Jack Ma

Jack Ma was born Ma Yun on September 10, 1964, in Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang province in eastern China ^[1]. He grew up during the tail end of the Cultural Revolution, in a family of modest means; his parents performed pingtan, a traditional form of musical storytelling ^[2].

As a boy he became fascinated with the English language. From his early teens he rode his bicycle to a hotel near Hangzhou's West Lake to offer free tours to foreign visitors in exchange for conversation practice, a habit he kept up for years ^[2]. One of those tourists gave him the nickname Jack, which stuck. The practice gave him fluent, colloquial English at a time when few young Chinese had regular contact with foreigners.

Academic success came slowly. He failed the national university entrance examination twice before being admitted to Hangzhou Normal University, where he studied English and graduated in 1988 ^[1]. Among the frequently repeated Jack Ma facts is that he applied for dozens of jobs after graduation and was rejected from nearly all of them, including, by his own account, a position at a newly opened KFC restaurant in Hangzhou ^[3]. He eventually took a post teaching English at the Hangzhou Institute of Electronics Engineering on a small monthly salary.

Ma's first encounter with the internet came in 1995, during a trip to the United States on behalf of a Chinese trade delegation. Searching online for information about Chinese beer and finding almost nothing, he sensed an opening ^[2]. Back home he launched China Pages, one of the country's earliest internet ventures, a directory intended to help Chinese companies present themselves to overseas customers ^[1]. The business struggled against a state-backed competitor and Ma later spent a period working for a government body in Beijing that promoted electronic commerce.

The decisive step came in 1999. Ma gathered 17 friends and colleagues in his apartment in Hangzhou and persuaded them to help build a marketplace connecting Chinese manufacturers with buyers around the world. The company they founded was Alibaba, named for the folk tale character because the phrase 'open sesame' suggested opening doors for small businesses ^[3]. Early funding included a 20 million dollar investment from SoftBank, whose founder Masayoshi Son decided to back Ma after a brief meeting, a bet that became one of the most profitable in venture history ^[4].

Alibaba's business-to-business platform grew quickly, but the company's defining fight came in the consumer market. In 2003 it launched Taobao, a shopping site that challenged eBay's Chinese operation. By keeping listings free for sellers and adapting the service to local habits, Taobao took the bulk of the market within a few years, and eBay wound down its Chinese consumer business ^[4]. Alipay, the payments service Alibaba created in 2004 to build trust between strangers trading online, later became the foundation of an even larger financial enterprise.

Anyone asking who was Jack Ma before 2014 received a definitive answer that September, when Alibaba listed on the New York Stock Exchange and raised about 25 billion dollars, at the time the largest initial public offering ever completed ^[5]. The listing made Ma one of the richest people in Asia and confirmed Alibaba's place alongside the world's most valuable technology companies.

Under his leadership the group expanded far beyond its original marketplace. Taobao and its sister platform Tmall came to handle a vast share of Chinese online retail, and the annual Singles Day shopping festival on November 11, which Alibaba turned into a commercial event in 2009, grew into the largest one-day shopping occasion in the world ^[4]. The company also built businesses in cloud computing, logistics, digital entertainment, and food delivery.

Jack Ma achievements extend beyond commerce. In 2014 he and Alibaba co-founder Joe Tsai endowed the Jack Ma Foundation, which funds education, entrepreneurship, and environmental programs, with a particular focus on rural teachers in China ^[6]. In 2019 the foundation launched the Africa Netpreneur Prize (later renamed the Africa's Business Heroes competition) to support entrepreneurs across the continent. During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the foundation shipped masks, test kits, and other supplies to dozens of countries ^[6].

Ma married Zhang Ying, whom he met while both were students at Hangzhou Normal University, and the couple have children ^[1]. Zhang worked alongside him in the early years of China Pages and Alibaba before stepping back from the business.

He is known for interests that sit oddly beside the usual profile of a technology billionaire. Ma practices tai chi and has spoken often about his admiration for the martial arts novels of Louis Cha, known by the pen name Jin Yong; early Alibaba employees took nicknames from Cha's fiction, and Ma's own was Feng Qingyang, a reclusive sword master ^[2]. He has appeared as a performer at Alibaba's anniversary events, once singing in costume before tens of thousands of employees, and in 2017 he played the lead in a short kung fu film, Gong Shou Dao, alongside professional martial artists ^[3].

Despite founding one of the world's biggest technology firms, Ma has repeatedly said that he has little technical knowledge and never learned to write code, presenting himself instead as a teacher who understood customers ^[2]. His public speaking, delivered in fluent English with self-deprecating humor, made him one of the most recognizable Chinese business figures on the international stage.

In September 2018 Ma announced that he would step down as executive chairman of Alibaba one year later, handing the role to chief executive Daniel Zhang. He retired from the position on his 55th birthday, September 10, 2019, at a celebration in a Hangzhou stadium, saying he wanted to return to education and philanthropy ^[5]. He remained a lifetime partner in the Alibaba Partnership, the group that nominates a majority of the company's board.

His retirement from Alibaba did not end his influence, because he remained the controlling figure behind Ant Group, the fintech company built around Alipay. Ant's planned dual listing in Shanghai and Hong Kong in November 2020 was set to raise more than 34 billion dollars, which would have made it the largest IPO in history. Days before trading was to begin, and shortly after Ma gave a speech in Shanghai criticizing Chinese financial regulation, authorities suspended the listing ^[7]. Regulators subsequently ordered Ant to restructure, and Alibaba was fined a record 18.2 billion yuan (about 2.8 billion dollars) in 2021 following an antitrust investigation ^[7].

Ma largely disappeared from public view after the Ant episode, an absence that drew worldwide attention. In the years that followed he was reported spending time abroad, including in Japan, and pursuing interests in agricultural technology ^[8]. In January 2023 Ant Group announced changes that ended his control of the company, and in 2023 he accepted a visiting academic appointment at the University of Tokyo ^[8]. He was later seen again at Alibaba campuses in Hangzhou, and his occasional internal messages to employees continued to move the company's share price.

Ma's central achievement was demonstrating that a Chinese internet company built for Chinese conditions could reach global scale. Alibaba's marketplaces gave millions of small manufacturers and shopkeepers direct access to customers, and Alipay helped normalize digital payments in a country that moved from cash to smartphones within roughly a decade ^[4]. The escrow model Alipay pioneered addressed the trust problem that had held back online trade in China.

He also changed perceptions. For a generation of Chinese entrepreneurs, the former English teacher who failed exams and job interviews became proof that founders without elite credentials or technical training could build enduring companies ^[3]. His speeches on persistence and rejection circulated widely, and business schools have used Alibaba's contest with eBay as a case study in local adaptation.

The final chapters complicate the picture. The abrupt halt of the Ant Group listing and the regulatory campaign that followed marked a turning point in the relationship between the Chinese state and its largest private technology firms, and Ma's withdrawal from public life became a symbol of that shift ^[7]. Historians of Chinese business will likely read his career as both a product of the reform era's openness and a measure of its limits. However the balance is finally struck, the arc from a Hangzhou apartment in 1999 to a record-setting listing in New York remains one of the defining business stories of the early twenty-first century ^[5].