Chinese billionaire Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba and Ant Group, is suspected of being missing, Jessica Yun told Yahoo Finance.
The 56-year-old businessman has not been seen in public for more than two months, according to the report.
Ma has been in the spotlight recently, while China is cracking down on its business empire. In late December, Chinese regulators launched an antitrust investigation into Alibaba, the country’s largest e-commerce company that some call “China’s Amazon”. And in November, China introduced a series of new regulations that interrupted what would have been the massive initial public offering by Ma’s fintech company, Ant Group.
The new rules came weeks after Ma criticized China’s financial regulatory system at a conference in Shanghai in October. At the conference, Ma allegedly rejected the global financial regulations used by China as “an old people’s club” and said, “We cannot use yesterday’s methods to regulate the future.”
Blair Silverberg, CEO of the debt financing startup Capital, told Katie Canales of Business Insider in November that the new regulations were introduced “so that the government can assert its supremacy over Jack Ma”.
In November, Ma was replaced as a judge at the African talent show he founded, “Africa’s Business Heroes,” reported the Financial Times. The talent show did not immediately respond to Business Insider’s request for comment, but an Alibaba spokesman told Business that Ma could no longer be on the judging panel for the end of the show – which was filmed in November, but not yet. was released – “due to a scheduling conflict.”
“We have nothing to add more, “said the spokesman in response to questions about Ma’s whereabouts.
Ma stepped down as president of Alibaba in 2019.
Ma stepped down as president of Alibaba in 2019.
Wang HE / Getty images
Until recently, Ma was the richest man in China, with a fortune that reached more than $ 60 billion. Ma’s net worth, however, has fallen by $ 12 billion in the past two months, with China tightening the rules for the financial technology industry. Today, Ma is worth $ 50.6 billion, making him the fourth richest person in China, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
As word of Ma’s alleged disappearance spread, an August 2019 forecast of Ma by another billionaire Chinese businessman was circulating on social media.
In the video interview, Guo Wengui, who fled China as a fugitive in 2014 and claims to be a whistleblower exposing corruption in the country, said that next year, Ma would likely end up in prison or killed because China wants to “take it back” Ant Group by Ma.
Last week, the Chinese government ordered Ant Group, which owns China’s largest digital payment platform, Alipay, to reduce its operations after expressing concerns that its corporate governance “was not sound”.
An Ant Group spokesman did not immediately respond to Business Insider’s request for comment on this story.
