For years, no one has flown higher in China than Jack Ma, the elf-faced founder of the powerful $ 500 billion e-commerce conglomerate Alibaba, the Amazon of Asia.
Now he’s gone and no one knows where he is.
Ma, a member of the Communist Party who started out as an English teacher, symbolized the high-tech “China dream” until he came into conflict with the political leaders who once honored him. He has not been seen in public for two months.
“China used Jack Ma and Alibaba, as well as some of the other big fintech companies to show the world what great leaders they were,” Craig Singleton, a China expert at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, told the Post.
“But these private sector companies operated without government control, and Jack went a little too far for his skis. You only need to get off the line once and they will catch you. He probably got hit very hard. “
Insiders told the Post that Ma, 56, is highly unlikely to have permanently disappeared into one of China’s feared “black sites” reserved for the country’s dissidents. He is also not in Singapore, according to some rumors.
Instead, he is probably chilling his heels at home or in a “very comfortable place”, where an expert said he may be reviewing “Marxist lessons” with party officials, a process called “embracing supervision”.
In transforming his company into a giant almost bigger than China itself, the free spirit Ma, who is married and has three children, traveled the world. He lived with stars like Tom Cruise, Daniel Craig, Kevin Spacey and Nicole Kidman, had lunch with President Obama and former UK Prime Minister David Cameron and passed Davos – all while speaking the fluent English he learned as a child.
He even dressed up as Elton John or Michael Jackson and played his songs on stage while telling jokes to thousands of Alibaba employees in company roles.
He acted more like an American billionaire than even the stern and discreet Jeff Bezos – and that was his mistake, analysts in China say. Maintaining his frank manners, Ma spoke at a conference in Shanghai in October about how the country’s banks and state regulators were lagging behind – just days before Ma’s financial technology company ANT Group prepared what would have been the biggest IPO in the world.
“Today’s financial system is the legacy of the Industrial Age,” said Ma in the now infamous speech. “We must create a new one for the next generation and young people. We must reform the current system. “
Among other things, Ma criticized the country’s bankers for having a “pawnshop mentality”.
Ma’s wings were cut off abruptly. He disappeared from the public eye, ANT’s IPO was allegedly canceled at the request of Chinese President Xi Jinping – and China launched an antitrust investigation at Ma’s huge company.
“This is Icarus, a classic case of arrogance,” Gordon Chang, author of “The Coming Collapse of China,” told the Post. “In Jack Ma’s mind, he was a rock star, perhaps no more powerful than Xi Jianping, but bigger than the Central Bank. So the Party decided to overthrow him. They ran over Jack Ma and expect him to send a message. “
It is a difficult fall for the man who was born Ma Yun, the son of parents who were traditional musicians in Hangzhou, in southeastern China, about two hours from Shanghai. Ma was a troubled boy in a poor family who learned English alone from a young age by making friends with Western tourists, as described in “Alibaba: The House that Jack Built”, by former Morgan Stanley employee Duncan Clark, who met Ma in 1999 in the small apartment where he founded Alibaba.
Ma met Ken Morley, a tourist from Australia, and his family when he was 14 and this led to a lifelong friendship. The Morleys took Ma to Australia in 1985 for a visit and Ma said the trip “changed his life. I learned to think for myself. “
Ma’s new worldliness and ambition did not help him in school, however. He failed twice in China’s college entrance exams, which are notoriously difficult. He finally succeeded on his third attempt and went to the Hangzhou Teacher’s Institute, where he graduated in 1988 with a degree in English.
Ma met his future wife, Cathy, in college, and they were married in 1988. They live with their three children in their hometown, Hangzhou.
He encountered more obstacles after college, reportedly having been turned down in more than 12 job openings, even one at KFC.
He ended up being hired as an English teacher for $ 12 an hour. He also started a translation company, but it was on a visit to the United States in 1995 that he discovered the Internet and started trying online companies when he returned to China.
After several failures, he formed Alibaba in his small apartment in Hangzhou in 1999 with 17 friends. The initial concept – online shopping for small businesses – attracted $ 25 million from investors in its first year.
Today, Alibaba is, by many estimates, the largest online trading company in the world. In addition to shopping, it also includes banking, technology and cloud computing.
Ma pointed out how he is different from most Internet billionaires who are geniuses in mathematics, science or coding. He prefers the type of wild advertising maneuver associated with Richard Branson, which is why, according to privileged sources, he started taking the stage at Alibaba in corporate celebrations. He put on a blonde wig and a headdress to sing along with “The Lion King” in 2009. In 2017, he performed on top of a motorcycle in a Michael Jackson mask and outfit while dancing to “Billie Jean” and then he joined a “training-style” performance with support dancers.
Today, Ma is not an executive or board member of Alibaba or ANT, but he is Alibaba’s largest shareholder with shares worth at least $ 25 billion.
Alibaba lost more than $ 110 billion in market capitalization on December 24, when China officially launched the investigation. The Chinese government also told state media to censor reports on Alibaba’s investigation in December, the Financial Times reported on Thursday.
It is not uncommon for China to take some of its most valued magnates and celebrities out of the public eye for some infraction and show them who’s boss. The country’s biggest movie star, Fan Bingbing, disappeared in 2018 due to alleged tax evasion and was out of sight for months. She ended up writing a flattering apology to the Communist Party on its social media pages and reportedly paid a tax bill of at least $ 70 million.
No one knows where Bingbing disappeared, but a source told Vulture that she had been kept under “residential surveillance in a designated location”, described as a holiday resort in the coastal province of Jiangsu.
In Ma’s case, he did not appear as a judge at the end of an entrepreneurial game show called “Africa’s Business Heroes”, which is sponsored by his philanthropic organization in Africa.
Alibaba spokesmen said there was a “time conflict” that kept Ma out of his program. Although some reports from China say that Ma is just keeping a low profile as Chinese regulators analyze Alibaba’s vast books and order a restructuring of ANT, the situation looks serious, if not sinister.
Some say that the west opened the young mother’s eyes a lot and now he got what he deserved.
“Jack Ma is a gangster,” said Peter Navarro, director of commercial and industrial policy at the White House and author of the 2011 book “Death By China: Confronting the Dragon,” he told the Post. “He runs a company called Alibaba. Complete the thought: Forty thieves. He set up a company with stolen goods, using our eBay business model. He stole all e-commerce technology from us. “
But despite all her cunning, Mom failed to see what should be obvious to him and everyone around him, said Navarro. “Xi has been consolidating power for the past four to five years.”
“He is doing the same thing with Chinese oligarchs that Putin did with Russian oligarchs. They make money, fall in love with the West and forget where they come from. Then they are slapped. There is a Chinese expression called ‘kill the chicken, scare the monkey’ which means to make someone an example. This is what they are doing to him. They’ll probably let you come back, but your march orders will just shut up and make money. “
Singleton agreed.
“He will resurface and will have to regret it publicly, but not on his terms,” said Singleton. “But I bet Jack Ma will obey because he doesn’t want to see this huge thing that he built explode. He is a strategic thinker and is still someone to be considered. “