For years, no one flew higher in China than Jack Ma, the founder of the major e-commerce conglomerate Alibaba, the Amazon of Asia, which cost $ 500 billion.
Now he has disappeared and no one knows where he is.
Ma, a Communist Party member who started out as an English teacher, symbolized the high-tech “China Dream” until he collided with the political leaders who once held him under his spell. He has not been seen in public for two months.
“China used Jack Ma and Alibaba as well as some 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 were operating without government control and Jack was a little too far ahead of his skis. You only have to step out of line once and they’ll get you. He probably got hit pretty hard. “
Insiders told The Post that it is highly unlikely that Ma, 56, has disappeared permanently to one of China’s dreaded “black sites” reserved for the country’s dissidents. According to some rumors, he is also not in Singapore.
Instead, he likely chills his heels at home or in a “very soft location” where an expert said he may be going through “Marxist lessons” with party officials, a process called “embracing surveillance.”
As he built his business into a colossus almost bigger than China itself, the free-spirited Ma, who is married and has three children, traveled the world. He has starred with stars like Tom Cruise, Daniel Craig, Kevin Spacey and Nicole Kidman, had lunch with President Obama and former British Prime Minister David Cameron, and swung around Davos – all while speaking the fluent English he learned as a child.
He even dressed up as Elton John or Michael Jackson and performed their songs onstage while joking in front of thousands of admiring Alibaba employees at corporate functions.
He acted more like an American billionaire than even the hard-hitting, low-key Jeff Bezos – and that was his fault, Chinese analysts say. In keeping with his outspoken manner, Ma said at a conference in Shanghai in October how backward the country’s state-owned banks and regulators were – just days before Ma’s financial technology firm ANT Group prepared for what would have been the world’s largest IPO. .
“The current financial system is the legacy of the industrial age,” Ma stated in the now infamous speech. “We need to set up a new one for the next generation and young people. We need to reform the current system. “
Ma denounced the country’s bankers, among other things, for having a ‘pawnshop mentality’.
Ma’s wings were cut abruptly. He disappeared from the public eye, ANT’s IPO was reportedly canceled at the behest of Chinese President Xi Jinping – and China has launched an antitrust investigation into Ma’s massive company.
“This is Icarus, a classic case of pride,” Gordon Chang, author of “The Coming Collapse of China,” told The Post. According to Jack Ma, he was a rock star, perhaps no more powerful than Xi Jianping, but bigger than the Central Bank. So the party decided to take him down. They run Jack Ma over and hope it sends a message. “
It’s a tough fall for the man Ma Yun was born to parents who were traditional musicians in Hangzhou, southeastern China, about two hours from Shanghai. Ma was a scruffy boy in a poor family who taught himself English at a young age by befriending Western tourists, as described in ‘Alibaba: The House that Jack Built,’ by former Morgan Stanley employee Duncan Clark, who met Ma in 1999. met in the small apartment where he founded Alibaba.
Ma met Ken Morley, a tourist from Australia, and his family when he was 14 and it led to a lifelong friendship. The Morleys took Ma to Australia in 1985, and Ma said the trip “changed his life.” I learned to think for myself. “
However, Ma’s newfound worldliness and ambition did not help him in school. He passed China’s notoriously difficult university entrance exam twice. He eventually made it to his third try and attended Hangzhou Teacher’s Institute, graduating with a degree in English in 1988.
Ma met his future wife, Cathy, in college, and they were married in 1988. They live with their three children in their hometown of Hangzhou.
He ran into more obstacles after college and was reportedly turned down for more than 12 job openings, even one at KFC.
He was eventually hired as an English teacher for $ 12 an hour. He also started a translation company, but it was during a visit to the US in 1995 that he discovered the Internet and started trying online start-ups when he returned to China.
After several failures, he founded Alibaba from his tiny Hangzhou apartment in 1999 with 17 friends. The original concept – online shopping for small businesses – attracted $ 25 million from investors in its first year.
Today, Alibaba is the world’s largest online trading company by most estimates. In addition to shopping, it also includes banking, technology and cloud computing.
Ma has played how different he is from most egghead internet billionaires who are math, science or coding geniuses. He prefers the kind of wild publicity stunts associated with Richard Branson, which is why, insiders say, he started taking the Alibaba stage at corporate parties. He put on a blonde wig and headdress to sing along to “The Lion King” in 2009. In 2017, he stroked a motorcycle in a mask and Michael Jackson outfit while dancing to “Billie Jean” and then joined in a “formation style” performance with backup dancers.
Today, Ma is not an executive or board member at 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 value on December 24 when China officially launched the probe. The Chinese government also told the state media to censor coverage of the Alibaba investigation in December, the Financial Times reported Thursday.
It’s not uncommon for China to rip some of their most esteemed tycoons and celebrities out of public opinion for an offense and show them who’s boss. The country’s biggest movie star, Fan Bingbing, disappeared in 2018 for alleged tax evasion and was out of sight for months. She eventually wrote a fawning apology to the Communist Party on her social media pages and reportedly paid a tax bill of at least $ 70 million.
No one knows where Bingbing went, but one source told Vulture that she had been kept under “residential surveillance in a designated location,” described as a resort town in the coastal province of Jiangsu.
In Ma’s case, he was a no-show judge in the finale of a game show for entrepreneurs called “Africa’s Business Heroes,” which is sponsored by his philanthropic organization in Africa.
Alibaba spokespersons said there was a “scheduling conflict” that kept Ma off his show. While some reports from China say that Ma is simply remaining unremarkable as Chinese regulators analyze Alibaba’s vast books and order a restructuring of ANT, the situation appears dire, if not sinister.
Some say the West opened young Ma’s eyes too much and now he’s got what he deserved.
“Jack Ma is a gangster,” Peter Navarro, White House director of trade and manufacturing policy and author of the 2011 book “Death By China: Confronting the Dragon,” told The Post. He runs a company called Alibaba. Finish the thought: 40 thieves. He set up a stolen property business on our eBay business model. He stole all the e-commerce technology from us. “
But for all his cunning, Ma didn’t understand what should have been clear to him and everyone around him, Navarro said. “Xi has consolidated power for the past four to five years.”
‘He does the same with Chinese oligarchs as Putin with Russian oligarchs. They get money and fall in love with the West and forget where they come from. Then they are knocked down. There is a Chinese phrase called ‘kill the chicken, scare the monkey’ which means you have to make an example of someone. That’s what they do to him. They’ll probably let him come back, but his march assignment will be to just shut up and make money. “
Singleton agreed.
“He will come back to the surface and have to repent publicly, but not on his terms,” Singleton said. “But I bet Jack Ma will live up to it because he doesn’t want this huge thing he built to blow up. He is a strategic thinker and still someone to be reckoned with. “