Jack Ma, who disappeared from public view in 2020, just accepted a teaching position in Japan. Here's how the Alibaba and Ant Group founder got started and amassed a huge fortune.
Jack Ma, the billionaire founder of Alibaba and Ant Group, accepted a teaching role in Japan.
Ant Group said Ma would give up control of the fintech company amid closer scrutiny from Beijing.
He grew up poor and faced multiple job rejections but amassed billions. Here's a look at Ma's life.
Alibaba and Ant Group founder Jack Ma, who disappeared from public view in 2020 and resurfaced in Thailand in January, has accepted a teaching role in Japan.
Ma is expected to conduct research on sustainable agriculture and food production, Tokyo College said in an announcement on May 1.
Jay Fai restaurant in Bangkok, Thailand, posted a photo of Ma when he resurfaced. The caption read: "Incredibly humble, we are honored to welcome you and your family to Jay Fai's."
The billionaire faced a crackdown from Chinese regulators in 2020 that resulted in an antitrust investigation, a suspended IPO, and Ma losing $12 billion of his fortune in just a few months.
This isn't Ma's first rodeo facing difficulties, however. He grew up poor in communist China, failed his university entrance exam twice, and was rejected from dozens of jobs, including one at KFC, before finding success with his third internet company, Alibaba.
Here's how Ma got his start and made his fortune.
Jillian D'Onfro, Charles Clark, and Taylor Nicole Rogers contributed to an earlier version of this post.
Jack Ma — born Ma Yun — was born on September 10, 1964, in Hangzhou, southeastern China. He has an older brother and a younger sister.
He and his siblings grew up at a time when communist China was increasingly isolated from the West, and his family didn't have much money when they were young.
Ma was scrawny and often got into fights with classmates. "I was never afraid of opponents who were bigger than I," he recalls in "Alibaba," a book by Liu Shiying and Martha Avery.
After President Nixon visited Hangzhou in 1972, Ma's hometown became a tourist destination. As a teenager, Ma started waking up early to visit the city's main hotel, offering visitors tours of the city in exchange for English lessons. The nickname "Jack" was given to him by a tourist he befriended.
After high school, he applied to go to college — but failed the entrance exam twice. He finally passed on the third try, going on to attend Hangzhou Teachers Institute. He graduated in 1988 and started applying to as many jobs as he could.
He received more than a dozen rejections — including from KFC — before being hired as an English teacher. Ma was a natural with his students and loved his job — though he only made $12 a month at a local university.
Ma had no experience with computers or coding, but he was captivated by the internet when he used it for the first time during a trip to the US in 1995. He had recently started a translation business and made the trip to help a Chinese firm recover a payment. Ma's first online search was "beer," but he was surprised to find that no Chinese beers turned up in the results. It was then that he decided to found an internet company for China.
Though his first two ventures failed, four years later, he gathered 17 of his friends in his apartment and convinced them to invest in his vision for an online marketplace he called "Alibaba." The site allowed exporters to post product listings that customers could buy directly.
Soon, the service started to attract members from all over the world. By October 1999, the company had raised $5 million from Goldman Sachs and $20 million from SoftBank, a Japanese telecom company that also invests in technology companies. The team remained close-knit and scrappy. "We will make it because we are young and we never, never give up," Ma said to a gathering of employees.
He was known for maintaining a sense of fun at Alibaba. In the early 2000s, when the company decided to start Taobao, its eBay competitor, he had his team do handstands during breaks to keep their energy levels up.
In 2005, Yahoo invested $1 billion in Alibaba in exchange for about a 40% stake in the company. This was huge for Alibaba — at the time it was trying to beat eBay in China — and it would eventually be an enormous win for Yahoo too, netting it $10 billion in Alibaba's IPO alone.
In 2014, Ma told Bloomberg he knew Alibaba had made it big when another customer offered to pay his restaurant bill. The customer, Ma said in the interview, had left Ma a note that read: "I'm your customer of Alibaba group, I made a lot of money and I know you don't make any money. I'll pay the bill for you."
Ma stepped down from his post as CEO in 2013, staying on as executive chairman.
Alibaba Group Holding Ltd founder Jack Ma (2nd L) poses as he arrives at the New York Stock Exchange for his company's initial public offering (IPO) under the ticker "BABA" in New York September 19, 2014.
The company's $150 billion IPO was the largest offering for a US-listed company in the history of the New York Stock Exchange. It also made Ma the richest person in China, with an estimated worth of $25 billion at the time.
Alibaba employees threw a big party at the company's Hangzhou headquarters to celebrate the IPO. One employee even took the party as the perfect opportunity to propose. Ma told employees at a press conference that he hopes they use their newfound wealth to become "a batch of genuinely noble people, a batch of people who are able to help others, and who are kind and happy."
The biggest day in the calendar for Alibaba is China's "Singles' Day" — a retaliation to Valentine's Day — which supposedly celebrates the country's singletons. In 2016, the site recorded nearly $20 billion in sales in 24 hours.
Ma looks back at a giant electronic screen showing real-time sales figures on the "Singles' Day" online shopping festival.
Alibaba's success may have made Ma an extremely wealthy man, but he has made very few flashy purchases, and he still has some pretty modest hobbies. "I don't think he has changed much, he is still that old style," Xiao-Ping Chen, a friend of Ma, told USA Today. He likes reading and writing kung fu fiction, playing poker, meditating, and practicing tai chi.
One of his greatest passions is the environment. According to Fortune, Ma developed an interest in environmentalism when a member of his wife's family became sick with an illness that Ma suspected was caused by pollution. He sits on the global board of The Nature Conservancy and spoke during a session of the Clinton Global Initiative in 2015. He has also, according to Fortune, been instrumental in funding a 27,000-acre nature reserve in China.
Ma has largely kept his family life out of the spotlight. He married Zhang Ying, a teacher he met at school, after they graduated in the late 1980s. They have two children — a daughter and a son.
In 2017, Ma made headlines after meeting President Donald Trump. Despite Trump's protectionist attitude towards trade, Ma said China and the United States were not about to be drawn into a trade war. "Give Trump some time. He's open-minded," Ma told a panel at the World Economic Forum in January 2017.
Ma is something of a celebrity in China, and crowds of people show up to listen to him speak. The company also hosts annual talent shows, and Ma is a natural entertainer. At a company anniversary event, he dressed up as a punk rocker for a performance in front of 20,000 Alibaba employees.
Company lore has it that Ma came up with the name "Alibaba" while sitting in a San Francisco coffee shop. In "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves," a secret password unlocks a trove filled with unbelievable riches. Ma's company has, in a way, revealed the potential of small and mid-sized businesses across the globe.
Ma stepped down as Alibaba's chairman on September 10, 2019, his 55th birthday. The company threw him a farewell party in an 80,000-seat stadium in Hangzhou, and Ma performed with other Alibaba executives.
Ma picked Daniel Zhang, who has been the CEO of Alibaba since 2015, to replace him as chairman. According to CNN Business, Ma decided to pivot to full-time philanthropy.
When the coronavirus pandemic brought the world to a halt in March 2020, Ma sourced and shipped N95 face masks and COVID-19 testing kits to over 100 countries dealing with shortages, including the US.
In May 2021, SoftBank announced that Ma would resign from the troubled investment fund's board of directors.
Masayoshi Son, SoftBank's chairman and CEO.
Reuters
"Stepping down from SoftBank Group's Board, I believe, and he said to me actually, was something that he decided on his own," SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son said during the firm's earnings announcement. "That's sad, but we still keep in contact directly and right before the COVID-19, we met face-to-face every month to have dinner, to talk about businesses, to talk about lives. And we will remain friends for the rest of our life, I believe."
In October 2021, Ma made headlines again in relation to Ant Group's highly anticipated IPO. Ant Group was expected to raise $37 billion with a valuation reportedly surpassing $300 billion. But then, Ma publicly snubbed China's financial regulatory system, calling it 'an old people's club.'
Soon after, regulators introduced new online lending rules that directly impacted Ant's business. Officials then said there were "major issues" with Ant's listing, and by November, the IPO was suspended.
Once China's richest man, Ma's net worth has fallen by more than $25 billion since he disappeared from public view, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. His net worth is now estimated at $34.1 billion, making him China's ninth-richest person.
In January 2021, Yahoo Finance reported that Ma hadn't been seen publicly in more than two months and had been replaced as a judge on the TV talent show he founded, which raised the question of whether Ma had gone missing.
Ma's absence mirrored similar situations where Chinese businessmen had disappeared after battling with regulators, but multiple sources said that Ma was not missing — he was simply "laying low" amid the government scrutiny and new regulations.
Ma appeared to resurface in Thailand in January after Jay Fai restaurant in Bangkok, Thailand, posted a photo of him on Instagram. The caption read: "Incredibly humble, we are honored to welcome you and your family to Jay Fai's."
A post shared by JAY FAI (เจ๊ไฝ)⭐️ (@jayfaibangkok)
His reappearance came as Ant Group said it was streamlining voting rights to prevent any one shareholder from having a controlling vote.
A scene of AI technology and digital smart Life at the Booth of Alibaba and Ant Group at the World Intelligence Congress in Shanghai, China, in July 2021.
