For years, no one has flown higher in China than Jack Ma, the pixie-faced founder of the $ 500 billion Alibaba e-commerce conglomerate, Amazon in Asia.
He’s gone now and no one knows where he is.
Ma, a member of the Communist Party, who famously began as an English teacher, symbolized the high-tech “Dream of China” until she fled from the political leaders who once lionized her. He hasn’t been seen in public in two months.
“China has used Jack Ma and Alibaba, as well as some of the other big fintech companies, to show the world what great leaders they were,” said Craig Singleton, a China expert for the Democracy Foundation.
“But these private sector companies operated without government controls, and Jack went a little too far in front of his skis. You have to get out of the line only once and they will receive you. He was probably hit pretty hard. “
Insiders told The Post that 56-year-old Ma was unlikely to disappear permanently on one of China’s dreaded “black sites” for dissidents. He is not in Singapore either, according to some rumors.
Instead, he probably cools his heels at home or in a “very quiet location,” where an expert said he could review “Marxist lessons” with party officials, a process called “embracing surveillance.”
While building his company into an almost larger monster than China itself, the free-spirited Ma, who is married with three children, traveled the world. He fell in love with celebrities such as Tom Cruise, Daniel Craig, Kevin Spacey and Nicole Kidman, dined with President Obama and former British Prime Minister David Cameron and won around Davos – all while speaking fluent English which he learned it as a child.
He even dressed as Elton John or Michael Jackson and performed their songs on stage while breaking jokes in front of thousands of Alibaba employees at the company’s functions.
He behaved more like an American billionaire than even the nasty Jeff Bezos – and that was his mistake, Chinese analysts say. In his sincere manner, Ma spoke at a conference in Shanghai in October about how backward the country’s state-owned banks and regulators were – just days before ANT Group’s financial technology firm Ma prepares what what would have been the largest IPO in the world.
“Today’s financial system is the legacy of the industrial age,” Ma said in her now infamous speech. “We need to set up a new one for the next generation and for the young people. We need to reform the current system. “
Among other things, Ma threw away the country’s money because he has a “pawn mentality.”
Ma’s wings were suddenly cut off. He disappeared from the public eye, the ANT IPO was canceled at the request of Chinese President Xi Jinping – and China launched an antitrust investigation into Ma’s huge company.
“This is Icarus, a classic case of hubris,” Gordon Chang, author of The Coming Collapse of China, told The Post. “In Jack Ma’s mind, he was a rock star, maybe no stronger than Xi Jianping, but bigger than the Central Bank. So the party decided to take him down. They came across Jack Ma and I hope he sends a message. “
It is a hard fall for the man born Ma Yun to parents who were traditional musicians in Hangzhou, in the southeastern part of China, about two hours from Shanghai. Ma was a lowly boy in a poor family who learned English from an early age, befriending Western tourists, as described in “Alibaba: The House Built by Jack,” by Morgan Stanley’s former employee. , Duncan Clark, who met Ma in 1999 in a small apartment where he founded Alibaba.
I met Ken Morley, a tourist from Australia, and his family at the age of 14, which led to a lifelong friendship. Morley took Ma to Australia in 1985 for a visit, and Ma said the trip “changed her life. I learned to think for myself. “
However, Ma’s new worldliness and ambition did not help him in school. He failed twice in the notorious difficult entrance exams. He finally passed the third attempt and went to the Hangzhou Teacher’s Institute, from which he graduated in 1988 with a degree in English.
I met my future wife, Cathy, in college and they got married in 1988. I live with my three children in their hometown of Hangzhou.
He faced several obstacles after college, being rejected for more than 12 jobs, even one at KFC.
He was eventually hired as an English teacher for $ 12 an hour. He also set up a translation company, but was on a visit to the United States in 1995 when he discovered the Internet and began trying online start-ups when he returned to China.
After several failures, he formed Alibaba from his small apartment in Hangzhou in 1999 with 17 friends. The original concept – online shopping for small businesses – attracted $ 25 million from investors in its first year.
Alibaba is today the largest online trading company in the world. In addition to shopping, it also includes banking, technology and cloud computing.
Ma played on how different it is from most Internet billionaires, who are math, science or coding geniuses. He prefers the kind of stunts associated with Richard Branson, which is why, say insiders, he started going on the Alibaba stage at corporate holidays. He wore a blonde wig and hairstyle to sing with “The Lion King” in 2009. In 2017, he trained on a motorcycle with a Michael Jackson mask and suit while dancing with “Billie Jean” and then alongside a “style band” 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 survey. The Chinese government also told the state media to censor reports on the Alibaba investigation in December, the Financial Times reported on Thursday.
It is not uncommon for China to take some of the most popular tycoons and celebrities out of the public eye for a crime and show them who the boss is. The country’s biggest movie star, Fan Bingbing, disappeared in 2018 for alleged tax evasion and has been out of sight for months. Finally, she wrote an unusual apology to the Communist Party on its social media pages and paid a tax bill of at least $ 70 million.
No one knows where Bingbing went missing, but a source told Vulture that she was being held under “residential surveillance in a designated location” described as a holiday resort in the coastal province of Jiangsu.
In Ma’s case, he was not presented as a judge at the end of a game show for entrepreneurs called “Africa’s Business Heroes”, sponsored by his philanthropic organization in Africa.
Alibaba spokesmen said there was a “programming conflict” that kept Ma out of his show. While some reports in China say Ma is keeping a low profile, while Chinese regulators are analyzing Alibaba’s vast books and ordering the restructuring of the NTA, the situation seems serious, if not sinister.
Some say that the West has opened the eyes of young Ma too much and now she has got what she deserves.
“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: Forty thieves. He set up a stolen goods business using our eBay business model. He stole all our e-commerce technology. “
But despite his skill, Ma failed to see what should have been obvious to him and everyone around him, Navarro said. “Xi has strengthened his power in the last four to five years.”
“He is doing the same thing with the Chinese oligarchs as Putin is with the Russian oligarchs. They receive money and 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 set an example for someone. That’s what I do to them. They will probably let him come back, but his orders to go will be just to shut up and make money. “
Singleton agreed.
“He will reappear on the surface and will have to repent publicly, but not on his own terms,” Singleton said. “But I bet Jack Ma will comply because he doesn’t want to see this massive thing he built exploding. He is a strategic thinker and he is still someone you have to consider. “