Industrial Organization) from Sciences Po and Université Sorbonne Paris Nord, respectively.

Pershing Square Holdings, Ltd. 33 Report of the Directors We present the Annual Report and Financial Statements of the Company for the year ended December 31, 2025. PRINCIPAL ACTIVITY The Company was incorporated in Guernsey, Channel Islands on February 2, 2012. It became a registered open-ended investment scheme under Guernsey law on June 27, 2012, and commenced operations on December 31, 2012. On October 1, 2014, the Guernsey Financial Services Commission (“GFSC”) approved the conversion of the Company into a registered closed- ended investment scheme. Please refer to Note 11 for further information on the various classes of shares (any reference to “Note” herein shall refer to the Notes to the Financial Statements). INVESTMENT POLICY The Company’s investment objective is to preserve capital and seek maximum, long-term capital appreciation commensurate with reasonable risk. For these purposes, risk is defined as the probability of permanent loss of capital, rather than price volatility. In its value approach to investing, the Company seeks to invest in long (and occasionally short) investment opportunities that the Investment Manager believes exhibit significant valuation discrepancies between current trading prices and intrinsic business (or net asset) value, often with a catalyst for value recognition. The Investment Manager may also seek short sale investments that offer absolute return opportunities.

In addition, the Investment Manager may short individual securities to hedge or reduce long exposures. The Company will not make an initial investment in the equity of companies whose securities are not publicly traded (i.e., private equity) but may invest in privately placed securities of public issuers and publicly traded securities of private issuers. Notwithstanding the foregoing, it is possible that, in limited circumstances, public companies in which the Company has invested may later be taken private, and we may make additional investments in the equity or debt of such companies. The Company may make investments in the debt securities of a private company, provided that there is an observable market price for such debt securities. The Company may invest in long and short positions in equity or debt securities of U.S. and non-U.S.

issuers (including securities convertible into equity or debt securities); distressed securities, rights, options and warrants; bonds, notes and equity and debt indices; swaps (including equity, foreign exchange, interest rate, commodity and credit default swaps), swaptions, and other derivatives; instruments such as futures contracts, foreign currency, forward contracts on stock indices and structured equity or fixed-income products (including without limitation, asset-backed securities, mortgage-backed securities, mezzanine loans, commercial loans, mortgages and bank debt); exchange traded funds and any other financial instruments the Investment Manager believes will achieve the Company’s investment objective. The Company may invest in securities sold pursuant to initial public offerings. Investments in options on financial indices may be used to establish or increase long or short positions or to hedge the Company’s investments. In order to mitigate market-related downside risk, the Company may acquire put options, short market indices, baskets of securities and/or purchase credit default swaps, but is not committed to maintaining market hedges at any time. A substantial majority of the Company’s portfolio is typically allocated to 8 to 12 core holdings usually comprised of liquid, listed mid-to-large capitalization North American companies.

Pershing Square Holdings, Ltd. 34 So long as the Company relies on certain exemptions from investment company status under the U.S. Investment Company Act of 1940, as amended, the Company will not purchase more than 3% of the outstanding voting securities of any SEC-registered investment company. The Company will not invest more than 10%, in aggregate, of its total assets in other UK-listed closed- ended investment funds. In addition, investments by the Company in, or giving exposure to, the securities of any one issuer may not, in the aggregate, represent more than 25% of the Company’s gross assets, measured at the time the investment is made. To date, the Company has generally implemented substantially similar investment objectives, policies and strategies as the other investment funds managed by the Investment Manager and its affiliates. Allocation of investment opportunities and rebalancing or internal “cross” transactions are typically made on a pro-rata basis.

However, the Investment Manager may abstain from effecting a cross transaction or only effect a partial cross transaction if it determines, in its sole discretion, that a cross transaction, or a portion thereof, is not in the best interests of a fund (for example, because a security or financial instrument is held by such fund in the appropriate ratio relative to its adjusted net asset value, or because a security or financial instrument should be divested, in whole or in part, by the other funds) or as a result of tax, regulatory, risk or other considerations. The Company may hold its assets in cash, cash equivalents and/or U.S. Treasurys pending the identification of new investment opportunities by the Investment Manager. There is no limit on the amount of the Company’s assets that may be held in cash or cash equivalent investments at any time. The Board has adopted a policy pursuant to which the borrowing ratio of the Company, defined for this purpose as the ratio of the aggregate principal amount of all borrowed money (including margin loans) to total assets (pursuant to the latest annual or semi-annual Financial Statements of the Company), shall in no event exceed 50% at the time of incurrence of any borrowing or its drawdown (e.g. a borrowing under a line of credit).

The Board may amend the Company’s borrowing policy from time to time, although the Board may not increase or decrease the Company’s maximum borrowing ratio without the prior consent of the Investment Manager. This borrowing policy does not apply to and does not limit the leverage inherent in the use of derivative instruments. The Company may use derivatives, including equity options, in order to obtain security-specific, non-recourse leverage in an effort to reduce the capital commitment to a specific investment, while potentially enhancing the returns on the capital invested in that investment. The Company may also use derivatives, such as equity and credit derivatives and put options, to achieve a synthetic short position in a company without exposing the Company to some of the typical risks of short selling, which include the possibility of unlimited losses and the risks associated with maintaining a stock borrow. The Company generally does not use total return swaps to obtain leverage, but rather to manage regulatory, tax, legal or other issues. Material changes to the Company’s Investment Policy require approval by a special resolution of the holders of Public Shares. RESULTS AND NAV The Company had a gain attributable to all shareholders for the year ended December 31, 2025 of $2.53 billion (December 31, 2024: gain of $1.17 billion). The net assets attributable to all shareholders at December 31, 2025 were $15.05 billion (December 31, 2024: $13.01 billion).

Pershing Square Holdings, Ltd. 35 The Company announces the weekly and monthly NAV and investment performance of its Public Shares to the LSE and publishes this information on the Company’s website (www.pershingsquareholdings.com). In addition, monthly transparency reports created by the Administrator and the Company’s fact sheets are published on the Company’s website. The Company released semi-annual financial statements on August 20, 2025 relating to the first half of 2025. The Company intends to release semi-annual financial statements for the first half of 2026 in the third quarter. DISCOUNT TO NAV The Board monitors the discount to NAV at which the Company’s Public Shares trade closely and seeks opportunities to narrow it. The discount narrowed over the course of 2025 from 31.2% at the beginning of the year to 24.1% as of December 31, 2025. The discount has further narrowed slightly since year end to 22.5% as of February 10, 2026. The Board and the Investment Manager continue to believe that the Public Shares are undervalued and remain focused on delivering positive performance and attracting long-term investors to narrow the discount. The Company has taken a variety of actions to better position the Public Shares as an attractive investment opportunity to potential investors in the UK and internationally. The Company has transitioned its trading to the LSE over time, adding a listing on the Main Market of the LSE (2017) and a USD denominated LSE quotation (2018).

The Company was admitted to the FTSE 100 in December 2020 and was the 57th largest company on the LSE by market capitalization as of February 10, 2026. As the majority of the Company’s liquidity moved to the LSE, the Company consolidated all trading on the LSE and the Public Shares were de-listed from Euronext Amsterdam as of January 31, 2025. In November 2024, the Board approved the publication of a modified UK Key Information Document (“KID”) and European MiFID Template (“EMT”) with “0” cost disclosures. The Board believes this approach, taken as a whole with the Company’s expense disclosures in this Annual Report, more accurately reflects the reality that the Company’s ongoing costs are not directly charged or attributable to shareholders. This approach also avoids other investment firms, which buy the Company’s shares for inclusion in client portfolios, having to double-count the Company’s costs in their own fee disclosures. In February 2024, the Investment Manager and the Board expanded the performance fee offset provisions in the Company’s IMA, which would reduce the Company’s performance fees as the Investment Manager launches new funds. Under the previous arrangement, the Company received a fee reduction of 20% of performance fees earned by the Investment Manager on current and certain future non-PSH funds only once the Investment Manager recovered costs it incurred in connection with PSH’s initial public offering.

The amendment eliminated the Investment Manager’s right to receive the outstanding $36 million of unrecovered costs, and expanded the fee reduction to also include 20% of any management fees earned from any non-PSH Pershing Square funds that invest in public securities (specifically including those that do not have performance fees, which had hitherto been excluded). In August 2025, the Investment Manager and the Board further amended the Company’s IMA to reduce the management fees otherwise payable by the Company with respect to its holding of common stock in Howard Hughes Holdings, Inc. (“HHH”). The reduction will be an amount equal to the fees payable to the Investment Manager by HHH that are attributable to the HHH common stock held by the Company. In January 2022, the Company moved to the North American investment sector of the Association of Investment Companies from the Hedge Fund sector, which more accurately reflects the Company’s investment focus. The Company also amended its dividend policy in 2022 such that dividends increase with the Company’s NAV.quarterly

Pershing Square Holdings, Ltd. 36 dividend increased to $0.1646 per Public Share from $0.1456 per Public Share in 2024. The Company also engaged Cadarn Capital Ltd. (“Cadarn Capital”) and LodeRock Advisors Inc. (“LodeRock”) in June and September 2023, respectively, to provide strategic marketing advice and develop shareholder engagement strategies over a wider geographic focus. The Company announced share buyback programs in June and November of 2025 (the “2025 Shares Buyback Programs”) of $200 million or for up to 10 million of the Company’s outstanding Public Shares, and $100 million or for up to 5 million of the Company’s outstanding Public Shares, respectively. The Company repurchased 3,652,119 shares for $220 million as of December 31, 2025 at an average discount of 28.8%, representing 73.3% of the 2025 Share Buyback Programs. Since the Company’s first buyback program in May 2017 through December 31, 2025, including the Company’s May 2018 tender offer, the Company has repurchased a total of 73,572,630 Public Shares for $1.8 billion at an average discount of 29.3%. The Company intends to propose that shareholders renew the Company’s general share buyback authority at the Company’s 2026 Annual General Meeting to allow the Company to engage in share buybacks up to a maximum of 14.99% of the Public Shares outstanding.

If approved by shareholders, the Board may decide to utilize the share buyback authority to make further acquisitions of Public Shares in the market if it and the Investment Manager determine it is likely to be an effective use of capital and in the best long-term interests of shareholders after taking into consideration the discount at which shares would be repurchased, unencumbered cash, investment opportunities, current portfolio holdings, leverage and other factors. The Board continues to be satisfied that the interests of PSH shareholders and the Investment Manager are closely aligned. Affiliates and affiliated entities of the Investment Manager beneficially owned 28% of the Company at December 31, 2025 (December 31, 2024: 27%). The Board believes the investment in the Company by the Investment Manager’s team has created a strong incentive for the Investment Manager to generate positive investment performance, which the Board believes will increase the Company’s share price and reduce the discount to NAV over the long term. BONDS On July 25, 2019, the Company closed on a fully committed private placement of $400 million Senior Notes at par with a coupon rate of 4.95%, maturing on July 15, 2039 (the “2039 $400m Bonds”). On August 26, 2020, the Company closed on a fully committed private placement of $200 million Senior Notes at par with a coupon rate of 3.00%, maturing on July 15, 2032 (the “2032 $200m Bonds”).

On November 2, 2020, the Company issued $500 million of Senior Notes at par with a coupon rate of 3.25%, maturing on November 15, 2030 (the “2030 $500m Bonds”). On October 1, 2021, the Company issued $700 million of Senior Notes at 99.670% of par with a coupon rate of 3.25%, maturing on October 1, 2031 (the “2031 $700m Bonds”). On October 1, 2021, the Company also issued €500 million of Senior Notes at 99.869% of par with a coupon rate of 1.375%, maturing on October 1, 2027 (the “2027 €500m Bonds”). On April 29, 2025, the Company issued €650 million of Senior Notes at 99.890% of par with a coupon rate of 4.25%, maturing on April 29, 2030 (the “2030 €650m Bonds”) On October 28, 2025, the Company issued $500 million of Senior Notes at 99.805% of par with a coupon rate of 5.50%, maturing on October 28, 2032 (the “2032 $500m Bonds” and collectively with the 2027 €500m Bonds, 2030 €650m Bonds, 2030 $500m Bonds, 2031 $700m Bonds, 2032 $200m Bonds and 2039 $400m Bonds, the "Bonds”).

Pershing Square Holdings, Ltd. 37 The Bonds rank equally in right of payment and contain substantially the same covenants. The Bonds’ coupons are paid semi- annually, with the exception of the 2027 €500m Bonds and 2030 €650m Bonds, which are paid annually. The Bonds are listed on Euronext Dublin under the symbol of PSHNA. DIVIDENDS The Company pays a quarterly dividend in an amount determined by multiplying the Company’s average NAV per Public Share for all trading days in December of the prior year by 0.25%, subject to a cap on the total dividends paid for the year of 125% of the average of the total dividends paid in each of the previous three years. Once the dividend is set for a specific year, the Company does not intend to decrease the dividend in future years, even if the NAV per Public Share were to decline. On January 20, 2025, the Company announced a quarterly dividend of $0.1646 per Public Share for 2025. On January 26, 2026, the Company announced a quarterly dividend of $0.1837 per Public Share for 2026. The Special Voting Share (see Note 11) receives a proportionate quarterly dividend based on its respective NAV per share, which is contributed to charity. Dividends will be paid in USD unless a shareholder elects to be paid in GBP.

Shareholders may also elect to reinvest cash dividends into Public Shares through a dividend reinvestment program (“DRIP”) administered by an affiliate of MUFG Corporate Markets (Guernsey) Limited (“MUFG”, and previously Link Market Services), the Company’s registrar. Further information regarding the dividend, including the anticipated 2026 dividend payment schedule and how to make these elections, is available at www.pershingsquareholdings.com/psh-dividend-information. Each dividend is subject to a determination that, after the payment of the dividend, the Company will meet solvency requirements under Guernsey law, and that, in accordance with the indentures governing the Bonds, the Company’s total indebtedness will be less than one third of the Company’s total capital. The Board may determine to modify or cease paying the dividend in the future. In the year ended December 31, 2025, the Company distributed dividends of $118,119,801, a net increase of $10,953,119 from the amount it distributed in 2024 due to the increase in the Company’s dividend per Public Share. DIRECTORS The present members of the Board, all of whom are non-executive Directors, are listed on pages 30-32. Further information regarding the Board is provided in the Corporate Governance Report. The Company maintains directors’ and officers’ liability insurance in relation to the actions of the Directors on behalf of the Company.

Information regarding Directors’ remuneration and ownership in the Company is set out in the Directors’ Remuneration Report on pages 44-46. MATERIAL CONTRACTS The Company’s material contracts are with: • PSCM, the Investment Manager to the Company. PSCM receives a quarterly management fee and may receive a performance fee from the Company as described more fully in Note 15. • Northern Trust International Fund Administration Services (Guernsey) Limited (“Northern Trust”), the Company’s Administrator and Company Secretary. The Administrator provides the Company with administration services, including, among other things, the computation of the Company’s NAV and the maintenance of the Company’s accounting and statutory records.

Pershing Square Holdings, Ltd. 38 • MUFG, the Company’s registrar. The Company has also engaged an affiliate of MUFG to administer the Company’s DRIP. • Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC and UBS Securities LLC, the Company’s Prime Brokers and custodians. • The Bank of New York Mellon, the Company’s bond indenture trustee, custodian and securities intermediary for derivatives subject to uncleared margin rules. • Jefferies International Limited (“Jefferies”), the Company’s corporate broker and buyback agent. Jefferies also previously served as the adviser for the Company’s share tender offer and was the Company’s sponsor in connection with its LSE listing. • Cadarn Capital and LodeRock, investor relations advisers to the Company based in the UK and Canada, respectively. • Although the Investment Manager is authorized to engage service providers on behalf of the Company, the Board is advised of and given the opportunity to review and execute material contracts. The Board and, where appropriate, the Investment Manager monitor the performance of these service providers throughout the year, and the Management Engagement Committee conducts a formal review annually. For further details of the review conducted by the Management Engagement Committee of these and other service providers to the Company, please see “Management Engagement Committee” in the Corporate Governance Report.

The Board has reviewed the recommendations of the Management Engagement Committee with respect to the engagement of the Investment Manager and the Company’s other material service providers and agrees with the Committee’s conclusion that their continued appointment is in the interests of the Company’s shareholders as a whole. The Board will continue to monitor their performance closely. ESG As an investment company without employees or physical operations, the Company does not directly engage in activities that impact the environment or the community. Although the Board has delegated the responsibility for making individual investment decisions to the Investment Manager, the Board has encouraged the Investment Manager to consider ESG best practices, including the risks and impact of climate change, within its own organization, and to actively engage on these issues with its portfolio companies when appropriate. As further described in the Investment Manager’s ESG Statement, available on the Company’s website, the Investment Manager has integrated ESG into its investment selection, risk management and stewardship processes, and has embedded ESG considerations into its operations as a firm. The Investment Manager analyzes the exposure of a business to ESG risks and its approach to ESG at the time of its initial investment and as part of its ongoing stewardship by performing extensive diligence on the business, the industry sector and the context in which the business operates.

A business that has not addressed material ESG risks or that has unsustainable business practices will generally not meet the Investment Manager’s investment criteria unless the Investment Manager’s intent is to use its influence to actively address these issues. As highlighted in “Public Company Engagement Since Inception,” the Investment Manager continues to be an engaged investor on the Company’s behalf, and it considers many of the Company’s current portfolio companies to be active engagements. The Investment Manager has formal representation on the boards of HHH and SEG, and an ongoing informal dialogue with representatives of other portfolio companies.

Pershing Square Holdings, Ltd. 39 The Investment Manager provides a detailed portfolio review to the Board at each quarterly Board meeting and discusses any material ESG issues at each portfolio company as part of its report. Topics discussed in 2025 meetings included the nutritional content of fast food, the ethical implications of deterministic AI software implementations and governance changes at several portfolio companies. In addition, the Investment Manager’s Portfolio Update on pages 12-22 incorporates material ESG-related developments at each portfolio company where appropriate. The Board has been pleased to note that all of the Company’s portfolio companies address ESG issues and sustainability as part of their strategic planning, including by adopting environmental stewardship programs, community initiatives, public advocacy and by measuring their progress toward sustainability targets. Links to their ESG practices are available in the Investment Manager’s ESG Statement on the Company’s website. The Board will continue to monitor the Investment Manager’s integration of ESG issues into investment decisions to ensure its approach promotes the long-term success of the Company and the sustainability of the Company’s business model. The Investment Manager continues to cultivate a diverse team of high-performance professionals and seeks meaningful ways to promote a collaborative work environment, care for its employees and contribute to community projects.

In addition, the CEO of the Investment Manager is co-Trustee of the Pershing Square Foundation, which together with its affiliate entities has committed more than $1 billion in grants and social investments since its inception in target areas including health and life sciences, economic opportunity, social innovation, education, arts and urban development. MODERN SLAVERY ACT 2015 Although the Company does not fall within the scope of the UK Modern Slavery Act 2015, it has assessed its supply chains for potential sources of modern slavery or human trafficking. The Company has minimal contact with countries and sectors most likely to have a risk of modern slavery or human trafficking. The Company’s major suppliers are providers of professional services, including the Investment Manager, Administrator, auditor and other legal and financial advisors. These suppliers operate in the United States, United Kingdom, Western Europe, and other countries that are generally regarded as low risk. Prior to engaging a supplier with higher-risk attributes, the Company will perform additional due diligence on the supplier’s employment practices to ensure that it is not engaged in modern slavery or human trafficking.

SECTION 172(1) STATEMENT The Directors have acted in the way they consider, in good faith, would be most likely to promote the success of the Company for the benefit of its members as a whole, having regard to its stakeholders and matters set out in s172(1)(a-f) of the Companies Act 2006, in the decisions taken during the year ended December 31, 2025 as described in this Report of the Directors. The following are some examples of how the Directors have discharged their section 172 duties during the year: • The Board approved an amendment to the Company’s IMA that reduces the management fees otherwise payable by the Company with respect to its holding of common stock in HHH. The amendment is discussed in “Discount to NAV” on pages 35-36. • In line with the Company’s dividend policy, the Board authorized a quarterly dividend of $0.1646 per Public Share for 2025, an increase of 13% from the 2024 dividend. The dividend policy is described in “Dividends” on page 37. • The Board has identified shareholders as key stakeholders and actively sought to engage with them. As a closed- ended investment company, PSH has no employees or operations, and its shareholders are both customers and investors. The Board’s approach to engagement with its stakeholders is discussed further in “Shareholder Engagement.”

Pershing Square Holdings, Ltd. 40 • The Board has maintained close relationships with its major suppliers of services – the Investment Manager, Administrator, auditor, and its other professional service providers. • The share buyback programs authorized by the Board permitted the Company to repurchase 6,573,519 Public Shares at an average discount of 29.3% for the benefit of shareholders in 2025. • The Board continued to responsibly manage and ladder the maturities of the Company’s debt obligations by approving the issuance of the 2030 €650m Bonds and the 2032 $500m Bonds, which the Board believes will contribute to the Company’s returns over the long-term. As was the case for prior Bond issuances, the majority of the co-managers for the 2030 €650m Bonds and the 2032 $500m Bonds were female and minority owned banks, continuing to demonstrate the Board and Investment Manager’s engagement on diversity and inclusion. • The election of Jean-Baptiste Wautier and appointment of Bilge Ogut to replace Tope Lawani and Bronwyn Curtis facilitated a smooth transition of the Board membership and planning for future succession. • The Board continues to monitor the Investment Manager’s approach to ESG issues to ensure that the Company’s investment activities are consistent with the long-term success of the Company and for the benefit of the Company’s stakeholders.

The Board’s approach and examples of how the Investment Manager has practically applied its principles are discussed further in “ESG” on pages 38-39. Further details regarding the processes by which the Board has considered the requirements of section 172(1) in its decision- making are included in “The Board’s Processes” in the Corporate Governance Report. SHAREHOLDER ENGAGEMENT As the Company’s shareholders are also its customers, the Board recognizes the importance of soliciting shareholder feedback to understand shareholders’ issues and to address their concerns regarding the Company. The Directors report to shareholders throughout the year on a formal basis with the publication of the annual and semi-annual reports. Shareholders also receive a live update from the Chairman of the Board and the Investment Manager at the Company’s annual investor event. The 2026 annual investor event was held in-person and webcast simultaneously on February 11, 2026, providing accessibility to shareholders unable to attend in person and eliminating the cost and environmental impact of travel. The event’s format, including an extended question and answer session, is designed to provide the Board a meaningful opportunity to engage with and hear from shareholders directly.

Attendance at this event continues to grow annually and it has become an important “investor outreach” forum, with 456 shareholders registered to attend in person and 430 shareholders registered to attend virtually (excluding affiliate ownership). In addition to the annual investor event, the Chairman and other Directors are available for meetings with shareholders as their schedules permit. Shareholders may contact the Directors in writing at the Company’s registered office or by email at PSHDirectors@ntrs.com. The Board regularly assesses the nature and quality of its and the Investment Manager’s engagement with shareholders. To ensure the Board remains apprised of shareholder requests and feedback, the Board and the Investment Manager have adopted procedures governing interactions with shareholders. In addition, Company announcements, other than routine or portfolio-related announcements, are approved by the Chairman or the Senior Independent Director prior to their release. The Board receives quarterly updates from the Investment Manager regarding investor contact during the quarter, which include, among other items, a summary of common discussion topics, meeting highlights, and metrics regarding the number, type, location and investment timeframe of shareholders contacted.semi-annual

Pershing Square Holdings, Ltd. 41 investor calls and letters to shareholders, the annual investor presentation, the publication of weekly and monthly NAV estimates, and on an ad-hoc basis when queries from shareholders arise. Over the course of 2025, the Investment Manager conducted several hundred shareholder calls and meetings, thereby engaging with holders of a majority of the Company’s Public Shares including several of the Company’s largest shareholders. A representative of the investor relations team is present for the substantial majority of most Board meetings. Jefferies continues to act as corporate broker to the Company to support communications with shareholders and advise the Company on shareholder sentiment. The Company continues to engage Cadarn Capital and LodeRock to raise the Company’s profile and cultivate demand from institutional investors and retail platforms in key international jurisdictions. Their activities include advising on the Company’s marketing strategy, identifying potential investors and liaising with their respective target markets, organizing one-to-one investor meetings and sharing shareholder insights. The Company continues to see increased interest and growth in its shareholder register from these regions. Investor feedback from meetings conducted by Jefferies, Cadarn Capital and LodeRock is reported to the Board on a regular basis.

GOING CONCERN Risks associated with the Company’s investment activities, together with existing and emerging risks likely to affect its future development, performance and position are set out in Principal Risks and Uncertainties on pages 24-29 and in Note 13. The Board has considered the financial prospects of the Company through March 31, 2027 and made an assessment of the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern. In assessing the going concern status of the Company, the Directors have considered: • The Company’s net assets attributable to all shareholders at December 31, 2025 of $15,049,406,887; • The liquidity of the Company’s assets (at December 31, 2025, 98.6% of its assets comprised of cash and cash equivalents and Level 1 assets); • The Company’s total indebtedness to total capital ratio of 19.5% at December 31, 2025; • The liquidity of the Company’s assets relative to the future interest and redemption obligations of the Bonds; and • The low level of fixed operating expenses relative to net assets, such expenses approximating 2.3% for the year ended December 31, 2025. After making reasonable enquiries, and assessing all data relating to the Company’s liquidity, particularly its cash holdings and Level 1 assets, the Directors and the Investment Manager believe the Company is well placed to manage its business risks.

Furthermore, the Directors confirm they have a reasonable expectation that the Company will continue to operate and meet its liabilities as they fall due for the foreseeable future and do not consider there to be any threat to the going concern status of the Company. For these reasons, the Directors have adopted the going concern basis in preparing the Financial Statements. VIABILITY STATEMENT In accordance with Principle 33 of the Association of Investment Companies (“AIC”) Code, the Board has carefully considered the existing and emerging risks set out in Principal Risks and Uncertainties alongside the measures in place to mitigate those risks — both at the Investment Manager level and the Company level. It has determined that those controls are sufficient such that the risks will not likely impair the long-term viability of the business. The Board has made this assessment with respect to the upcoming three-year period ending December 31, 2028.

Pershing Square Holdings, Ltd. 42 The Board has also evaluated the sustainability of the Company’s business model, taking into account its investment objectives, sources of capital and strategy. The Board believes the Company’s closed-ended structure and Investment Policy position it to invest over the long-term, and provide the Company with the flexibility to meet its investment objective in a variety of market conditions. In addition, the 2024 amendments to the performance fee offset provisions and the 2025 amendments to the management fee provisions in the Company’s IMA have the potential to meaningfully reduce the fees paid to the Investment Manager over time and improve the Company’s NAV per share performance. The Board has also evaluated quantitative data as of December 31, 2025 including net assets attributable to shareholders, the liquidity of the Company’s assets, and the Company’s total liabilities. It has also considered projections of expected net cash outflows for the next three years. The Board believes a three-year timeframe is appropriate given the general business conditions affecting the Company’s portfolio positions, the typical duration of equity positions taken by the Company and the regulatory environment in which the Company operates. The Board is confident these projections can be relied upon to form a conclusion as to the viability of the Company with a reasonable degree of accuracy over the three-year timeframe.