In this book I argue that all progress, both theoretical and practical, has resulted from a single human activity: the quest for what I call good explanations. – David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity
This paper draws heavily on David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity and Karl Popper’s theory of knowledge and applies their ideas to progress, business, and investing. Any errors are my own.
For as long as I can remember, I have been curious about what causes progress. In school, I learned about the American colonies and wondered how that world became the one we live in today, with skyscrapers, computers, and spaceships that can land on the Moon. Yet for most of human history, progress was extremely slow. With America celebrating its 250th anniversary, I started thinking more deeply about that question: why did progress suddenly take off?
The best explanation I have found is the one David Deutsch describes in The Beginning of Infinity : progress occurs when people create new knowledge by guessing solutions to problems, criticizing those solutions, and replacing worse ideas with better ones. Societies differ in how well their cultures allow that process to occur. Those differences help explain why progress has flourished in some places but stagnated in others.
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This process also matters for investors because businesses create value by applying knowledge to solve problems for customers. The knowledge that will shape future products, industries, and competition cannot be predicted in detail. If it could, we would already have it. Recent advances in artificial intelligence provide a timely example. Even after a new technology emerges, investors must still judge which businesses will benefit, which will be disrupted, and what expectations are already reflected in market prices. How can investors make sound decisions when a business’s future value cannot be known in advance?
This paper explores how societies create the conditions for knowledge to grow, how businesses apply that knowledge to create and retain value, and how investors can make decisions under uncertainty, especially during periods of technological change.
America and the Conditions for Sustained Progress
It is remarkable that America has existed as an independent country for only about three long human lifetimes. Someone living at the time of the founding could not have imagined the wealth and capabilities available to the average American today. In many areas of material life, that person had more in common with someone living in ancient Rome than with a modern American.
People have been capable of creating knowledge for hundreds of thousands of years, as the early controlled use of fire suggests. The recent acceleration of progress therefore cannot be explained by the sudden emergence of human creativity. Nor can it be explained by access to natural resources alone; materials become resources only when people possess the knowledge needed to put them to use.
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The difference lies largely in culture, particularly in whether a society’s shared ideas and traditions protect people’s freedom to challenge existing ideas and propose new ones. Deutsch distinguishes between two broad types of society: static and dynamic. Static societies preserve established ways of life by suppressing criticism and discouraging innovations that challenge tradition. Dynamic societies, by contrast, can preserve useful knowledge and social order while allowing existing ideas and practices to be questioned, improved, or replaced.
Static societies can persist for long periods because their cultures faithfully reproduce entrenched ideas along with the behaviors, traditions, and ways of thinking that support them. Conformity is rewarded, while questioning established practices is discouraged or punished. A community dependent on keeping a central fire burning, for example, might treat the practices for maintaining it as sacred. That might preserve essential knowledge embodied in the tradition, but it could also make useful steps difficult to distinguish from arbitrary or even harmful ones. By insulating the tradition from criticism, the culture can prevent alternatives from being proposed or tested, whether for maintaining the fire or solving other problems.
Although static societies dominated most of human history, some cultures experienced periods of unusual progress. In Peak Human , Johan Norberg examines seven such golden ages, including ancient Athens, Abbasid Baghdad, Song China, and Renaissance Italy. He identifies a recurring pattern: openness to people, trade, and ideas from elsewhere allowed existing knowledge to spread, while criticism of prevailing beliefs and experimentation with new approaches enabled new knowledge to be created.
These periods of openness and rapid progress were fragile and eventually receded. Some were weakened from within as authorities imposed orthodoxy or punished dissent: an Athenian jury sentenced Socrates to death on charges of impiety, Abbasid rulers punished scholars who rejected state-imposed religious doctrine, and the Roman Inquisition placed Galileo under house arrest for defending heliocentrism. War and political upheaval could also erode openness, as the Peloponnesian War did in Athens, or interrupt progress, as the Mongol invasion and subsequent civil strife did in Song China.
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One of the Enlightenment’s key achievements was establishing a more durable tradition of criticism through which people could pursue better explanations. In England, common law, limits on royal power, Parliament, and scientific debate helped sustain that tradition. America inherited and extended it through a political system founded on the principles that people possess natural rights and that governments derive their legitimate authority from the consent of the governed rather than hereditary rule. Although applied imperfectly, those principles provided standards against which existing practices could be judged and improved.
In practice, this tradition operates through several mechanisms: open debate, competitive markets, and constitutional democracy. Free speech protects people’s freedom to propose and criticize ideas. Free enterprise and markets allow people to try competing solutions, while customer choice and the resulting profits and losses provide feedback about which solutions create value. Constitutional democracy provides peaceful ways to challenge laws, constrain power, and replace political leaders. As Karl Popper argued, democracy’s central virtue is not that it guarantees good rulers but that it allows bad ones to be removed without violence. Together, these mechanisms allow existing ideas, businesses, laws, and political leaders to be replaced when better alternatives emerge, without overturning the broader system.
A society’s institutions embody accumulated knowledge about how people can coordinate, criticize ideas, and correct errors. Some of that knowledge is made explicit in constitutions and laws; much remains inexplicit, residing in how elections, courts, property rights, and markets operate and in the less visible norms and practices that sustain them. This helps explain why copying the formal features of American institutions elsewhere has not always produced the same results. Cultural qualities such as tolerance for dissent, respect for limits on coercive power, willingness to permit experimentation and failure, and openness to new ideas and competition are more difficult to reproduce. Formal rules can support these qualities, but their effectiveness ultimately depends on how people interpret and uphold them.
The value of America’s tradition of criticism lies not in preventing mistakes, but in making sustained progress possible by allowing people to identify and correct them. Deutsch’s principle of optimism captures the broader point: “All evils are caused by insufficient knowledge.” Problems are inevitable, but they are soluble. Protecting the freedom to challenge existing ideas and pursue better ones is therefore not merely a source of prosperity. It is fundamental to creating the knowledge needed to improve the world.
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Businesses in a Dynamic Society: Moats and Adaptability
Businesses are among the institutions that enable people in a dynamic society to preserve, apply, and create knowledge. By bringing together people, financial capital, and physical resources, a business can produce goods and services that would be difficult or impossible for individuals to create on their own. It creates value by applying knowledge to resources in ways that solve problems for customers. The knowledge behind those solutions is embodied in its products, processes, culture, relationships, and business model.
Competition and customer choice continually test a business’s solution against alternatives, while profits and losses provide feedback about whether customers value its products and services more than the resources used to provide them. By allowing people to keep trying new and better ways to solve problems, a dynamic society creates the conditions for wealth to grow. The same process leaves every business vulnerable: a competitor may develop a superior solution, or new knowledge may make the existing one obsolete. A durable business must therefore embody knowledge that competitors cannot easily reproduce while remaining capable of developing new solutions as the world changes.
Moats: Hard-to-Replicate Knowledge
Creating value for customers does not guarantee that a company can capture enough of it to earn attractive returns on capital. Airlines transformed travel, but broadly similar services leave little room for differentiation and make price competition intense. High returns attract capital and invite attempts to develop competing solutions. Sustaining attractive returns over time requires a moat: an advantage that makes a company’s solution difficult to copy or replace.
The trucking industry illustrates how seemingly similar services can have very different underlying business models and economics. A full-truckload carrier typically moves one customer’s shipment directly from its origin to its destination. This service does not require a dense terminal network, so barriers to entry are relatively low, competition is intense, and profitability is generally modest. A less-than-truckload (LTL) carrier, by contrast, combines shipments from many customers across a network of terminals and routes. Its advantage depends on shipment density, route efficiency, pricing knowledge, service reliability, and the coordination of thousands of daily decisions. The resulting barriers to entry tend to limit the number of viable competitors and support greater profitability for incumbents that have reached scale. A competitor is free to enter the market, but it cannot easily build a dense terminal network or reproduce the operating knowledge needed to run it efficiently.
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The LTL network reflects a broader feature of durable businesses: much of the knowledge behind their solutions may be inexplicit. It may reside in accumulated routines, judgment, and practical know-how that competitors cannot easily acquire or reproduce. Recognizing an attractive opportunity does not provide that knowledge. Overcoming such a moat may therefore require creating a materially better solution rather than simply copying what already exists.
A moat earned through customer choice does not prevent competition; it makes the company difficult to displace. Customers can leave and rivals can offer better solutions, so the advantage survives only while the incumbent continues providing enough value to retain them. That differs from an advantage sustained by political privilege or restrictions that prevent alternatives from being offered.
Even a moat earned through superior problem-solving is not permanent. Innovation can alter an industry’s economics and turn the knowledge, assets, and practices that once protected an incumbent into liabilities.
Adaptability: Creating New Knowledge
Newspapers show how technological change can alter an industry’s economics and undermine the advantages that once protected an incumbent. For decades, a city’s leading newspaper often held a dominant local position, supported by economies of scale in printing and distribution and network effects between readers and advertisers. The internet dramatically lowered the cost of distributing content and shifted advertising spending toward digital platforms. Newspapers retained much of their knowledge of journalism and local markets, but that knowledge was no longer enough to sustain the competitive position built around the old model.
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Historical results can inform expectations about the future, but they need to be explained rather than simply extrapolated. The important question is whether the advantages that produced them will remain useful as conditions change.
Amazon (AMZN) provides a useful contrast. Jeff Bezos recognized that the internet could give people access to a much larger selection of products and make them easier to find and compare. Amazon’s retail business expanded from books into other categories while remaining focused on enduring customer wants: greater selection, lower prices, and faster delivery. Those goals have no obvious endpoint. They give Amazon a reason to keep investing in fulfillment, software, logistics, and new services while developing new knowledge about how to serve customers better. That culture of continual improvement does not make Amazon immune to disruption, but it has encouraged the company to revise or replace existing methods in pursuit of the same customer wants.
Moats and adaptability address different but related risks: a moat protects existing earning power, while adaptability helps a company improve existing solutions or develop new ones. Warren Buffett has generally preferred businesses with durable moats that do not require continual reinvention. Berkshire (BRK.B)’s experience with newspapers shows, however, that even a genuine moat can erode when innovation changes the economics supporting it. The most enduring businesses therefore combine hard-to-reproduce knowledge with a culture that does not treat existing advantages as permanent.
For investors, a moat can often be assessed through current customer behavior and economics. Adaptability is harder to judge because it concerns problems not yet recognized and solutions not yet created. Investors can still ask whether a company’s existing practices can be questioned, new approaches tested, mistakes acknowledged, and resources redirected. These qualities do not guarantee successful adaptation, but they improve a company’s ability to keep solving customer problems as the world changes.
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Investing in a Dynamic Society: Decisions Under Uncertainty
Dynamic societies allow people to continually create new knowledge, but neither the content of that knowledge nor the changes it will bring can be predicted in detail. Investors must therefore allocate capital without knowing precisely how a business or its industry will evolve.
Conjecturing Investment Theses: Good and Bad Explanations
Every investment thesis is a conjecture, but not every conjecture is equally useful. Deutsch argues that a good explanation is hard to vary: its details are constrained by what it explains and cannot be altered arbitrarily without weakening it. A bad explanation can be changed freely while still seeming to account for almost any outcome.
The value of a business ultimately depends on the cash it can distribute to owners over its remaining life. A thesis that does not connect the price paid to those future cash flows is speculation, as I define it. At its simplest, speculation depends primarily on the hope of selling an asset to someone else at a higher price, while investing involves owning a business for the cash it can ultimately produce.
There is nothing inherently wrong with speculating or, for that matter, gambling. The important thing is recognizing which activity you are pursuing. Examples of speculation include buying stocks with money needed soon and therefore depending on a favorable near-term sale price, relying on other investors to become more enthusiastic and pay a higher valuation multiple, and expecting a historical price pattern to repeat. A thesis based solely on a chart pattern can be rejected as a bad explanation because it is easy to vary: changing the pattern, time period, or indicator can support almost any conclusion. Without a reason one pattern should be more meaningful than another, there is no basis for choosing among them.
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If the intent is to invest rather than speculate, there is no need to guess where share prices will move in the near term. A useful filter is to ask: “If I bought shares in this company and had to lock them in a vault for ten years, unable to sell them, would I still want to own the business? ” This shifts attention from price movements to what a good investment thesis must explain. I generally place theses that depend on correctly predicting the timing and effects of Federal Reserve policy, recessions, or military conflicts in my “too hard” pile. Those events can affect the intrinsic values of businesses, but I lack a good explanation for forecasting them, let alone determining how they would change the attractiveness of a particular investment relative to other available uses of capital.
The vault thought experiment also helps explain why I favor businesses whose long-term cash generation rests on hard-to-replicate advantages. Commodity-like businesses may not look so cheap, even at low valuation multiples, when the thesis must rely on the cash they can return to owners over time. Rapid growth alone does not solve this problem. Growth eventually slows, and without a moat, high returns on capital attract competition that tends to push those returns toward more ordinary levels. Businesses in fast-changing technology markets present a different problem: their business models and apparent advantages may not have been tested enough to judge whether they will endure.
A good investment thesis therefore uses explanation to form expectations without depending on a detailed prediction of how the business’s future will unfold. It explains how the business creates and retains value: the problem it solves for customers, why customers choose its solution over alternatives, what makes that solution difficult to replicate, and what could strengthen or weaken its position as competition, technology, and customer needs change. It then connects these factors to the economics of the business, including its opportunities to scale and reinvest, the capital required to do so, the cash it can ultimately generate, and how management is likely to allocate it.
Buying a stock because it appears undervalued means judging that the value of its expected future cash flows exceeds the price being asked. This is the inherently contrarian element of active investing: the investor is judging their expectations about the business to be less wrong than those reflected in the market price. Because that judgment remains conjectural, a thesis’s key assumptions must be explicit enough to be criticized as new evidence and competing explanations emerge.
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Criticizing Investment Theses: Explanations and Evidence
Criticism begins with the conjecture itself. Is it internally consistent? Does it conflict with relevant facts or other explanations that have survived criticism? Are important assumptions arbitrary or easy to vary? Is there a competing explanation that accounts for the same observations at least as well? These questions can expose weaknesses before any new evidence is gathered.
Evidence provides another source of criticism. Historical growth, margins, market share, and other business results can reveal problems with a thesis, but they are not the thesis itself. They describe what happened, not why it happened or whether the factors that produced those results will persist. The same facts can therefore be consistent with different explanations.
When two competing explanations survive those initial criticisms and appear to account for the same observations equally well, evidence can help distinguish between them. Consider a company that repeatedly lowers prices. One explanation is that competition is forcing it to cut prices because it lacks pricing power. Another is that its scale lowers unit costs, allowing it to pass some of those savings to customers. If that is what is happening, lower prices increase demand and further reinforce the company’s scale and cost advantage.
The price cuts alone are consistent with both explanations. The next step is to identify what each would lead us to expect. If customer adoption and volumes rise, unit costs fall, and the company’s competitive position strengthens, the scale-advantage explanation survives an important test. If volumes fail to grow while unit economics and returns on capital deteriorate, the lack-of-pricing-power explanation may better account for what is happening.
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Even then, a period of better- or worse-than-expected performance does not automatically prove or disprove a thesis. That does not make the thesis immune to criticism; whether an outcome undermines it depends on what the thesis claimed and why the results differed from expectations. Businesses operate within complex, dynamic economies, and even the most successful rarely produce results that move smoothly up and to the right. Worse-than-expected performance nevertheless creates a new problem: why did this happen, and what does it reveal about the thesis?
The discrepancy may reflect temporary circumstances, incomplete data, or a mistaken interpretation, but any such explanation must remain open to criticism and account for the evidence better than the alternatives. A claim that a setback is temporary should also explain what caused it, why the thesis’s central claims remain intact, and what should happen when the condition passes. In other cases, the result may expose an important error or make a competing explanation more persuasive. A thesis cannot be altered after every disappointment merely to preserve the original conclusion. The goal is not to defend it, but to improve or replace it when a better explanation emerges.
Changes in stock price should be considered separately from evidence about the underlying business. A rising share price does not validate the investment thesis, just as a falling price does not invalidate it. What changes directly is the prospective return available at the new price. A large price movement may prompt further investigation because it could reflect information I have missed, but the movement itself does not explain what changed.
When company results are weaker than expected and the share price also falls, I ask two questions: How much should the new information change the thesis and my estimate of future owner cash flows? After making that adjustment, how much has the lower price changed the prospective return? A business can become less valuable while its stock becomes more attractive if its price falls by more than the estimated decline in value. The reverse can happen when a business performs well but the stock appreciates enough to leave little room for an attractive return.
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Seen this way, investing is a continuing process of problem solving: developing explanations for how businesses create and retain value, exposing them to criticism and testing them against evidence, comparing the resulting estimate of value with the market price, and revising decisions as new problems emerge.
Investing Through Technological Change: Artificial Intelligence
This investing approach is especially useful for filtering opportunities during periods of rapid technological change. Recognizing that a new technology may transform society is not enough to identify a good investment. The businesses that ultimately succeed, the advantages they develop, and the value they capture will depend partly on knowledge that has not yet been created.
Warren Buffett made a related point in a 1999 Fortune article published near the height of the dot-com exuberance. He noted that at least 2,000 companies had entered the automobile business in the United States, yet by the 1990s only three U.S. car companies remained. The paths leading to those eventual survivors were far from straightforward. Henry Ford’s first automobile company failed. General Motors (GM)’ rapid acquisition spree left it financially strained and cost founder Billy Durant control of the company in 1910. Chrysler emerged from the reorganization of the troubled Maxwell Motor Company in 1925. Automobiles transformed society, but recognizing their importance was far easier than identifying in advance which companies would survive or generate attractive returns.
Artificial intelligence presents the same challenge today. Both the technology and the surrounding industry are changing so rapidly that I find it difficult to predict where either is headed. NVIDIA (NVDA) developed GPUs for video game graphics in the late 1990s and later introduced CUDA, which allowed developers to use them for general-purpose computing. AlexNet demonstrated the value of GPUs for training deep neural networks, Google ((GOOG), (GOOGL)) researchers introduced the transformer architecture, and OpenAI (OPENAI) used that architecture to create increasingly capable large language models.
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That progression was far less predictable as it unfolded. Few people anticipated that chips originally designed for video game graphics would become central to training large AI models, let alone the range of tasks those models would eventually perform. Nor did many expect ChatGPT, released in November 2022, to bring AI to a mass audience and help drive a surge in demand for computing infrastructure. That history illustrates why AI’s capabilities, industry structure, and competitive dynamics over the next decade or two remain highly uncertain.
Uncertainty about where the technology is headed, combined with the rapid improvement and apparent intelligence of current AI systems, has contributed to dramatic predictions, ranging from widespread job losses and economic disruption to superintelligent systems escaping human control. One unresolved question is whether continued development of these systems will produce machines capable of creating explanatory knowledge, which is the threshold I use here for artificial general intelligence (AGI). Current models do not yet demonstrate that ability in this open-ended sense. A system trained only on the information available before Darwin or Einstein, for example, would have to conjecture explanations that were not contained in prior observations or theories.
Deutsch has argued that AGI must be physically possible but that creating it will require understanding how such creativity works, not merely improving performance on existing tasks. Whatever the path to AGI, AI does not need to cross that threshold to be economically transformative. These systems can assist with or automate parts of coding, analysis, experimentation, communication, and many other tasks. By making existing knowledge easier and cheaper to apply, they can lower the cost of producing many goods and services and expand what people can accomplish.
The harder question for investors is how the resulting economic value will be divided among customers, companies supplying the technology, and businesses applying it. AI may improve or automate one part of an existing service without eliminating the need for the broader product and the distribution network, customer relationships, and accumulated knowledge required to deliver it. Like electricity or the internet, it may also enable businesses to develop products and services that are difficult to imagine today.
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Although I remain fascinated by AI, I have found it difficult to form well-grounded expectations about what many businesses built around it will look like in ten or twenty years. It is unclear which business models will endure or whether leading AI models will remain proprietary or become widely available. Investing in a company simply because it involves AI is not an investment thesis. The same questions apply: What problem does the company solve? How does AI improve its solution? What makes that solution difficult to replicate? Who captures the resulting value? What expectations are already reflected in its stock price?
NVIDIA shows that an AI-related investment thesis can rest on knowledge and competitive advantages that already exist. Its hardware, CUDA software ecosystem, and relationships with developers embody knowledge accumulated and tested over decades. Those advantages may help explain why NVIDIA has captured substantial value from the growth of AI, but any thesis would still need to address whether alternative chips and computing architectures could weaken its position. It would also need to judge whether its expected future earning power offers an attractive return at its current market price.
The more a thesis depends on capabilities, products, or industry structures that do not yet exist, the more it rests on assumptions that cannot be tested in the market. Those assumptions should affect whether I invest at all, the price I am willing to pay, and the amount of capital I commit. The practical question is whether the thesis offers an attractive prospective return without requiring a chain of technological and competitive developments to go right.
Active investing does not require identifying every eventual winner as a technology emerges; investors need only find a few opportunities they believe they understand. Early in a technology’s development, companies are still discovering which products and business models will work and what durable advantages will emerge. Many will fail. Venture capital portfolios are structured for this risk, spreading capital across many companies before their products and business models have been extensively tested. Public-market investors can wait until customer adoption, competitive advantages, unit economics, and cash generation become easier to evaluate. For the Saga Portfolio, I am following the industry closely while focusing my research on whether and how AI may affect the businesses we own.
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What this Means for Investors
People create wealth by developing explanatory knowledge and applying it to solve problems. Dynamic societies accelerate that process by preserving the freedom to criticize existing ideas, experiment with alternatives, and correct errors peacefully. Businesses apply useful knowledge to solve problems for customers. Moats allow them to retain some of the value they create, while adaptability enables them to preserve what works and improve or replace what does not.
Applying this framework to the Saga Portfolio means looking for businesses that have created valuable, hard-to-replicate knowledge, can continue solving important problems better than their competitors, and can be purchased at prices that are attractive relative to the cash they may ultimately generate for their owners. Within this process, investment theses remain conjectures, subject to ongoing criticism as new problems and evidence emerge.
AI does not overturn this framework. Its economic consequences will depend on the problems it solves, which businesses use it effectively, who retains the value created, and what expectations are already reflected in market prices. The future cannot be predicted in detail because it will be shaped by knowledge that has not yet been created. That uncertainty does not prevent sound investing. It makes good explanations, attractive prices, and a willingness to correct mistakes all the more important.
Shares of Vishal Mega Mart surged 10% on Monday after the company announced the reappointment of Managing Director and CEO Gunender Kapur for a five-year term. Morgan Stanley said the move eases succession-related concerns and provides continuity to the company’s growth strategy.
Vishal Mega Mart shares surged around 10% to Rs 113.70 apiece on Monday morning, the highest level seen in more than a month. The stock is also on track to record the biggest single-day jump since late April of 2025.
Gunender Kapur’s current three-year term as Vishal Mega Mart’s Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer was set to expire on June 26, 2027. The company on Friday said that its board of directors, during its meeting, approved the reappointment of the executive for a period of five years from September 1 onwards, till August 31, 2031. He has been redesignated as ‘Founder, Managing Director & Chief Executive Officer’ of the popular retailer.
Morgan Stanley on Vishal Mega Mart share price
Morgan Stanley maintained its ‘Overweight’ rating on the shares of Vishal Mega Mart with a target price of Rs 146 apiece, implying a potential upside of more than 41% from the stock’s previous closing price of Rs 103.43 apiece. The international brokerage said Gunender Kapur’s reappointment as Managing Director and CEO for another five-year term starting September 1, 2026, along with the redesignation as Founder, MD & CEO, eases succession-related concerns and provides continuity to the company’s growth strategy, ET Now reported.
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It added that the stock currently trades at 42.8 times its 12-month forward price-to-earnings multiple, which the brokerage considers attractive compared with discretionary peers. Consistent execution by the company further supports Morgan Stanley’s positive view on the stock. Also read | CAS chaos triggers liquidity spiral: Nuvama says higher participation needed to break cycle
Vishal Mega Mart share price
Vishal Mega Mart shares have jumped around 6% in a week and 3.5% in a month, although the stock is down 18% in 2026 so far. After hitting a record high of Rs 157.60 apiece in August last year, the stock tumbled over 37% to hit a 52-week low of Rs 98.77 apiece this March.
The stock has, however, recovered more than 15% since then to trade at Rs 113.70 apiece today. Overall, the stock has delivered negative returns of around 26% over the past one year. The company currently has a market capitalisation of around Rs 52,650 crore.
(Disclaimer: Recommendations, suggestions, views and opinions given by the experts are their own. These do not represent the views of The Economic Times)
Shares of Lalithaa Jewellery Mart continued to surge further, after marking a strong market debut by listing at around 32% premium over IPO price on Monday, with analysts highlighting attractive valuations while noting down the key risks.
Lalithaa Jewellery Mart shares listed at Rs 265 apiece on NSE, marking around 32% premium over the IPO price of Rs 201 apiece. After the strong market debut, the shares of the company rose further to Rs 274.40 apiece, rallying over 36% from IPO price.
The strong market debut comes after Lalithaa Jewellery Mart’s Rs 1,700 crore initial public offering received an overwhelming response, with the issue being subscribed 62.97 times overall between August 17 and August 19. The maiden public issue of the company comprised a fresh issue of Rs 1,200 crore and an offer for sale (OFS) of Rs 500 crore by promoter and founder Kiran Kumar Jain.
Grey market estimates vs listing premium
Despite the strong market debut, the listing premium was slightly below grey market estimates. Ahead of listing, the unlisted shares of Lalithaa Jewellery Mart were trading with nearly 37% grey market premium (GMP) over the IPO price, according to sites tracking the unofficial market. Lalithaa Jewellery Mart plans to use a significant portion of the IPO proceeds to accelerate its retail expansion strategy, with funds earmarked for setting up 10 new stores.
Should you buy, sell or hold Lalithaa Jewellery shares?
Despite Lalithaa Jewellery Mart’s strong market debut, investors should not ignore the risks, said Shivani Nyati, Head of Wealth at Swastika Investmart. She noted that jewellery retail is highly dependent on gold prices, consumer demand, inventory management and working capital. For the pre-listing outlook, sentiment has been strong. “Low risk Investors can book the profit while the other can hold for medium to long term,” according to the analyst.Since the company doesn’t have any hedging policy, Sunny Agrawal, Head of Fundamental Research at SBI Securities, believes that the exponential growth during the last 2-3 years would have been partially on the back of steep rise in gold prices thereby aiding margin expansion. Going forward, street will keenly watch the sustainability of the margins and growth outlook on the back of deployment of capital for expansion of 10 more stores, he added.
The strong market debut of the company comes after the Rs 1,700 crore initial public offering of the company garnered several ‘Subscribe’ calls from analysts. Ventura Securities had highlighted that the company is a leading mass-market jewellery retail chain in Southern India.
“At the upper price band of Rs. 201, the issue is valued at 11.1x FY26 diluted EPS of Rs.18.0, compared with the listed peer average P/E of 29.7x. The valuation represents a meaningful discount to peers, this combined with the company’s return ratios, regional franchise and store expansion opportunities we recommend a ‘Subscribe’ rating for the issue,” said BP Wealth.
Nirmal Bang meanwhile said that the valuation gap from peers offers a good investment opportunity considering risks related to gold-price volatility and working-capital intensity. With planned store expansion in place and proven strong fundamental record provides long term growth visibility for Lalithaa, it added.
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Geojit Investments also had issued a ‘Subscribe’ call for short to medium term investors, given the company’s strong store expansion, industry leading revenue per store, robust return ratios, strong brand, and integrated manufacturing-led retail model.
(Disclaimer: Recommendations, suggestions, views and opinions given by the experts are their own. These do not represent the views of The Economic Times)
Alibaba Group Holding shares plunged as much as 10% in Hong Kong trading Monday after the Chinese e-commerce and cloud computing giant priced a record HK$80 billion, or $10.2 billion, share placement, with the company saying it will direct all of the proceeds toward expanding its artificial intelligence capabilities.
Alibaba plans to sell 710 million new ordinary shares at HK$112.70 apiece, according to a term sheet reviewed by Reuters, representing a 3.6% discount to the stock’s Friday closing price of HK$123. The transaction, launched Sunday, would mark the largest-ever primary follow-on offering by a Hong Kong-listed company, and ranks as the world’s third-largest primary follow-on share sale of the year, trailing only offerings from Alphabet and Intel.
The company was explicit about how the funds will be deployed. Alibaba said it intends to use 100% of the net proceeds from the placement to invest in its “full stack” AI capabilities, a category the company said spans chips, infrastructure, and the development and deployment of AI models, according to multiple outlets including U.S. News and Investing.com. Alibaba did not disclose further detail regarding the specific breakdown of its planned AI-related investments by category, and did not comment beyond its formal regulatory disclosure, according to reporting from WMBD Radio.
The share placement was structured as an offshore transaction not registered under U.S. securities laws, meaning American investors were not eligible to participate in the offering, Alibaba said.
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Alibaba Chief Executive Eddie Wu framed the fundraising as a necessary step to secure the company’s long-term competitive position within the global AI race. According to Investing.com, Wu said Alibaba needed to build sufficient computing capacity before it could capture future growth opportunities tied to artificial intelligence, a rationale that underscores the company’s willingness to absorb near-term financial strain in pursuit of longer-term strategic positioning.
That near-term strain has already become evident in Alibaba’s recent financial results. The company reported that its net profit fell 75% year over year during its April-to-June quarter, a decline driven directly by surging AI-related capital expenditure. According to CNBC, the fundraising announcement came just days after Alibaba disclosed that steep profit drop, with heavy AI spending continuing to weigh significantly on the company’s near-term earnings even as executives argue the investment is essential to the company’s future.
Alibaba’s AI ambitions are backed by a substantial, previously announced spending commitment. The company pledged last year to invest at least 380 billion yuan in cloud computing and AI infrastructure over a three-year period, according to CNBC. According to WMBD Radio, Alibaba disclosed during its most recent earnings report that it had already spent nearly half of that three-year capital expenditure plan, while separately stating that the expected payback period on its AI-related investments was improving, falling to an estimated 2.5 years from a previous estimate of three years, a shift the company attributed to surging demand for its AI products and services.
Alibaba’s fundraising push arrives amid an intensifying global race among major technology companies to build out artificial intelligence infrastructure. According to Reuters, cited by Investing.com, the four major U.S. hyperscalers — Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet and Meta — are together expected to spend roughly $725 billion in capital expenditures in 2026, much of it directed toward AI data centers, chips and cloud infrastructure. Alibaba’s Chinese technology peers have similarly ramped up their own AI-related spending; CNBC reported that Tencent’s capital expenditure rose 65% from the previous quarter to 52.8 billion yuan during the June quarter, as that company continues investing in computing infrastructure to monetize its own AI models.
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The timing of Alibaba’s capital raise also follows closely on the heels of a significant product release. According to Hokanews, the fundraising announcement came just weeks after Alibaba released its Qwen 3.8-Max model, part of the company’s broader Qwen family of large language models that has become central to its AI strategy across its e-commerce, cloud and enterprise services ecosystem.
Market reaction to the announcement was decisively negative in the immediate term, reflecting investor concern over the scale of dilution and continued capital intensity the placement represents. Coverage from Eastern Herald framed the fundraising as placing the burden of proof squarely on Alibaba’s leadership going forward, noting that while the company had clearly demonstrated its ability to raise substantial capital, the more significant open question is whether that capital, once deployed into AI infrastructure in 2026, will translate into a defensible competitive position by 2028 and beyond, a case the outlet noted “cannot yet be made with data” but “can only be made with commitment.”
The transaction also reflects a broader shift in where major Chinese technology companies are choosing to raise capital for AI investment. According to Eastern Herald, Hong Kong’s stock exchange has seen growing activity from Chinese technology firms seeking large capital raises specifically tied to AI development, a trend the outlet attributed in part to Hong Kong’s exchange authorities streamlining listing requirements and actively courting so-called “new economy” companies in recent years, positioning the city as an increasingly significant venue for this type of large-scale technology fundraising.
With the HK$80 billion placement now priced and the underlying shares set to be issued to non-U.S. investors, Alibaba’s leadership faces continued pressure to demonstrate that its aggressive AI capital expenditure translates into sustainable competitive advantage and, eventually, improved profitability, particularly given the company’s recently disclosed 75% profit decline tied directly to the same AI investment strategy the new fundraising is designed to accelerate further. Investors and analysts covering the stock are likely to continue closely monitoring Alibaba’s coming quarterly results for further signs of whether the company’s AI-related revenue growth, including continued adoption of its Qwen model family, begins to offset the substantial near-term costs associated with building out its AI infrastructure at this unprecedented scale.
John Caudwell, the Phones 4u founder, and Lord Stuart Rose, the former chief executive of Marks and Spencer, have joined a campaign calling on the Chancellor to halt and reverse the creeping taxes that its signatories say punish founders for growing their businesses.
The two are the most prominent of a wave of new backers for Stop the Creep, run by the founder group Helm, which describes itself as the UK’s largest community of scale-up founders. They sign alongside Christos Angelides, chief executive of the fashion retailer Reiss, and Charlie Mullins, who founded Pimlico Plumbers. The campaign says more than 150 business leaders and parliamentarians have now added their names.
The signatories warn of a “death by a thousand cuts” for Britain’s wealth creators. Other backers include Luke Johnson, chair of Gail’s Bakery, Johnnie Boden, founder of the clothing retailer Boden, and dozens of politicians, among them the shadow business secretary Andrew Griffith.
What the campaign is asking for
Stop the Creep makes three demands. It wants the rise in Employers’ National Insurance reversed, the entrepreneurial reliefs that have been cut restored, and a clear, stable roadmap for business taxation set out so that founders can invest with confidence. The campaign’s published case argues that Britain risks becoming an incubator economy, world class at creating businesses but unable to keep them.
Lord Rose, who also chaired Asda and is chairman of Zenith Vehicles, said: “I have been in Business for over 50 years and have never been more concerned about the cost of doing business and building businesses that are financially sustainable for the long term. Employment costs and regulations are now serious impediments to growth and employment.
“Employers’ National Insurance alone took a hundred million pounds a year out of one supermarket. Multiply that across the economy and it is easy to see why investment has stalled. The good news is that this is within the Government’s gift to fix.
“This is not about special treatment. If the Government wants businesses to create jobs and growth, the Budget is the moment to ease the burden on the act of creating them.”
Caudwell’s change of mind
Caudwell, who built Phones 4u before selling his business group for £1.5 billion, switched his support from the Conservatives to Labour at the 2024 general election. He has since said he was “misled” by the party’s pro-business promises. Over the weekend he told The Telegraph: “I do not think the Labour Party is electable”, adding that he would back any party that seeks to turbocharge growth.
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Mullins sold Pimlico Plumbers in 2021 and has already left the UK for Spain over the rising tax burden, which is the point the campaign is making about direction of travel rather than about any one measure.
The Budget as the test
The intervention lands as attention turns to Chancellor John Healey’s first Budget on 28 October. Polling of business leaders published by Helm earlier this month found that just 6 per cent consider Prime Minister Andy Burnham to be pro-business, with more than four in five expecting trading conditions to stay the same or get worse.
Andreas Adamides, chief executive of Helm, said: “John Caudwell wanted this Government to succeed. Lord Rose has spent half a century at the top of British business. Charlie Mullins has already left. That is what training entrepreneurs for export looks like.
“When founders of this calibre unite around one cause the Government should listen, because these are exactly the people it needs on side to deliver the growth it has promised.”
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Adamides said founders were “ready and willing” to work with ministers on growth. “Andy Burnham says he is pro-growth, and we take him at his word, but his first Budget this autumn will be the real test of this commitment.
“Stopping the creep of taxes on wealth creators, and giving business the certainty it needs to invest, would be the clearest possible signal that this Government wants Britain’s founders to build and succeed here.”
Helm says its members run scale-up businesses with combined revenue of more than £8 billion and contribute £1 billion a year in tax. The average member is the chief executive of a company turning over £21 million a year.
For owner managers outside that bracket, the practical question the Budget answers is narrower than the campaign’s framing. Employers’ National Insurance is a live cost on every payroll, and the reliefs at issue, principally those that reduce the tax due when a business is sold or passed on, are the ones that determine what a founder keeps at the end. Both are set on 28 October.
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Jamie Young
Jamie Young is Senior Reporter at Business Matters, covering SME finance, employment law and Westminster policy since 2016. He has reported on every Budget and Autumn Statement since 2018, helped make sense of the ‘covid era’ and the bounce-back loan scheme from launch through the fraud investigations, and broke the magazine’s coverage of the 2024 late-payment reforms. He joined Business Matters straight from completing his BA in Administration from Exeter University and is NCTJ-qualified. Reach him at jyoung@cbmeg.co.uk
Sydney commercial lawyer Joanna Oakey has built her professional profile around a part of business law that can have consequences well beyond the signing of a contract: helping owners buy, grow and sell businesses.
As managing director of Aspect Legal, Oakey works in commercial law with a particular emphasis on business sales and acquisitions, while the firm also advises on contracts, intellectual property, trademarks, brand protection, procurement, employment and disputes. Her current professional profile describes her as a commercial lawyer and deal maker with more than 20 years of experience.
Her work has also expanded beyond conventional legal practice. Oakey hosts The Deal Room and Talking Law podcasts, writes about commercial issues affecting business owners and is the author of Buy Grow Exit: The Ultimate Guide to Using Your Business as a Wealth Creation Vehicle.
1. Business sales and acquisitions sit at the center of her practice
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For an entrepreneur, selling a business can be the financial culmination of years of work. For a buyer, acquiring an established company can represent a major investment with significant legal and commercial risks.
Oakey’s practice has a substantial focus on these transactions.
Aspect Legal says it provides specialist advice to buyers and sellers throughout business and share sales and acquisitions, including preparation, legal due diligence, transaction structuring, drafting, negotiation and completion. The firm also says it has advised thousands of local and national business owners as they acquire and exit businesses.
That work can begin well before a sale agreement is drafted.
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For sellers, legal preparation may involve reviewing existing customer and supplier contracts, employment arrangements, leases, intellectual property and other assets. The purpose is to identify potential problems before a prospective buyer’s lawyers uncover them during due diligence.
For buyers, the process can involve examining whether the business actually owns the assets it appears to own, whether important contracts can be transferred, whether there are unresolved disputes and whether regulatory or employment issues could create liabilities after completion.
Oakey’s recent writing reflects this emphasis on preparation.
In June 2026, she wrote about six contract problems that business owners should address before selling. The article warned that problems identified during a buyer’s legal review can affect negotiations, including warranties, money held back at completion or earn-out structures.
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The broader message is straightforward: The legal preparation for a business sale should not necessarily begin when a buyer appears.
2. She emphasizes getting a business ready before the deal begins
A recurring theme in Oakey’s work is that business owners should prepare for an eventual transaction rather than waiting until a buyer is already at the table.
That can be particularly important because buyers and their advisers can examine a business in considerable detail.
Aspect Legal says its work for sellers can include an independent review of a company’s legal strengths and weaknesses, preparation of documents, confidentiality agreements, sale agreements and negotiation of transaction terms.
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For a business owner, seemingly minor legal housekeeping can become significant when the company is being sold.
A customer contract may not contain the rights the seller assumed it did. A lease may have restrictions on assignment. An employee agreement may be outdated. A trademark may not be properly protected. A key supplier arrangement may not transfer automatically to a purchaser.
None of these issues necessarily prevents a transaction. But they can create additional negotiations, delays or uncertainty.
Oakey’s recent article on preparing contracts before a sale makes that point directly, arguing that problems are generally easier to address before a buyer becomes involved.
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For business owners thinking about an eventual exit, that approach turns legal preparation into part of the broader business strategy.
It also changes the timing of the lawyer’s role.
Instead of appearing only when documents need to be signed, a commercial lawyer can become involved earlier, helping an owner identify legal issues that could affect the value or attractiveness of the company.
3. Privacy compliance has become a new transaction issue in 2026
One of the most current aspects of Oakey’s work is her focus on changing privacy obligations and how they can affect business transactions.
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In July 2026, Aspect Legal published analysis of changes taking effect during the year and their implications for businesses preparing to sell. The firm said changes taking effect July 1 expanded the number of businesses affected by privacy obligations, while further changes scheduled for Dec. 10 would introduce additional disclosure requirements concerning the use of artificial intelligence in decision-making for covered businesses.
For sellers, the issue is not simply regulatory compliance.
Privacy practices can become part of the buyer’s due diligence process.
A prospective purchaser may want to know what customer information the business holds, how that information was collected, whether privacy policies are appropriate, whether data is transferred offshore and what obligations apply to the business.
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That means a privacy problem can become a transaction problem.
Aspect Legal made a similar point in July when discussing the buyer’s perspective, saying privacy compliance is increasingly an issue to examine during due diligence.
The development is particularly relevant as more businesses adopt cloud services, artificial intelligence tools and digital customer-management systems.
For an owner planning to sell, the lesson is that the legal value of a business can be affected by how well its information, contracts and compliance systems are organized.
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Privacy may once have been treated as an administrative issue. In a transaction, it can become part of the commercial risk assessment.
4. Oakey has made legal education part of her professional identity
Oakey’s public profile extends beyond traditional client work.
She hosts Talking Law, which Aspect Legal describes as a podcast offering legal tips to business owners without the jargon. She also hosts The Deal Room, which focuses specifically on business sales and acquisitions.
The Deal Room has become a significant part of her professional positioning because it focuses on the people and advisers involved in transactions rather than limiting discussion to legal doctrine.
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Aspect Legal describes the podcast as Australia’s first podcast dedicated to business sales and acquisitions and says it features industry advisers as well as owners and managers involved in buying and selling organizations.
Oakey is also the author of Buy Grow Exit, a book focused on using a business as a wealth-creation vehicle. Her firm’s profile identifies her as a lawyer, author and podcaster.
That educational focus may matter to business owners because many commercial legal decisions arise before a formal legal engagement.
An entrepreneur considering an acquisition may first want to understand how due diligence works. A business owner preparing for an exit may want to know what buyers look for. Someone negotiating a shareholders agreement may need to understand the practical consequences of different structures.
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Providing accessible information can help owners recognize those questions earlier.
Oakey’s LinkedIn activity also shows that she continues to discuss current business issues, including artificial intelligence, business brokerage and the practical challenges involved in buying and selling companies. Her recent posts include commentary around AI adoption among advisers and a 2026 masterclass on buying and selling businesses.
5. Her approach connects legal work with the business lifecycle
Oakey’s career is built around more than isolated legal transactions.
Aspect Legal describes its model as helping growing businesses acquire companies, consolidate and protect their assets and eventually exit in a way designed to preserve business value.
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That approach treats legal advice as something that can follow a business through different stages.
At the growth stage, the issues may include contracts, employment arrangements, intellectual property and brand protection.
During expansion, the company may acquire another business or enter a joint venture.
As the owners prepare to exit, the focus can shift to legal due diligence, transaction structures, sale agreements and negotiations.
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The same legal foundations can matter at each stage.
A company with well-managed contracts and clearly protected intellectual property may be easier to review during due diligence. A business with unresolved legal problems may face more questions from prospective buyers.
Aspect Legal says it can assist sellers from early planning and structuring through the transaction itself, while buyers can receive assistance with due diligence, structuring, negotiations and post-acquisition planning.
This lifecycle perspective is particularly relevant for small and mid-sized business owners, who may not have in-house legal teams.
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The bottom line on Joanna Oakey
Joanna Oakey has built a professional identity around the intersection of commercial law and business transactions.
As managing director of Aspect Legal, her practice covers business sales and acquisitions alongside broader commercial services, including contracts, intellectual property, trademarks, procurement, employment and disputes.
Her current work also reflects emerging issues affecting Australian businesses. Recent publications from Aspect Legal have focused on privacy compliance, AI-related obligations, contract preparation and the practical challenges facing buyers and sellers in 2026.
For business owners, perhaps the most relevant feature of Oakey’s practice is its focus on the period before a transaction becomes urgent.
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A business sale is rarely just about signing a contract. It can involve years of preparation, legal housekeeping, negotiations, due diligence and decisions about how risk should be allocated between buyer and seller.
For owners considering their next stage of growth — or an eventual exit — understanding those issues early can make the legal side of the process considerably easier to navigate.
Disclaimer: This article is for general informational purposes only and is not legal advice. Business owners should obtain independent legal, financial and tax advice based on their individual circumstances before entering into a transaction.
The popular Wiltshire event attracts around 150,000 visitors each year
Peter Davison, Local Democracy Reporter
07:51, 24 Aug 2026
The Cyclops – part of this year’s Festival of Light at Longleat(Image: Local Democracy Reporting Service)
Behind-the-scenes secrets have emerged as one of Wiltshire’s most visited tourist destinations gears up for a major seasonal spectacle. Longleat Estate has staged its popular Festival of Light since 2014, drawing around 150,000 visitors.
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However, beneath the sparkle and spectacle, there are staff to house, installations – including the celebrated singing Christmas tree – to be built and maintained, and vehicles to be accommodated.
An application to Wiltshire Council seeks permission for all three.
According to the report, Longleat hopes to capture the zeitgeist with an illuminated Wooden Horse of Troy – re-popularised by the Hollywood movie hit Odyssey – as part of this year’s theme, Legendary Worlds.
Visitors will be invited to explore the lost city of Atlantis and meet the gods, heroes and monsters of ancient Greece, along with the Vikings and the court of King Arthur.
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The festival will run between November 7 and January 10, between 4pm and 8.30pm.
Organisers wish to install temporary surfacing to accommodate parking for hundreds of vehicles, alongside temporary lighting to assist families navigating to and from their cars.
The planning application highlights that guest arrivals are staggered throughout the day, with numbers restricted.
The Estate also seeks to supply temporary accommodation for roughly 70 staff members.
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This will comprise seven 10-berth static caravans.
Meanwhile, the expansive coach park will be covered with marquees and utilised for assembling and maintaining the giant lanterns.
The planning application highlights that the Festival of Light has evolved into an “established and popular feature of the Longleat calendar”, contributing to 15 per cent of the estate’s annual visitor numbers.
CHICAGO — Sean Grayson, the former Illinois sheriff’s deputy convicted in the fatal shooting of Sonya Massey, a case that became a flashpoint in the national debate over police use of force, died Sunday while serving a 20-year prison sentence, according to his attorney.
Grayson’s lawyer, Daniel Fultz, confirmed that his client died earlier Sunday but declined to provide additional details regarding the circumstances of his death. Grayson, 32, had been diagnosed with colon cancer before Massey’s killing, and his attorneys said at his January sentencing that the disease had since spread to his liver and lungs.
Grayson was convicted of second-degree murder in October in connection with the July 2024 shooting death of Massey, a 36-year-old Black woman who had called 911 to report a possible prowler outside her Springfield-area home. Body camera footage of the encounter showed Massey crouching in her kitchen and apologizing in the moments before Grayson shot her in the face. He was sentenced in January to the maximum 20 years in prison allowed for the conviction.
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Only months into his sentence, Grayson sought medical release in May under an Illinois law that allows for the release of prisoners with terminal illnesses or serious medical conditions. The Illinois Prisoner Review Board denied that request last month.
Massey called 911 early on July 6, 2024, to report someone prowling outside her home. Grayson and another Sangamon County sheriff’s deputy responded to the call. Body camera video captured Grayson directing Massey to remove a pot of hot water from her stove. As she held the pot, Massey told the deputies, “I rebuke you in the name of Jesus.” Grayson then threatened to shoot her, drew his handgun and ordered her to drop the pot. Massey apologized and ducked behind a kitchen counter before Grayson fired three times, striking her in the face.
The second deputy on scene, Dawson Farley, later testified that he did not consider Massey to be a threat during the encounter and said he drew his own weapon only after Grayson had already drawn his.
Grayson was fired from the Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office following the shooting and was initially charged with first-degree murder. Jurors ultimately convicted him of the lesser charge of second-degree murder after Grayson argued during trial that he had feared Massey intended to throw the hot water at him.
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Massey’s killing drew significant national attention and sparked protests, while also raising broader questions about how Grayson had been able to move through multiple law enforcement agencies before ultimately being hired by the Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office. In response to those questions, Illinois lawmakers passed the Sonya Massey Act, a new state law requiring law enforcement agencies to more thoroughly review an applicant’s previous employment records before hiring an officer.
The U.S. Department of Justice separately opened a civil rights investigation following Massey’s death. That investigation later resulted in an agreement between the department, Sangamon County, its sheriff’s office and other local agencies, requiring a series of policy changes to local policing and emergency response practices. According to those terms, the changes included additional training for officers on interacting with individuals experiencing behavioral health crises, along with the development of a mobile crisis response program intended to provide alternative support for situations involving mental health concerns.
Beyond the criminal case and subsequent policy reforms, Massey’s family separately reached a $10 million civil settlement with Sangamon County over the fatal shooting, according to prior reporting on the case.
Grayson’s death closes out the criminal portion of a case that had continued to draw national scrutiny well beyond his conviction and sentencing, given both the circumstances captured on body camera footage and the broader questions his hiring history raised about screening practices across law enforcement agencies. His death comes just months after he began serving his 20-year sentence and roughly one month after state officials denied his request for compassionate medical release related to his advancing cancer diagnosis.
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As of this report, authorities have not released additional details regarding the specific circumstances of Grayson’s death within the prison system, and his attorney has not indicated whether any further statement will be issued. Massey’s case remains closely associated with broader national conversations about police accountability, officer screening practices and law enforcement interactions with individuals experiencing mental health or behavioral crises, conversations that directly informed both the Sonya Massey Act and the subsequent Justice Department civil rights agreement reached with Sangamon County following her death.
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