Jack Ma was born in 1964 as Ma Yun in Hangzhou, China. At a young age, he became interested in English and worked as a guide for foreign visitors to Hangzhou in his youth.
According to the Forbes report, every morning at 5:00 a.m., Ma will ride his bike for 40 minutes to an international hotel in his hometown and wait there for visitors. When he met them, he offered an offer to take them around the city as a tour guide, and in exchange, they would teach him English.
Later, Ma attended the Hangzhou Teacher’s Institute (now known as Hangzhou Normal University) and graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in English in 1988.
According to a video on Jack Ma in Bloomberg, he applied for 30 positions but was denied every time. He then got a job at a nearby university where he taught English and earned $15 a month. He founded a translation business separately with some of his colleagues.
Ma experienced the Internet and its promise for the first time on a US trip in 1995. After his return to China, he talked about creating something that would put China on the world’s Internet map.
He created China Pages, a web site of yellow pages that did not work. He then helped set up a website for a government department in Beijing.
For over two decades, Jack Ma has enjoyed strong ties with the Chinese government. When Donald Trump was elected president of the United States in 2016, Ma was the first high-profile Chinese citizen he knew.
History
In June 1999, Ma formed the Alibaba Party, along with his wife and a group of friends. Initially, the website allowed companies to market their goods to each other. In 2000, Alibaba raised $25 million from investors including Goldman Sachs and SoftBank.
In 2014, the Alibaba Company raised about $25 billion in the world’s largest initial public offering and was listed on the New York Stock Exchange in the United States.
After dominating the e-commerce market in China, Alibaba grew to cover other industries such as cloud computing, video streaming, film making, health care, entertainment, shopping, and news media.
What exactly happened?
According to the New York Times report, public opinion has soured, and Jack Ma has become a man who likes to hate people in China. According to the article, Ma was called a “villain,” “an evil capitalist” and a “bloodsucking ghost.”
Chinese authorities have launched an anti-trust probe into the Alibaba Company. At the same time, government officials continue to encircle the Ant Party, the fintech arm that Ma had spun out of Alibaba.
In November, China’s market watchdog quashed Ant’s proposed breakout IPO, weeks after Ma disciplined China’s financial regulators for being concerned with reducing risk, and accused Chinese banks of operating like “pawnshops” by lending only to those who could supply collateral. On the morning of the disclosure of the Alibaba antitrust probe, four other regulatory agencies said that their officials would consult with Ant to negotiate possible supervisory initiatives.
