biography about jack ma

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Jack Ma (born September 10, 1964, Hangzhou , Zhejiang province, China) is a Chinese entrepreneur who was head of the Alibaba Group , which comprised several of China ’s most popular Web sites , including the business-to-business marketplace Alibaba.com and the shopping site Taobao.com.

Ma became interested in the English language as a young boy, and during his teens he worked as a guide for foreign tourists to Hangzhou. Ma failed the entrance exam for the Hangzhou Teachers College twice. (His weak point was mathematics.) He was admitted on the third try, in 1984, and he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English in 1988. From 1988 to 1993 he taught English at the Hangzhou Institute of Electronics and Engineering (now Hangzhou Dianzi University). In 1994 he founded his first company, the Haibo Translation Agency, which provided English translation and interpretation.

On a trip to the United States on behalf of the Hangzhou city government in 1995, Ma had his first encounter with the Internet and saw the lack of Chinese Web sites as a great business opportunity. On his return, he founded China Pages, which created Web sites for Chinese businesses and was one of China’s first Internet companies. He left the company two years later, however, partly because of strong competition from the communications company Hangzhou Telecom, which had founded a rival company, Chinesepage. From 1998 to 1999 Ma was head of an Internet company in Beijing that was backed by the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation. He felt, however, that if he remained with the government, he would miss out on the economic opportunities that the Internet was bringing. Ma persuaded his team at the ministry to go back to Hangzhou with him and found the Alibaba Group, which launched a Web site that facilitated deals between small businesses. Ma was convinced that the small-business-to-small-business Internet market had much greater potential for growth than the business-to-consumer Internet market had. Small businesses paid a membership fee to be certified as trustworthy sellers on Alibaba, with a greater fee being charged to businesses that wished to sell to customers outside China . In order to instill confidence in online sales, Alipay was created (2003) to act as a third party in transactions. Growth of Alibaba was rapid. In 2005 it attracted the attention of the American Internet portal Yahoo! , which bought a 40 percent stake, and in 2007 Alibaba.com raised $1.7 billion dollars in its initial public offering ( IPO ) in Hong Kong .

In 2003 Ma created a new company, the consumer-to-consumer online marketplace Taobao (Chinese: “searching for treasure”). At the time, the American company eBay , in collaboration with the Chinese company EachNet, had a market share of 80 percent, but Ma felt that eBay-EachNet’s policy of charging users a transaction fee was a weakness. Taobao did not charge such a fee but made money from online advertising and the sale of additional services to users. Ma’s intuition proved correct; by 2007 Taobao had a 67 percent market share, and eBay conceded majority ownership of its Chinese operations to the Chinese-language media company TOM Group, which created the subsidiary TOM EachNet. In 2011 Ma announced that Taobao would split into three companies: Taobao Marketplace, where individuals could buy and sell goods; Taobao Mall, an online shopping portal; and eTao, a shopping-related search engine . In September 2014 the Alibaba Group debuted an IPO on the New York Stock Exchange that raised $21.8 billion. That IPO was the largest ever in the United States and gave the company a market value of $168 billion, the highest such value in IPO history at that time for any Internet company. In September 2018 it was announced that Ma would step down as chairman of Alibaba the following year, though he would remain on the board.

During this time Ma oversaw the creation (2014) of the Ant Group, which served as the parent group of Alipay and other financial services. In 2020 Ant was scheduled for an IPO. However, that was delayed when Chinese officials demanded that the company be restructured. In addition, an antitrust investigation was opened against Alibaba. These developments came shortly after Ma criticized the country’s financial regulators.

Jack Ma Biography

Birthday: September 10 , 1964 ( Virgo )

Born In: Hangzhou, China

Jack Ma is a Chinese businessman, investor, and philanthropist. Once a poor lad who survived by guiding tourists, Jack went on to rise above his humble condition and achieve success. He started off by improving his communication skills and also learned English. Jack was one of the first few individuals who saw the Internet as a business opportunity even at a time when the rest of the world didn’t believe in his vision. After starting his first venture with a mere $20,000, the entrepreneur went on to earn around $800,000 in just three years. In the late-1990s, he founded the e-commerce based venture ‘Alibaba’ which catapulted him to global fame. The revenue generated by the firm helped him reach the zenith of success and made him the richest man in China. He even co-founded other similar ventures which were also successful to a great extent; one of these was an e-commerce website called ‘Taobao.’ Jack is the recipient of many awards. He has also been featured in world-renowned magazines, such as ‘Forbes’ and ‘Time.’

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Also Known As: Jack Ma Yun

Age: 59 Years , 59 Year Old Males

Spouse/Ex-: Zhang Ying

father: Ma Laifa

mother: Cui Wencai

children: Ma Yuankun

Born Country: China

Quotes By Jack Ma Billionaires

Height: 5'5" (165 cm ), 5'5" Males

Notable Alumni: Hangzhou Normal University

Founder/Co-Founder: Alibaba.com, Alibaba Group

education: Hangzhou Normal University

You wanted to know

What is jack ma's educational background, how did jack ma come up with the idea for alibaba, what is jack ma's role in alibaba now.

Jack Ma stepped down as Alibaba's chairman in 2019, but remains a significant shareholder and a member of the Alibaba Partnership.

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Jack was born Ma Yun on 10 September 1964, in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China. His parents were involved in a profession of storytelling through music.

Since a very young age, Jack was keen on gathering knowledge about English and tried his best to communicate better in the language. His desire to speak English encouraged him to visit a hotel frequented by English-speaking foreigners.

The youngster even started guiding tourists in an attempt to spend more time with native English speakers so that he could learn the language by conversing with them. He became pen pals with one such foreigner who nicknamed him 'Jack' as he could not pronounce his Chinese name.

Jack also aspired to enroll in a university and attended exams in order to gain admission. Though he was initially unsuccessful, he cleared the exams after four attempts. He then joined the ‘Hangzhou Teacher’s Training Institute’ to pursue a Bachelor’s degree in English. Jack graduated from the institution in the year 1988.

In the mid-1990s, Jack got to know about the Internet and began seeing this new technology as a great business opportunity.

He even visited the United States in 1995 to learn more about the Internet. One of his friends showed him how to connect to a website. The same year, he even raised a fund of $20,000 to start his own firm with an intention of focusing solely on the Internet.

The purpose of the company was to create websites for their clients. Although this kind of business was relatively new, Jack managed to earn a whopping $800,000 in just three years.

Jack’s success in this particular field led to his appointment as the head of a firm governed by ‘China International Electronic Commerce Center’ in 1998. He continued working in this IT-based firm for a year.

After stepping down from his responsibilities in 1999, Jack founded a company called ‘Alibaba’ along with his friends. The intention was to create a website that could serve as a one stop shop for business to business transactions.

During 1999-2000, the company received a financial backing of $25 million, which significantly helped in the growth of the company. Soon, the company’s business expanded to around 240 different nations and regions.

Jack then tried venturing into e-business; he could foresee e-business as a great money making scheme of the 21st century. He then founded many firms, such as ‘Taobao,’ ‘Lynx,’ and ‘Ali Mama.’

‘Taobao’ started trending on the Internet as a top e-commerce website and even caught the attention of the popular e-commerce company ‘e-bay,’ which was keen on acquiring the firm. However, Jack was disinterested in signing a deal with the firm.

‘Taobao’ also caught the attention of another famous company, ‘Yahoo.’ The American web services company invested $1 billion in Jack’s venture.

Jack had become a subject of criticism in 2007, after many people from across the world protested against the firm ‘Alibaba.’ They claimed that the firm raised huge profits through sales of animal products, sold through its portal. Considering the request of nature lovers across the world, Jack decided not to sell products made of Shark flesh through his online portal.

His company raised a whopping $25 billion in an initial public offering (IPO) on the New York Stock Exchange, the largest in the US financial history. Subsequently, Jack became the executive chairman of ‘Alibaba Group.’

He is also the owner of ‘Château de Sours,’ ‘Chateau Guerry,’ and ‘Château Perenne.’ In 2017, he promised to create one million jobs in the US for the then president-elect Donald Trump.

Later in the year, Jack celebrated the completion of 18 years of his ‘Alibaba Group.’ He performed on stage for the song ‘Can You Feel The Love Tonight,’ dressed like a heavy metal lead singer. He also delivered a performance inspired by Michael Jackson.

 In the meantime, Jack entered showbiz and debuted as an actor in the 2017 Chinese Kung fu short film ‘Gong Shou Dao.’

He stepped down as the executive chairman of the ‘Alibaba Group Holding’ in 2019 to concentrate more on his philanthropic works through his foundation. He also refuted the rumors which claimed that he was forced to do so by the Chinese government. He was succeeded by Daniel Zhang who previously served as the CEO of ‘Taobao.’

Jack Ma is primarily known as the founder of the e-commerce giant ‘Alibaba,’ which is one of the top e-commerce websites in the world. The firm, which is considered a rival of other famous websites, such as ‘eBay’, has helped Jack Ma become the richest man in China.

‘China Central Television’ had mentioned Jack in its ‘Top 10 Economic Personalities of the Year’ list, compiled for the year 2004.

In 2005, he was featured in the list of ‘25 Most Powerful Businesspeople in Asia.’ He was also named ‘Businessperson of the Year’ by ‘Business Week’ magazine in 2007.

2009 was an eventful year in Jack’s life; he secured a spot in ‘Time’ magazine’s list of ‘World’s 100 Most Influential People.’ He also received the 2009 ‘CCTV Economic Person of the Year: Business Leader of the Decade Award.’

The world-renowned ‘Forbes’ magazine named him the 30th most powerful person in the world in 2014.

At the ‘Asian Awards’ ceremony held in 2015, he was felicitated with the ‘Entrepreneur of the Year’ award.

He was ranked second in ‘Fortune’ magazine’s ‘World’s 50 Greatest Leaders’ list in 2017. In May 2019, he was appointed as a new advocate alongside 16 other influential global leaders by UN Secretary General Guterres to promote sustainable development growth.

He has received honorary doctorate degrees from various universities including the ‘University of Hong Kong,’ ‘De La Salle University’ in Philippines, and ‘Tel Aviv University’ in Israel.

Jack Ma tied the knot with a woman named Zhang Ying, whom he had first met while studying at the ‘Hangzhou Teacher’s Institute.’ Zhang played an important role in initiating Jack’s first business venture.

The couple is blessed with three children.

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The Rags-to-Riches Life Story of Alibaba Founder Jack Ma

The famed entrepreneur is now china's second-richest person..

Jack Ma made headlines recently after visiting President Trump and announcing that he would help create a million jobs in the US .

But the Chinese billionaire has not held back voicing scepticism of Trump's protectionist policies, warning "if trade stops, war starts."

When it comes to trade, Ma knows what he's talking about. According to Forbes , he's worth an estimated $29 billion, which includes his 7.8% stake in Alibaba -- China's answer to Amazon -- and a nearly 50% stake in payment-processing service Alipay.

Ma is a true rags-to-riches story. 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.

Jillian D'onfro contributed to an earlier version of this post.

Jack Ma -- born Ma Yun -- was born on October 15, 1964, in Hangzhou, located in the southeastern part of 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.

Source: 60 Minutes , USA Today

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. Still, Ma had hobbies just like any other kid. He liked collecting crickets and making them fight, and was able to distinguish the size and type of cricket just by the sound it made.

Source: USA Today , Business Insider

After President Nixon visited Hangzhou in 1972, Ma's hometown became a tourist mecca. 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.

Source: 60 Minutes

Without money or connections, the only way Ma could get ahead was through education. After high school, he applied to go to college -- but failed the entrance exam twice. After a great deal of studying, 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.

Source: Business Insider , Crocodile in the Yangtze

At the World Economic Forum in 2016, Jack Ma revealed he has even been rejected from Harvard -- 10 times!

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. YouTube Source: Business Insider , USA Today 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. YouTube Source: Business Insider , 60 Minutes 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. Screenshot / The Crocodile in the Yangtze Source: Business Insider , Crocodile in the Yangtze He has always maintained a sense of fun at Alibaba. When the company first became profitable, Ma gave each employee a can of Silly String to go wild with. 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. Screenshot / Crocodile in the Yangtze Source: Business Insider 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. HYSTA Ma told Bloomberg he knew Alibaba had made it big when another customer offered to pay his restaurant bill. "I'm your customer of Alibaba group, I made a lot of money and I know you don't make any money," said the customer. "I'll pay the bill for you." Andrew Burton/Getty Images Source: Business Insider Ma stepped down from his post as CEO in 2013, staying on as executive chairman. Alibaba went public September 19 2014. "Today what we got is not money. What we got is the trust from the people," Ma told CNBC. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid Source: REUTERS , CNBC , AFP 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 man in China, with an estimated worth of $25 billion. However, he has since been dethroned by property and entertainment mogul, Wang Jianlin. Jack Ma afterhis company's initial public offering (IPO) under the ticker "BABA" in New York September 19, 2014. Andrew Burton/Getty Images Alibaba employees threw a big party at the company's Hangzhou headquarters to celebrate. 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." QQ.com by Tencent Source: QQ.com , USA Today 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 $18 billion in sales in 24 hours. Alibaba Group Executive Chairman Jack Ma looks back at a giant electronic screen showing real-time sales figures on the "Singles' Day" online shopping festival. REUTERS The IPO 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. Associated Press Source: USA Today In March 2013, Alibaba spent a reported $49.7 million on a Gulfstream G550, mostly for Ma's use. Dean Morley / Flickr Source: China Daily One of his greatest passions is the environment. 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's also been instrumental in funding a 27,000-acre nature reserve in China. Shannon Stapleton / REUTERS Source: Fortune Ma has largely kept his family life out of the spotlight. He married Zhang Ying, a teacher whom he met at school, after they graduated in the late 1980s. "[He] is not a handsome man, but I fell for him because he can do a lot of things handsome men cannot do," Zhang has said. They have two children -- a daughter and a son. Flickr/aidanmorgan Source: Want China Times , Businessweek Ma most recently made headlines after meeting President Donald Trump. Despite Trump's protectionist attitude towards trade, Jack Ma said China and the United States are not about to be drawn into a trade war. "Give Trump some time. He's open minded," Ma told a panel at Davos in January. Donald Trump with Jack Ma. AP Ma is something of a celebrity in China, and crowds of people show up to listen to him speak. YouTube Source: 60 Minutes 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. Steven Shi / REUTERS Source: 60 Minutes 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. AP Images This post originally appeared on Business Insider. Related Stories 6 in 10 Americans Support DEI in the Workplace 3 Habits That Quickly Identify Someone With Good Leadership Skills Melinda French Gates Shared Her Advice for Navigating Change A refreshed look at leadership from the desk of CEO and chief content officer Stephanie Mehta This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Privacy Policy Privacy policy Notice of collection do not sell my data Ad vendor policy terms of use Advertise help Center About Us Subscribe sitemap COPYRIGHT 2024 MANSUETO VENTURES Inc.com adheres to NewsGuard’s nine standards of credibility and transparency. 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Harris Poll.   That means that they didn't ask their manager for permission to take time off, but they didn't work anyway.   \n It's not just an Independence Day trend: One in eight workers plan to partake in quiet vacationing this summer, according to another recent survey .   \n It's particularly popular among younger workers , the Harris Poll found. Around the Fourth of July holiday, 56 percent of Gen Z and Millennial workers admit to quiet vacationing in the past, compared to 35 percent of Gen X and Boomers. Another 56 percent of Gen Z and Millennial workers think that working during the week of July 4 should be \"taboo.\"   \n It's evidence of a \"generational divide\" around time off, says Libby Rodney, chief strategy officer at the Harris Poll: \"Younger workers think that major holidays should be a time of rest, not just a day off.\"   \n Indeed, 62 percent of Gen Z and millennial workers \"would make trade-offs for their workplace to be closed for a week\" around the Fourth of July holiday, according to the report--an offering currently available to just 10 percent of workers in the survey.  \n Specifically, a third say they would take a pay cut for this time off, while 27 percent would sacrifice \"access to certain company perks or benefits\" and 19 percent would give up a portion of their annual bonus.   \n It   \"speaks volumes about their value on work-life integration,\" Rodney says--and 40 percent of these younger workers think this time off would actually make them more productive, as well.   \n This could be important for company leaders to understand, Rodney adds: \"Younger generations just see a different way of ultimately getting the same work productivity that older generations want.\"   ","inc_code_only_text":"","inc_custom_javascript":null,"baseurl":"//preview.inc.com/","inc_filelocation":"sarah-lynch/almost-50-percent-employees-quiet-vacation-4th-july-week.html","origin_filelocation":"sarah-lynch/almost-50-percent-employees-quiet-vacation-4th-july-week.html","timestamp":"10:00AM ET","featureimage":"https://assets.inc.com/_/images/uploaded_files/image/970x450/GettyImages-2154664770_541861.jpg","lightfeatureimage":"FALSE","smallfeatureimage":"https://assets.inc.com/_/images/uploaded_files/image/640x290/GettyImages-2154664770_541861.jpg","tilefeatureimage":"https://assets.inc.com/_/images/uploaded_files/image/300x200/GettyImages-2154664770_541861.jpg","recommendedfeatureimage":"https://assets.inc.com/_/images/uploaded_files/image/284x160/GettyImages-2154664770_541861.jpg","mobileoverrideimage":"https://assets.inc.com/_/images/uploaded_files/image/100x100/GettyImages-2154664770_541861.jpg","vid_jw_identifier":"","videooverride":"","rubric":"","pubdate":"2024-06-18 10:00:00","caption":"Productivity","captionURL":"//preview.inc.com/productivity","precaption":"","captionclass":"lead","custombyline":"","byline":"Sarah 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This Company's Generous Parental Leave Package Was a No-Brainer","inc_headline2":"","inc_twitter_headline":"A generous parental leave package can make all the difference in wooing top talent. @melissajourno","inc_newsletter_headline":"","inc_deck":"Runway AI offers not only an expanded parental leave policy, but an innovative way of easing employees back to work, too.","inc_typid":"1","inc_clean_text":" When Anna Chalon joined the New York City-based Runway AI, one of the first items on her to-do list as their new head of people was to audit its benefits. Generative artificial intelligence companies like Runway are a dime a dozen, so she knew that they needed to stay competitive. \r\n The company already offered a 12-week paid parental leave policy--open to all genders--but Chalon, 34, made a note to herself to compare the benefit to the rest of the market. \r\n As she did a deep dive, she learned that 16-weeks of offered leave was a growing trend. Chalon then polled employees for their take. It was resounding: many agreed that 12 weeks, while nice, was simply not enough.  \r\n Eager to increase the benefit, Chalon found herself grappling with an internal dilemma: the timing. She, herself, was now expecting.  \r\n \r\n Chalon felt strange with the idea of changing the policy. \"I would be the first one to benefit from the leave that I was having control over,\" she says. \"So I actually told the CEO that I was probably going to wait until after my own leave before increasing it to 16 weeks, because it felt a little too self-serving.\" \r\n But Runway's CEO, Cristóbal Valenzuela, overruled her--agreeing that 16 weeks was the right move for the company. He encouraged her to implement the new policy and become the first to take it. Valenzuela sees the additional month as a way to not only find great talent, but to retain it at the company of 86 people. His approach to company culture is one big reason why Runway AI landed a spot on Inc.'s Best Workplaces 2024 . Among the 543 companies that made the list, 77 percent offer paid maternity leave longer than eight weeks. \r\n \"The AI market right now is extremely competitive,\" Valenzuela, 35, says. \"So competitive salaries are a great way of attracting great talent, but there's way more things that you need to have, and one of those is how you treat your employees.\" \r\n That additional month of leave ended up making all the difference, Chalon says, since the first 12 weeks \"are pretty rough for parents.\" She finally settled into a routine during the last month as her newborn started sleep training and, by week 16, was sleeping at night. \r\n \"All of that made the return to work feel a lot more set up for success if you're going to return,\" she says. \"Being able to sleep a little bit more and eat properly, I think those last four weeks specifically seemed pretty critical.\" \r\n \r\n Pop Quiz : Which benefits do you need to make Inc.'s Best Workplaces list? \r\n \r\n \r\n Runway not only offers 16 weeks of paid parental leave, but also a staggered return. So on the 17th week, an employee works two days a week, then an additional day each week thereafter until they're back to five. \r\n With Chalon's return, her top priority was getting a clear pulse on what happened while she was out, so she started setting up one-on-one meetings with the team. She then jumped into performance reviews and was later looped into other projects. Easing back into work allowed Chalon to assimilate and aptly tackle the demands of her job.  \r\n \"If the leave is so short and you have to come back,\" she says, \"I can imagine that some parents would decide to not go back because it feels so overwhelming.\" \r\n Methodology : How we selected Inc.'s Best Workplaces 2024. 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Runway AI offers 16 weeks of fully paid parental leave for every employee and two transition weeks upon return. 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If everyone is using it, industry leaders say, where is the advantage?","inc_typid":"1","inc_clean_text":" An industry conference in Cannes offers some reality checks on AI-boosted advertising, with some important takeaways from prominent executives. One says: \"No matter how incredible Sora, Dall-E or Adobe Firefly is, if every single marketer is using it , it can't possibly be an advantage.\" Also, TikTok is launching a new AI \"avatars\" feature for ads, where an AI actor will represent a creator or brand spokesperson, alongside \"stock\" AI actors. Also, it includes an \"AI dubbing tool\" to translate content into 10 languages. Gen-Z is already steeped in the influencer economy, so this takes a closer look at the next step: AI-faked real spokespeople. \r\n Here's what else we're keeping an eye on today: \r\n \r\n A look at how few social media influencers  actually make significant money , especially with platforms ending their billion-dollar content encouragement programs, and companies getting smarter about how much they're willing to pay people acting as ambassadors from their garages or sitting in their cars filming themselves. Lots of good information that breaks down It's a deep dive into what appears to be the end of a very niche, but very lucrative boom. \r\n EV maker Fisker just filed for bankruptcy, highlighting the complex challenges of being an early entrant in a fast-growing new sector. Also, Elon Musk mentioned a $20,000 Model Y Tesla during last week's shareholder meeting, which could sell like the proverbial hotcakes, and potentially lift Tesla from the doldrums. \r\n The research company Forrester has just released its 2024 consumer satisfaction index , and it has dropped pretty much across the board for an unprecedented third year running.  A main source of dissatisfaction is spiking prices with nothing to show in terms of customer service or other consumer-related contacts. And chatbots are definitely not helping. \r\n \r\n New figures from the U.S. Commerce Department showed that retail sales increased less than expected in May, climbing 0.1 percent after a 0.2 percent drop in April. A major cause was lower gas prices, which dropped total receipts at service stations. \r\n \r\n Apple is out of buy now, pay later , which explains its recent inclusion of Affirm in Apple Pay. The reason appears to be two-fold: launching fintech services of its own may not be generating the expected revenue streams, and a plan to start its own loan program. \r\n Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun is  appearing before Congress today, continuing the intense scrutiny of the troubled aircraft maker. New whistleblower allegations of potentially faulty parts going into 737 airliners ratchet up the pressure on the company. \r\n A new airport could spark the economy in a rural part of Florida. Will the workforce be ready ? \r\n AI can help the global shipping industry cut down emissions. A new report says up to 47 million tons of harmful gas emissions could be prevented through AI assistance. \r\n Biofuel groups have a vision of enthanol-powered jets. Fueling the effort isn't easy. \r\n The shareholders have spoken and , approving Elon Musk's huge payday. Now, Tesla kicks off a legal fight to reinstate Musk's pay. \r\n The startup parent of AI-infused search engine You.com is raising another $50 million to boost the company's value to as much as $900 million as it targets creating AI assistants. \r\n Misuse of AI could help spread false and misleading information on the Holocaust, a UNESCO report warns. \r\n Scooter Braun says he's no longer a music manager, and will focus on his children and his duties at Hybe America , the South Korea entertainment company where he is CEO.  Hybe's businesses include the artist-fan interaction app WeVerse and Ariana Grande's cosmetics brand REM Beauty.  \r\n 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be offset by her employer, Garrett Companies. \n The Greenwood, Indiana-based full-service real estate company founded in 2014, would be paying the tuition and fees for Williams' son's college education through its premium employee benefit, GarrettEDU. Through this benefit, employees who have been with the company for at least six years can be reimbursed for their dependents' secondary education expenses, be that at a university or a trade school . Employees can use this benefit for multiple children and anytime throughout their schooling, up to $100,000.  \n In 2014, Williams started working as a construction accountant at Garrett, which is one of the 543 honorees on Inc.'s 2024 Best Workplaces list. This is the company's sixth time on the list, and it's one of 41 percent of honorees that offer tuition reimbursement (versus 24 percent of applicants that didn't make the cut).  \n Williams, who has been with the business since its early days, says she quickly realized the culture was different. She frequently found new opportunities to learn and felt like the company's leaders truly recognized and rewarded employees' commitment to the business. Once she learned of the benefit, it was another incentive to stay. \"Learning is something that Garrett cares about,\" Williams says. \"But GarrettEDU shows that they care about my children, too.\"  \n Pop Quiz : Which benefits do you need to make Inc.'s Best Workplaces list? \n Her eldest son just completed his freshman year studying construction management, which costs approximately $9,000 according to Purdue's website. Much like a bonus or traditional expense, Williams submitted the tuition to GarrettEDU and was reimbursed over half that, after taxes.   She'll continue to pull from that bank of remaining GarrettEDU funds for the rest of her son's schooling and for her other son once he graduates high school. \"It cuts what we anticipated we were going to pay for college in half, really,\" she says. \"It just brings a little less stress and it helps us maintain a budget.\"  \n Garrett Companies, which has made the Inc. 5000 list eight times for its fast growth, officially rolled out GarrettEDU in 2022 to its 245 employees. Ken Koziol, president of Garrett's subsidiary design group, EDGE, developed the benefit to \"incentivize long-term retention and show our employees that we are invested in them too,\" he says. He notes that Garrett has many fun perks, like an annual ski trip, weekly yoga, and on-site spa treatments, but GarrettEDU is truly a \"game changer.\" Koziol himself has used approximately a third of the perk for two of his three children thus far. \"We recognize the sacrifices that vested employees make to their employer over the long term, and there is no better way to expect greatness from your employees than by doing something absolutely great for them,\" he says, \"This is a commitment recognizing a commitment.\" \n Methodology : How we selected Inc.'s Best Workplaces 2024. \n   ","inc_code_only_text":"","inc_custom_javascript":null,"baseurl":"//preview.inc.com/","inc_filelocation":"sydney-sladovnik/this-company-gives-longtime-employees-100000-toward-their-kids-education.html","origin_filelocation":"sydney-sladovnik/this-company-gives-longtime-employees-100000-toward-their-kids-education.html","timestamp":"7:00PM ET","featureimage":"https://assets.inc.com/_/images/uploaded_files/image/970x450/inc-best-workplaces-the-garrett-companies_541517.jpg","lightfeatureimage":"FALSE","smallfeatureimage":"https://assets.inc.com/_/images/uploaded_files/image/640x290/inc-best-workplaces-the-garrett-companies_541517.jpg","tilefeatureimage":"https://assets.inc.com/_/images/uploaded_files/image/300x200/inc-best-workplaces-the-garrett-companies_541517.jpg","recommendedfeatureimage":"https://assets.inc.com/_/images/uploaded_files/image/284x160/inc-best-workplaces-the-garrett-companies_541517.jpg","mobileoverrideimage":"https://assets.inc.com/_/images/uploaded_files/image/100x100/inc-best-workplaces-the-garrett-companies_541517.jpg","vid_jw_identifier":"","videooverride":"","rubric":"","pubdate":"2024-06-17 19:00:00","caption":"Best Workplaces 2024","captionURL":"//preview.inc.com/best-workplaces","precaption":"","captionclass":"default","custombyline":"","byline":"Sydney Sladovnik","bylineURL":"author/sydney-sladovnik","partnerObj":null,"partner":"","partnerURL":"","partnertype":"","brandview":null,"brandviewtag":null,"brandviewhub":null,"dayssincepubdate":0,"appURL":"//preview.inc.com/","channelid":"1800","authorid":"10390","authors":null,"seriesid":"NULL","skyscraperimage":null,"currentchannelname":"","currentchannelURL":"best-workplaces","currentchannelid":"","currentarticleid":"","currentarticleURL":"","overlayimage":"","images":{"tile":{"normal":"https://assets.inc.com/_/images/uploaded_files/image/300x200/inc-best-workplaces-the-garrett-companies_541517.jpg","x2":"https://assets.inc.com/_/images/uploaded_files/image/600x400/inc-best-workplaces-the-garrett-companies_541517.jpg"},"panoramic":{"normal":"https://assets.inc.com/_/images/uploaded_files/image/640x290/inc-best-workplaces-the-garrett-companies_541517.jpg","x2":"https://assets.inc.com/_/images/uploaded_files/image/1280x580/inc-best-workplaces-the-garrett-companies_541517.jpg"},"skyscraper":{"normal":"https://images.inc.com/refreshgraphics/300x520-6.jpg","x2":"https://images.inc.com/refreshgraphics/300x520-6.jpg"},"feature":{"normal":"https://assets.inc.com/_/images/uploaded_files/image/970x450/inc-best-workplaces-the-garrett-companies_541517.jpg","x2":"https://assets.inc.com/_/images/uploaded_files/image/1940x900/inc-best-workplaces-the-garrett-companies_541517.jpg"}},"imagemodels":[{"id":541517,"img_foreignkey":null,"img_gettyflag":false,"img_reusableflag":false,"img_rightsflag":false,"img_usrid":0,"img_pan_crop":null,"img_tags":null,"img_reference_name":"inc-best-workplaces-the-garrett-companies","img_caption":"The Garrett Companies offer up to $100k in tuition assistance for children of employees who have worked at the company for six years or more. Jenny Williams, a construction controller for the company, used the benefit for her son, who has just completed his freshman year at Purdue. ","img_custom_credit":"Photography by Lyndon French","img_bucketref":null,"img_panoramicref":"inc-best-workplaces-the-garrett-companies.jpg","img_tile_override_imageref":null,"img_skyscraperref":null,"img_gallery_imageref":null,"sizes":{"panoramic":{"original":"https://img-cdn.inc.com/image/upload/images/panoramic/inc-best-workplaces-the-garrett-companies_541517_l7o6a9.jpg","1920x1080":"https://img-cdn.inc.com/image/upload/w_1920,h_1080,c_fill/images/panoramic/inc-best-workplaces-the-garrett-companies_541517_l7o6a9.jpg","1024x576":"https://img-cdn.inc.com/image/upload/w_1024,h_576,c_fill/images/panoramic/inc-best-workplaces-the-garrett-companies_541517_l7o6a9.jpg","1230x1672":"https://img-cdn.inc.com/image/upload/w_1230,h_1672,c_fill/images/panoramic/inc-best-workplaces-the-garrett-companies_541517_l7o6a9.jpg","1940x900":"https://img-cdn.inc.com/image/upload/w_1940,h_900,c_fill/images/panoramic/inc-best-workplaces-the-garrett-companies_541517_l7o6a9.jpg","1270x734":"https://img-cdn.inc.com/image/upload/w_1270,h_734,c_fill/images/panoramic/inc-best-workplaces-the-garrett-companies_541517_l7o6a9.jpg","0x734":"https://img-cdn.inc.com/image/upload/w_1,h_734,c_fill/images/panoramic/inc-best-workplaces-the-garrett-companies_541517_l7o6a9.jpg","1150x540":"https://img-cdn.inc.com/image/upload/w_1150,h_540,c_fill/images/panoramic/inc-best-workplaces-the-garrett-companies_541517_l7o6a9.jpg","970x450":"https://img-cdn.inc.com/image/upload/w_970,h_450,c_fill/images/panoramic/inc-best-workplaces-the-garrett-companies_541517_l7o6a9.jpg","600x600":"https://img-cdn.inc.com/image/upload/w_600,h_600,c_fill/images/panoramic/inc-best-workplaces-the-garrett-companies_541517_l7o6a9.jpg","640x290":"https://img-cdn.inc.com/image/upload/w_640,h_290,c_fill/images/panoramic/inc-best-workplaces-the-garrett-companies_541517_l7o6a9.jpg","635x367":"https://img-cdn.inc.com/image/upload/w_635,h_367,c_fill/images/panoramic/inc-best-workplaces-the-garrett-companies_541517_l7o6a9.jpg","0x367":"https://img-cdn.inc.com/image/upload/w_1,h_367,c_fill/images/panoramic/inc-best-workplaces-the-garrett-companies_541517_l7o6a9.jpg","575x270":"https://img-cdn.inc.com/image/upload/w_575,h_270,c_fill/images/panoramic/inc-best-workplaces-the-garrett-companies_541517_l7o6a9.jpg","385x240":"https://img-cdn.inc.com/image/upload/w_385,h_240,c_fill/images/panoramic/inc-best-workplaces-the-garrett-companies_541517_l7o6a9.jpg","336x336":"https://img-cdn.inc.com/image/upload/w_336,h_336,c_fill/images/panoramic/inc-best-workplaces-the-garrett-companies_541517_l7o6a9.jpg","300x520":"https://img-cdn.inc.com/image/upload/w_300,h_520,c_fill/images/panoramic/inc-best-workplaces-the-garrett-companies_541517_l7o6a9.jpg","300x200":"https://img-cdn.inc.com/image/upload/w_300,h_200,c_fill/images/panoramic/inc-best-workplaces-the-garrett-companies_541517_l7o6a9.jpg","284x160":"https://img-cdn.inc.com/image/upload/w_284,h_160,c_fill/images/panoramic/inc-best-workplaces-the-garrett-companies_541517_l7o6a9.jpg","155x90":"https://img-cdn.inc.com/image/upload/w_155,h_90,c_fill/images/panoramic/inc-best-workplaces-the-garrett-companies_541517_l7o6a9.jpg","100x100":"https://img-cdn.inc.com/image/upload/w_100,h_100,c_fill/images/panoramic/inc-best-workplaces-the-garrett-companies_541517_l7o6a9.jpg","50x50":"https://img-cdn.inc.com/image/upload/w_50,h_50,c_fill/images/panoramic/inc-best-workplaces-the-garrett-companies_541517_l7o6a9.jpg"}}}],"adinfo":{"c_type":"article","showlogo":true,"cms":"inc333333","video":"no","aut":["sydney-sladovnik"],"channelArray":{"topid":"1800","topfilelocation":"best__workplaces","primary":["best-workplaces"],"primaryFilelocation":["best-workplaces"],"primaryname":["Best Workplaces 2024"]},"adzone":"/4160/mv.inc/best-workplaces/best-workplaces/best-workplaces"},"socialreferralcount":0,"spotlight_headline":"","channels":null,"articletags":null,"isPremium":false},{"id":"333744","inc_headline":"How the Startup Prenuvo and John Hancock Are Teaming Up to Fight Cancer Preemptively","inc_headline2":"","inc_twitter_headline":"John Hancock and Prenuvo aim to make it easier to identify tumors and other medical issues early. _B_Contreras_","inc_newsletter_headline":"","inc_deck":"A new collaboration between life insurance company John Hancock and MRI startup Prenuvo aims to make it easier for customers to identify tumors and other medical issues early on.","inc_typid":"1","inc_clean_text":" They're a bit of an odd couple: one is a company that's more than 160 years old and the other is a 2018 medical technology startup that raised a Series A funding round with help from Cindy Crawford and the CEO of 23andMe . You might call it the corporate equivalent of an intergenerational friendship. \n Nevertheless, John Hancock and the medtech company Prenuvo are united in their goal of increasing access to preventative medicine. Customers of the life insurance agency are becoming eligible for discounted MRI scans from Prenuvo, both companies announced Tuesday. \n \"Our DNA definitely gets modified by these companies we work with,\" said Brooks Tingle, president and chief executive of John Hancock, of the new deal. \"It's really been a wonderful thing for our company to work with people at these other companies and ingest some of that mindset.\" \n Despite the differences in age and size, the two firms share the goal of helping customers stave off illness before things get too serious. Under the newly-announced program, participants in John Hancock's Vitality program--which incentivizes members to live healthier lives--will be eligible for a $500 discount on Prenuvo's whole-body MRI scans. Prenuvo says its scans check for \"hundreds of conditions, including most solid tumors at Stage 1\" as well as aneurysms, gallstones, endometriosis and spine degeneration. \n Those who get scanned will be able to review their results with a nurse practitioner, John Hancock said in a statement, and the contents of their report won't be shared with the life insurance agency or impact their rates. \n It's a business model that makes a lot of sense for life insurers, who can collect more premiums from their customers if those customers live longer, Tingle said. He continued: \"Close to ten years ago, it occurred to us that it was profoundly odd that our industry wouldn't try to help people live longer, healthier, better lives, given how much of an interest we have in that.\" \n It makes sense for customers, too, Prenuvo chief executive Andrew Lacy said in an email: \"The average person has very limited information about their health and is told they're normal until they're diagnosed with a serious condition or cancer.\" \n It's not the first time either company has explored this kind of partnership. John Hancock previously partnered with the biotech company Grail to offer its customers cancer screenings , while Prenuvo recently made its scans available for members of the concierge healthcare service Sollis Health . \n But partnering with John Hancock made particular sense for Prenuvo, said Lacy--the startup already thinks of its MRI scans as \"life insurance that you don't need to die in order to take advantage of.\" ","inc_code_only_text":"","inc_custom_javascript":null,"baseurl":"//preview.inc.com/","inc_filelocation":"brian-contreras/how-startup-prenuvo-john-hancock-are-teaming-up-to-fight-cancer-preemptively.html","origin_filelocation":"brian-contreras/how-startup-prenuvo-john-hancock-are-teaming-up-to-fight-cancer-preemptively.html","timestamp":"8:00AM 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Contreras","bylineURL":"author/brian-contreras","partnerObj":null,"partner":"","partnerURL":"","partnertype":"","brandview":null,"brandviewtag":null,"brandviewhub":null,"dayssincepubdate":0,"appURL":"//preview.inc.com/","channelid":"190","authorid":"10585","authors":null,"seriesid":"NULL","skyscraperimage":null,"currentchannelname":"","currentchannelURL":"health-care","currentchannelid":"","currentarticleid":"","currentarticleURL":"","overlayimage":"","images":{"tile":{"normal":"https://assets.inc.com/_/images/uploaded_files/image/300x200/Prenuvo-Memory-Foam-inc_541888.jpg","x2":"https://assets.inc.com/_/images/uploaded_files/image/600x400/Prenuvo-Memory-Foam-inc_541888.jpg"},"panoramic":{"normal":"https://assets.inc.com/_/images/uploaded_files/image/640x290/Prenuvo-Memory-Foam-inc_541888.jpg","x2":"https://assets.inc.com/_/images/uploaded_files/image/1280x580/Prenuvo-Memory-Foam-inc_541888.jpg"},"skyscraper":{"normal":"https://images.inc.com/refreshgraphics/300x520-7.jpg","x2":"https://images.inc.com/refreshgraphics/300x520-7.jpg"},"feature":{"normal":"https://assets.inc.com/_/images/uploaded_files/image/970x450/Prenuvo-Memory-Foam-inc_541888.jpg","x2":"https://assets.inc.com/_/images/uploaded_files/image/1940x900/Prenuvo-Memory-Foam-inc_541888.jpg"}},"imagemodels":[{"id":541888,"img_foreignkey":null,"img_gettyflag":false,"img_reusableflag":false,"img_rightsflag":false,"img_usrid":0,"img_pan_crop":null,"img_tags":null,"img_reference_name":"Prenuvo","img_caption":"Customers of John Hancock are becoming eligible for discounted MRI scans from Prenuvo.","img_custom_credit":"Photo: Courtesy 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Care"]},"adzone":"/4160/mv.inc/grow/healthcare/healthcare"},"socialreferralcount":0,"spotlight_headline":"","channels":null,"articletags":null,"isPremium":false},{"id":"333731","inc_headline":"Why Salesforce Is Committing $25 Million to Carbon Removal Technology","inc_headline2":"","inc_twitter_headline":"Salesforce partnered with Stripe's Frontier to generate demand for the carbon removal industry. @chlobo_ilo","inc_newsletter_headline":"","inc_deck":"The software behemoth partnered with Stripe's Frontier in order to generate demand for the nascent carbon removal industry.","inc_typid":"1","inc_clean_text":" Salesforce is the latest tech company betting big on carbon removal . \r\n The San Francisco-based cloud software giant announced a $25 million commitment to carbon dioxide removal technology through Frontier. The funds will go to carbon removal startups to demonstrate demand for their products in hopes of accelerating the industry. The $25 million is the first piece of a broader pledge Salesforce made in 2022 to purchase $100 million worth of carbon dioxide removal credits by 2030. \r\n \"This industry needs to scale. It needs investment early on, so that the technologies that we're seeing today can be accelerated, can be commercially available to all buyers by 2030 and later,\" says Jamila Yamani, Salesforce's lead for carbon removal. \r\n Although many climate mitigation strategies are aimed at reducing emissions, carbon removal is a nascent solution that aims to actually pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through a variety of different means. The technology has attracted both attention and criticism from those who argue that it is still too immature and expensive . A Boston Consulting Group executive estimated in 2023 that it costs about $600 to $1,000 to pull one ton of carbon dioxide from the air via direct air capture, which is one form of carbon removal. For widespread adoption, he wrote that the cost would need to fall below $200. \r\n \r\n Frontier, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of fintech company Stripe, seeks to address those problems. It is an \"advance market commitment\" that aims to accelerate the development of carbon removal technology by providing a market for it. \r\n \"The weird thing about carbon removal is there's no intrinsic value in it, and so there isn't a normal natural customer for it like there would be with energy,\" says Nan Ransohoff, head of climate at Stripe and Frontier. This dynamic, she says, means that comparatively few startups have emerged in the space, and those that have are offering expensive rates for carbon removal because the technology hasn't had a chance to scale. \r\n The funds companies contribute to Frontier become revenue for startups--not equity investments. To-date Frontier says it has more than $1 billion committed, close to $230 million of which is contracted into offtake agreements with specific companies. \r\n \"The idea with Frontier was essentially to send a loud demand signal to potential entrepreneurs and investors and researchers that there is a market for technologies and especially technologies that are still really early,\" Ransohoff says. \"This is now over a billion dollars of revenue for carbon removal companies.\" \r\n Salesforce is just the latest major company to join Frontier. Its existing members include Google parent company Alphabet, as well as Meta, Stripe, Shopify, and McKinsey Sustainability. Its portfolio of carbon removal technologies include Lithos, which uses basalt to capture CO2, and Heirloom, which uses limestone as a carbon sink . \r\n Although companies like Salesforce could very well strike up their own offtake agreements with carbon removal startups, Ransohoff says the advantage of an organization like Frontier is that pooling money together sends \"a louder signal\" to the market. Plus, Frontier has the resources to vet portfolio startups. \r\n \"We have six PhDs full time on staff. We have a team of people who obsess over finding the best companies, [and] vetting them,\" she says. \r\n For Salesforce, carbon removal is just one component of its overall climate change mitigation strategy. Yamani says Salesforce also focuses on grid decarbonisation, nature restoration, sustainable aviation , decentralized renewable energy , and more. It has also committed to cutting its absolute emissions by 50 percent by 2030 and to \"near zero by 2040,\" Yamani says. \r\n \"It's an all of the above moment where we're leveraging all of the tools that we have to build a portfolio that can help decarbonize the planet. It's not a one silver bullet approach, and it's never meant to be,\" Yamani says. \r\n Alongside the carbon removal announcement, Salesforce also inked a 15-year virtual power purchase agreement with Qualitas Energy in Italy to expand its portfolio of solar energy. \r\n \"We really see corporate procurements as a way to kind of catalyze a new renewable energy market because we're going to need clean electricity available to us all over the world, not limited to the United States,\" Yamani says. 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person.","inc_sharing_deck":null,"inc_clean_text":" Jack Ma made headlines recently after visiting President Trump and announcing that he would help create a million jobs in the US . \n But the Chinese billionaire has not held back voicing scepticism of Trump's protectionist policies, warning \"if trade stops, war starts.\" \n When it comes to trade, Ma knows what he's talking about. According to Forbes , he's worth an estimated $29 billion, which includes his 7.8% stake in Alibaba -- China's answer to Amazon -- and a nearly 50% stake in payment-processing service Alipay. \n Ma is a true rags-to-riches story. 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. \n Jillian D'onfro contributed to an earlier version of this post. \n Jack Ma -- born Ma Yun -- was born on October 15, 1964, in Hangzhou, located in the southeastern part of 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. \n YouTube, Life News \n Source: 60 Minutes , USA Today \n 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. Still, Ma had hobbies just like any other kid. He liked collecting crickets and making them fight, and was able to distinguish the size and type of cricket just by the sound it made. \n YouTube, Life News \n Source: USA Today , Business Insider \n After President Nixon visited Hangzhou in 1972, Ma's hometown became a tourist mecca. 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. \n Screenshot / Crocodile in the Yangtze \n Source: 60 Minutes \n Without money or connections, the only way Ma could get ahead was through education. After high school, he applied to go to college -- but failed the entrance exam twice. After a great deal of studying, 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. \n YouTube \n Source: 60 Minutes \n 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. \n Crocodile in the Yangtze \n Source: Business Insider , Crocodile in the Yangtze \n At the World Economic Forum in 2016, Jack Ma revealed he has even been rejected from Harvard -- 10 times! \n REUTERS/Jason Lee \n

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.

Source: Business Insider , USA Today

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.

Source: Business Insider , 60 Minutes

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 has always maintained a sense of fun at Alibaba. When the company first became profitable, Ma gave each employee a can of Silly String to go wild with. 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.

Source: Business Insider

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.

Ma told Bloomberg he knew Alibaba had made it big when another customer offered to pay his restaurant bill. \"I'm your customer of Alibaba group, I made a lot of money and I know you don't make any money,\" said the customer. \"I'll pay the bill for you.\"

Ma stepped down from his post as CEO in 2013, staying on as executive chairman. Alibaba went public September 19 2014. \"Today what we got is not money. What we got is the trust from the people,\" Ma told CNBC.

Source: REUTERS , CNBC , AFP

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 man in China, with an estimated worth of $25 billion. However, he has since been dethroned by property and entertainment mogul, Wang Jianlin.

Alibaba employees threw a big party at the company's Hangzhou headquarters to celebrate. 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.\"

Source: QQ.com , USA Today

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 $18 billion in sales in 24 hours.

The IPO 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.

Source: USA Today

In March 2013, Alibaba spent a reported $49.7 million on a Gulfstream G550, mostly for Ma's use.

Source: China Daily

One of his greatest passions is the environment. 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's also been instrumental in funding a 27,000-acre nature reserve in China.

Source: Fortune

Ma has largely kept his family life out of the spotlight. He married Zhang Ying, a teacher whom he met at school, after they graduated in the late 1980s. \"[He] is not a handsome man, but I fell for him because he can do a lot of things handsome men cannot do,\" Zhang has said. They have two children -- a daughter and a son.

Source: Want China Times , Businessweek

Ma most recently made headlines after meeting President Donald Trump. Despite Trump's protectionist attitude towards trade, Jack Ma said China and the United States are not about to be drawn into a trade war. \"Give Trump some time. He's open minded,\" Ma told a panel at Davos in January.

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.

This post originally appeared on Business Insider.

The Inspiring Life Story Of Alibaba Founder Jack Ma, Now The Richest Man In China

Fresh off the biggest IPO in history, Alibaba founder and chairman Jack Ma is now the richest person in China .

Ma is now worth an estimated $25 billion , which includes his 7.8% stake in Alibaba and a nearly 50% stake in payment processing service Alipay.

Ma is a true rags-to-riches story. He grew up poor in communist China, failed his college entrance exam twice, and was rejected from dozens of jobs, including one at KFC, before finding success with his third internet company, Alibaba. 

Jack Ma (a.k.a. Ma Yun) was born on October 15, 1964, in Hangzhou, located in the southeastern part of 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.

 Source: 60 Minutes , USA Today

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. Still, Ma had hobbies just like any other kid. He liked collecting crickets and making them fight, and was able to distinguish the size and type of cricket just by the sound it made.

Source: USA Today , Business Insider

After then-US president Richard Nixon visited Hangzhou in 1972, Ma's hometown became a tourist mecca. 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.

Source: 60 Minutes

Without money or connections, the only way Ma could get ahead was through education. After high school, he applied to go to college — but failed the entrance exam twice. After a great deal of studying, he finally passed on the third try, going on to attend Hangzhou Teacher's 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 made only $12 a month at a local university.

Source:  Business Insider , Crocodile in the Yangtze

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.

Source: Business Insider , USA Today

Though his first two ventures failed, four years later he gathered 17 of his friends in his apartment and convinced them to invest in him and his vision for an online marketplace he called "Alibaba." The site allowed exporters to post product listings that customers could buy directly.

Source: Business Insider ,  60 Minutes

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.

Source: Business Insider , Crocodile in the Yangtze

He has always maintained a sense of fun at Alibaba. When the company first became profitable, Ma gave each employee a can of Silly String to go wild with. In the early 2000s, when the company decided to start Taobao, its eBay competitor, he had the team working on it do handstands during breaks to keep their energy levels up.

Source: Business Insider

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.

Ma stepped down from his post as CEO in 2013, staying on as executive chairman. Alibaba went public on Sept. 19. "Today what we got is not money. What we got is the trust from the people," Ma told CNBC. 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 man in China, with an estimated worth of $25 billion.

Source: REUTERS, CNBC , AFP

Alibaba employees threw a big party at the company's Hangzhou headquarters to celebrate. 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."

Source: QQ.com , USA Today

The IPO may have made Ma an extremely wealthy man, but he hasn't made any flashy purchases (yet), 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. He has even teamed up with Jet Li to spread awareness of tai chi, and he brings a trainer along with him when he travels.

Source: USA Today

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 this September. He's also been instrumental in funding a 27,000-acre nature reserve in China.

Source: Fortune

Ma has largely kept his family life out of the spotlight. He married Zhang Ying, a teacher whom he met at school, after they graduated in the late '80s. "[He] is not a handsome man, but I fell for him because he can do a lot of things handsome men cannot do," Zhang has said. They have two children — a daughter and a son who is an undergrad at UC Berkeley. Ma has also audited history classes at his son's college.

Source: Want China Times , Businessweek

He does have a few splurges, however. In March 2013, Alibaba spent a reported $49.7 million for a Gulfstream G550, mostly for Ma's use.

Source: China Daily

Ma is something of a celebrity in China, and crowds of people show up to listen to him speak.

Source:  60 Minutes

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.

Source: Entrepreneur

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The jack ma story: why thinking big is more important than technical knowledge.

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"We don’t want to be number one in China. We want to be number one in the world," said Jack Ma ... [+] shortly after he founded Alibaba.

Building one of the world’s largest e-commerce companies doesn’t require specialized or technical knowledge, genius-level math—or even a business plan. So what does it take? Here’s the story of Jack Ma, the richest man in China and, with about $35 billion in assets, one of the richest people in the world.

Jack Ma was born in 1964. As a boy, he did everything he could to learn English. He was an avid reader of Mark Twain and used every opportunity to get better at English. Aged 12, he had an idea of how he could improve his English skills: Every morning at five o’clock he rode his bicycle for 40 minutes to an international hotel in his hometown and waited there for tourists. When he approached them, he proposed a deal. He would show them around the city as a travel guide and they would teach him English in return. Even in rain and snow, he waited outside the hotel day after day, morning after morning, year after year. One day he met an Australian family and soon became friends with them. They ended up inviting him to Australia, where he was impressed by the high standard of living that people enjoyed compared with China.

Ma Failed His University Entrance Exam

His English was improving constantly, but he was so weak in math that he failed the standardized university entrance test—he only achieved one out of 120 possible points. He tried again, and this time he scored 19 out of 120. His overall results were so bad that the university turned him down. Still, he persevered and eventually managed to get into Teachers’ College—although he admits that it was the least respected university in his city. In 1988, he obtained a bachelor’s degree in English and found a job as an English teacher.

A trip to Seattle in 1995, where a friend showed him the internet for the first time, proved to be decisive in shaping his future. He was immediately smitten and intuitively recognized the role the internet would play in years to come. That same year, he founded a company, China Yellow Pages, which struggled to eke out an existence. He had spent almost all of his money on registering the company and had little left for anything else. The company’s office consisted of a single room with a workstation and a very old PC in the middle.

The biggest problem was that it was not possible to access the internet in his hometown of Hangzhou at that time. Given such circumstances, anyone else would have given up on the idea of setting up an internet company in such circumstances. But Jack Ma was different. He told all his friends about the incredible potentials of the internet and convinced some of them to commission him to design websites for them. He asked them to send him information about their companies, which he translated into English and sent by post to Seattle, where the websites were actually created. His friends in Seattle took screenshots of the websites they were working on and sent them back to China, where he showed them to his clients. The fact that he actually managed to find companies in his hometown who were willing to spend the not insignificant sum of 20,000 renminbi (about $2,400) on their new homepages is testament to his enormous persuasiveness. “I was treated like a con man for three years,” is how Jack Ma remembers those early days.

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“We Want To Be Number One In The World”

Over the next few years, Ma repeatedly changed his business model—combining experimentation with perseverance. In 1999, he founded the Alibaba Group as a business-to-business, e-commerce platform. Things were by no means easy at first. Jack Ma later remembered: “First week, we have seven employees. We buy and sell, ourselves. The second week, somebody started to sell on our website. We bought everything they sell. We had two rooms full of things we bought for no use, all garbage, for the first two weeks—in order to tell people that it works.”

From the outset he thought big and set himself very ambitious goals. Shortly after founding his company, he told a journalist: “We don’t want to be number one in China. We want to be number one in the world.” He was so convinced of his future success that he even had a meeting filmed in his modest apartment in February 1999—to document the moment for his company’s later history. During the small meeting, he posed the question: “In the next five or ten years, what will Alibaba become?” Answering his own question, he said that “our competitors are not in China, but in Silicon Valley … We should position Alibaba as an international website.”

Ma tried to raise money from venture capitalists in Palo Alto, Silicon Valley. The investors he met expected him to present a fully developed business plan. But, much like Bloomberg, the Google founders and so many other successful company founders, Jack Ma did not have a business plan. His motto was: “If you plan, you lose. If you don’t plan, you win.”

Unfortunately, the investors had a hard time understanding Ma’s approach. “We don’t really have a clearly defined business model yet,” he conceded. “If you consider Yahoo! a search engine, Amazon a bookstore, eBay an auction center, Alibaba is an electronic market. Yahoo! and Amazon are not perfect models and we’re still trying to figure out what’s best.” Thanks to his charisma, he nevertheless managed to persuade the employee responsible for China at Goldman Sachs to invest $5 million in his company.

Intuition Is More Important Than Book Knowledge

Jack Ma’s example shows that entrepreneurial intuition and, above all, the willingness to be open to new ideas, and to always be ready to adapt a business model, are much more important than book knowledge of the kind taught in business administration courses around the world. In a lecture, Ma said: “It is not necessary to study an MBA. Most MBA graduates are not useful … Unless they come back from their MBA studies and forget what they’ve learned at school, then they will be useful. Because schools teach knowledge, while starting business requires wisdom. Wisdom is acquired through experience. Knowledge can be acquired through hard work.”

What Jack Ma says is confirmed by entrepreneurial research: entrepreneurial success is not the result of explicit, academic learning and book knowledge–it is the product of implicit learning processes that manifest themselves in intuition and gut feeling. However, this is not something irrational or mystical; it is accumulated experience, which in turn is the result of a combination of perseverance and the willingness to experiment.

“I’m Not Good At Technology”

As far as Ma was concerned, even technological knowledge was not necessary as he strived to achieve exceptional success as an internet entrepreneur: “I'm not good at technology,” he declared in 2014. “I was trained to be a high school teacher. It’s a funny thing. I’m running one of the biggest e-commerce companies in China, maybe in the world, but I know nothing about computers. All I know about computers is how to send and receive email and browse.” 

Jack Ma, who first started as a website designer and then went into business-to-business e-commerce, continued to develop his business in new directions. In 2003, he founded Taobao, the largest Chinese business-to-consumer shopping website. He was met with skepticism when he unveiled his plans for Taobao, both within his company and from investors. After all, Alibaba’s business-to-business operations were not yet turning a profit. Plus, at this time, it was proving increasingly difficult to raise new funds from venture capital companies. Should the company really open a new front before it had won the business-to-business battle? Many of the people he spoke to were wary. But Jack Ma was right. In 2007, he even managed to beat his fiercest competitor, eBay, which had far greater financial muscle than Ma’s company. eBay was forced to wind up its business in China because it never managed to understand the Chinese market, including the mentality of the large numbers of small retailers who use Taobao. In 2004, Ma went on to found Alipay, the world’s largest internet payment service.

Jack Ma was and is always open to new ideas. “From day one,” he explained in 2004, “all entrepreneurs know that their day is about dealing with difficulty and failure rather than defined by ‘success.’ My most difficult time hasn’t come yet, but it surely will. Nearly a decade of entrepreneurial experience tells me these difficult times can’t be evaded or shouldered by others—the entrepreneur must be able to face failure and never give up.”

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Who is Jack Ma? The story of Alibaba's founder

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By Doug Zanger, America's Editor

October 18, 2018 | 6 min read

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The natural inclination, when considering the upward arcs of Alibaba and Amazon, is to compare the men who founded them. In doing so, there unfolds a tale of two paths which converge and cross perceptually, yet diverge consistently.

Amazon’s Bezos graduated summa cum laude from Princeton with degrees in computer science and electrical engineering. And despite a few false starts early in his career, he had found success in finance before going on to create Amazon.

Jack Ma’s academic record isn’t quite as impressive. He explained at Davos three years ago how he “failed a key primary school test two times, failed the middle school test three times, failed the college entrance exam two times”. Even when he graduated, he was rejected for most of the jobs he applied for out of college. Most notably he was the only one of 24 applicants turned down by KFC in his hometown of Hangzhou.

And he applied 10 times to Harvard Business School, where tech titans Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates had studied, but was rejected on every occasion.

Despite all the failure and all the rejection he forged ahead, never giving up. Indeed his fighting spirit is a consistent thread throughout Ma’s career.

It’s obvious that he fought (and continues to fight) for the company he founded in 1999. He told a gathering of employees early on: “We will make it because we are young and we never, never give up.”

Ma’s public persona is as a fighter as well. A recent movie from Alibaba’s film studio division titled Gong Shou Dao features Ma as an action hero and pays tribute to martial arts – something he holds dear.

“He’s created a really good culture, but it’s not about him,” says Humphrey Ho, who is managing director of Chinese digital agency Hylink’s first international office in Los Angeles. “He fights for his people and his people are encouraged to fight as well, especially for vendors. I’ve always operated as a partner, vendor or client and Alibaba fights for us.”

While Amazon is relentless in its customercentric approach, for Alibaba it is “customers first, employees second and shareholders third” – or at least that’s what Ma told CNBC on the day of the company’s listing on the New York Stock Exchange in 2014. Putting shareholders third didn’t necessarily make him friends on Wall Street, but one of the differences between him and his Seattle counterparts lies in what a customer means.

To Ma, his customers include the small businesses that rely on Alibaba’s products, especially Taobao and Tmall. As he told a Stanford University graduate class: “Alibaba is not a company for consumers. We know that small businesses need customers. I knew that we didn’t have the right DNA to become a consumer company. Small businesses know more about the needs of their customers. We had to empower our power sellers and SMEs to support their customers. We hope small businesses can use technology to challenge the large enterprises.”

Internally, Ma’s ability to hire and keep people is part of an ethos that leans on Chinese proverbs, one being: “If you suspect people, don’t use suspicious people.” It’s a roundabout way of saying that the right people should be in the right jobs – and not necessarily the smartest person, which could explain the longer tenures of Alibaba employees.

“The first thing you notice is that people have been at Alibaba a long time,” notes Ho. “There’s usually a lot of turnover in the tech industry, but that’s not the case with Alibaba compared to other big tech conglomerates in China.”

Ma’s penchant is to make others the stars of the show but, oftentimes, the big stages call – and he never disappoints. From interviews with former US president Barack Obama to well-received appearances at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Ma shows a deft touch. “He’s a very good communicator and the staff he hires as a result are really good communicators,” says Ho.

“If you speak two languages you can communicate with at least the Western part of the English-speaking world and your executives there, and you can express ideas very similar to your Chinese executives, your Chinese leadership, your board, your shareholders back home. That puts him at a significant advantage over his competitors who are also trying to globalize.”

Alibaba’s annual shopping event Singles Day, which dwarfs the US Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined and raked in more than $25bn worth of sales last year, is another example of Ma’s positive fighting spirit. In the 24 hours of the yearly event, Ma is frequently seen cheering on the Alibaba team, including the developers that churn out promotions at a dizzying pace.

“If it is three in the morning, you appreciate your founder coming down to be with the team,” says Ho. “It’s inspirational and very cool.”

Another area where Ma fights is in philanthropy. Long an advocate for stewardship, especially around natural resources, he set up a philanthropic trust in 2014. Of particular interest is support for his hometown and education for children in China.

For example, late last year the Jack Ma Foundation gave a first-of-its-kind contribution to the First Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University (donations to public hospitals used to be outlawed) in Hangzhou, home of Alibaba Group’s headquarters.

Additionally, earlier this year Ma called on other leaders and entrepreneurs to help support his plan to provide solutions for China’s “left-behind children” – a reference to the growing number of young people left in rural communities while their parents go to urban centers to find work. It is estimated that 60 million children in China fit this category and Ma encouraged 80 entrepreneurs to help establish boarding schools to improve education standards.

“Many pupils have to climb mountains or take a boat to go to school,” Ma told the South China Morning Post (a news outlet owned by Alibaba). “In my opinion, these kids should not be commuting between home and school every day. They should go to a boarding school.”

It would be foolish to depict Alibaba as being a completely different beast to Amazon – they will both, after all, always strive to achieve greater market share. But in a sector where the maximization of profits and the pacification of shareholders is almost a given, it is striking that Ma may well be remembered as much for his philanthropic efforts and struggle for the greater good as he will for his staggering achievements in the world of e-commerce.

This feature first appeared in The Drum's May issue , which focused on Alibaba.

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Alibaba's Jack Ma: From 'crazy' to China's richest man

BEIJING — China's richest man celebrated his 50th birthday last week in the United States and expects his company will last twice as long, plus two years.

Revealing his ambition — and a love of numbers common in China — Jack Ma says Alibaba will last 102 years so the Internet empire he founded in 1999 can span three centuries.

Under Ma's maverick leadership, the 15-year-old firm has already bridged a period of extraordinary change in global trade and the Chinese economy. In a nation with little e-commerce but plenty of Communist Party bureaucrats, he raised a still-growing giant whose U.S. initial public offering , which will start trading under the BABA ticker Friday, is the largest in history.

REJECTED BY KFC

His rags-to-riches journey is just as spectacular. A scrawny Ma, just over 5 feet tall, was rejected by KFC and other employers in his hometown of Hangzhou in east China. He believed in the Internet's business potential when few other Chinese did. Outlandish ideas earned him the nickname "Crazy Jack Ma." No one thinks he's mad now, even when dressing in wild wigs and lipstick for his annual meeting where he serenades a stadium full of Alibaba employees.

Ma's readiness to make fun of himself, and speak his mind, stands in contrast to China's often conservative corporate barons. Charismatic and energetic, this former teacher has become an inspiration to millions across China. He flunked at math but loved English, and countless books and DVDs sell his business lessons in every airport lounge.

Ma — whose net worth is $21.9 billion,according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index — now stars in the coming-out party for China's private sector onto the world stage. He praises and uses Western management techniques but also quotes regularly from Chairman Mao Zedong. He is a fan of China's kung fu novels and made those legends part of his company's culture. He travels the world with a tai chi trainer.

Jack Ma, whose Chinese name is Ma Yun, was born in 1964 into a markedly different China. Communist Party campaigns dominated daily life. His parents performed a type of musical storytelling that was banned during Mao's devastating Cultural Revolution, from 1966 to 1976.

Ma's grandfather, a local official under the Nationalist Party that Mao defeated, was persecuted as an enemy of the Communist revolution. Ma and his relatives all suffered at that time, wrote Chinese author Zhang Yongsheng in a 2009 biography.

Like most Chinese parents back then, Ma's father beat him growing up. But there were childhood pleasures, too. He liked collecting and fighting crickets, an ancient pastime that Mao also banned. Ma developed an expert ear, able to distinguish the type and size of cricket just by the sound, his friend and personal assistant at Alibaba, Chen Wei, wrote in his 2013 book on Ma.

Starting at age 12, Ma says he awoke at 5 a.m. to walk or bicycle to Hangzhou's main hotel so he could practice his English with foreign tourists, who started trickling into the country after Mao's death in 1976. He did this for nine years and acted as a free tour guide to many, befriended several and later visited one family in Australia.

Those experiences opened his eyes. "I realized what they told me was quite different from what I had learned in school or heard from my parents," Ma told Xiao-Ping Chen, a professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, in an interview published last year.

MA MEETS THE INTERNET

After twice failing the national college entrance exams, Ma entered what he called "Hangzhou's worst college." Graduating in 1988, Ma married his college sweetheart and taught English at a local college for five years, earning $15 a month. During that time, he also applied for, and failed to land, jobs at a local KFC, a hotel and the city police.

Determined to enter business, Ma set up a translation company, but he still had to peddle goods on the street to get by. He traveled to the United States in 1995 as a translator to help a Chinese firm recover a payment. The attempt failed, and the American who owed money pulled a gun on him, Ma says. But a friend in Seattle showed Ma the Internet, and an idea began brewing.

Ma noticed there was not a single online listing for "China" and "beer," unlike those that popped up for American and German beer. He returned to China and set up a listing site that he later sold to the government. After working in Beijing for an Internet firm under the Ministry of Commerce, Ma returned home to Hangzhou to pursue his dream.

ALIBABA FOUNDED

With the help of more than a dozen friends who pooled their resources — just $60,000 — he founded Alibaba, a business-to-business online platform. The company now makes more profit than rivals Amazon.com and e-Bay combined, as China's burgeoning middle class are big spenders online, and small companies rely on Alibaba and its online payment system.

Ma seized opportunities as China was transforming into a market economy. At the time, the Internet was first being promoted, and small, private businesses struggled to get loans and had to compete against government-protected state firms, said economist Feng Pengcheng, director of the China Research Center for Capital Management at the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing.

"The business model Ma Yun created in China suited the Chinese market. It might be a failure in the U.S. market, but it's so successful in China," Feng said. "What's more, Ma Yun is good at cooperating with other talents. His company culture and his personal charm attracted employees, and his slogans are uplifting," he said.

For a billionaire so outspoken on company and business issues, Ma says little about his family and manages to keep his private life quiet and scandal-free. Ma and his wife Zhang Ying have a son, an undergrad at the University of California-Berkeley, where Ma had audited classes. A black-and-white photo of a young Ma with his older brother and younger sister went viral this month in China's cyberspace, as many people were unaware their richest citizen even had siblings.

"Ma Yun's lifestyle is very simple and modest. His hobbies are still tai chi and kung fu novels," Chen, his friend and assistant, said last week from Boston, while accompanying Ma on Alibaba's U.S. roadshow before the IPO.

"I don't think he has changed much, he is still that old style. After the IPO, I am sure his lifestyle will be simpler. He won't change," Chen said. In his book, being published in English this month, Chen said Ma enjoys meditation in the mountains, playing poker with friends and writing his own kung fu fiction. By Ma's own account, he believes in both Buddhism and Taoism, and follows many tenets of Confucianism.

'OPPOSITE OF STUFFY'

"My father said if you were born 30 years ago, you'd probably be in a prison, because the ideas you have are so dangerous," Ma told Charlie Rose in a 2011 TV interview. Despite such bravado for a Western audience, Ma has always been careful in China to avoid statements and actions that could jeopardize his business.

If China ever did permit open elections, Ma could become a popular candidate for top office, said Duncan Clark, a Brit who is a Beijing-based technology consultant. "He is the opposite of stuffy and canned. He's funny, creative and a compelling speaker. I often thought he has another career in stand-up comedy," he said.

Ma resigned last year as Alibaba's CEO, but he clearly remains in charge as the firm's executive chairman. He has hinted at exploring more "cultural" pursuits, such as film-making, education and environmental protection.

"One issue facing China is that people's wallets are bulging, but their heads are empty," he told Hong Kong's South China Morning Post last year. Ma also promises more philanthropy, including what may be China's largest charity foundation. Expect to hear plenty more from maverick Ma.

Contributing: Sunny Yang

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Do Not Sell

How Jack Ma went from English teacher to tech billionaire

Jack Ma, the rags-to-riches entrepreneur behind Chinese e-commerce giant, Alibaba, plans to hand over the reins at the company he co-founded nearly two-decades ago.

He said on Monday, his 54th birthday, that he will step down as executive chairman next year , ushering in a new era for the $420 billion company that has grown from a web page run out of Ma's apartment to a top global tech enterprise.

Alibaba's empire spans everything from cloud computing and digital banking to online messaging and movie production .

Ma, an outspoken advocate for globalization , will begin transitioning out of his role at a politically heated time. The United States and China are locked in an escalating trade war . Meanwhile, China's economy is showing signs of slowing .

Duncan Clark, author of "Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built," told CNN that he doubts Ma's retirement announcement was prompted by geopolitical headaches.

"He has long talked about his desire to go back to his roots as a teacher," Clark said. So his retirement should come as "no big surprise."

'Hollywood story'

Ma was born to a poor family in Hangzhou, in the eastern Chinese province of Zhejiang in 1964. He struggled in school, and he has said during interviews that he was rejected from Harvard 10 times and repeatedly rejected for jobs.

He failed his entrance exam twice before studying at the Hangzhou Teachers College. He graduated in 1988 and continued to teach English there for several years.

Ma described his ascent to one of China's most prominent tech tycoons as a "Hollywood story" during an interview with The New York Times in 2005.

He told the outlet that he traveled to California in 1995 to help collect a debt that an American businessman owed to a Chinese firm. But Ma said the man had a gun and held him captive in a Malibu mansion for two days. He escaped after promising the businessman he would become his partner in an internet venture.

Ma did not contact the man again, but he asked friends in Seattle about the internet, according to The Times. Invigorated by the technology, Ma returned to China, where the internet was still virtually unknown.

"The day we got connected to the web, I invited friends and TV people over to my house," he told The Times . "We waited three and a half hours and got half a page. We drank, watched TV and played cards, waiting. But I was so proud. I proved the internet existed."

Building Alibaba

He quit teaching and borrowed a couple thousand dollars to launch China Pages, one of the country's first commercial websites.

When that venture failed, he scraped together roughly $60,000 from friends and investors and co-founded Alibaba.com as a business-to-business marketplace in 1999. It attracted backing from giants like Goldman Sachs ( GS ) and SoftBank ( SFTBF ) .

The company survived the dot-com crash in 2000, and a couple of years later Alibaba started turning a profit .

Alibaba spawned Taobao.com, an eBay-like bartering marketplace, in 2003. It was a breakout success.

Yahoo, then a tech powerhouse, purchased a large stake in Alibaba in 2005 in a deal valued at $4 billion that also gave Alibaba control over Yahoo's operations in China.

Over the next decade, Alibaba amassed millions more customers and is credited with helping to change Chinese society by giving working-class people access to online commerce and creating a flood of new jobs.

Alibaba debuted on the New York Stock Exchange in September 2014 and raised a record $25 billion .

But its early days on the stock market were shaky as the company struggled to meet Wall Street's lofty expectations.

Ma gave his view in an interview CBS's 60 Minutes that year: "We believe customer number one, employee number two, shareholder number three. If they don't want to buy that, that's fine ... They can sell us."

60 Minutes anchor Lara Logan pointed out that in the United States, "the shareholder is usually first."

"Yeah, and I think they are wrong," he said. "The shareholder, good. I respect them. But they're the third. Because you've take care of the customer, take care of the employees, shareholder will be taken care of."

Ma later expressed regret about the IPO. "If I had another life, I would keep my company private," he said in a 2015 speech .

'Love them. Don't marry them.'

Like other Chinese tech giants that have emerged over the past two decades, Alibaba has had to navigate an economy over which China's ruling Communist Party looms large.

Ma told 60 Minutes that Alibaba works with Chinese authorities when it comes to issues of national security. But he said he still sought to keep the government at arm's length.

His policy was to "never, ever do business with government," he said. "Love them. Don't marry them."

In a 2014 article in The New Yorker , writer Jiayang Fan said that Ma and other self-made Chinese success stories were "becoming a problem for the Beijing government, which has historically chosen its heroes and compelled them to serve the needs of the Chinese Communist Party."

"The problem, of course, is that they also point to an increasing adoption by the Chinese of Western values," she wrote.

But Alibaba has played by Beijing's rules, allowing it to continue to grow strongly despite the Chinese government's tightening grip on the internet under President Xi Jinping. Ma has served as an advocate for the Communist Party, accompanying Xi on foreign visits and praising his policies.

Looking forward

Ma, who is worth around $40 billion, has remained the face of Alibaba. But he began gradually relinquishing control of the company years ago. He stepped down as CEO in 2013, retaining the role of executive chairman. Daniel Zhang is the current CEO.

But Clark, the biographer, said that he doesn't think Ma will ever fully sever ties with the company.

"Jack has such a following [and] moral standing at the company, it doesn't really matter what title he has," he said.

Ma holds a more than 6% stake in Alibaba, and the company's governance structure gives him and other partners firm control of the board.

He told Bloomberg TV earlier this week he wants to return to teaching someday. "This is something I think I can do much better than being CEO of Alibaba," he said.

Ma also said he wants to follow in the footsteps of Microsoft co-founder and fellow billionaire Bill Gates, who has pledged to give away at least half of his wealth during his lifetime.

He plans to focus on his Jack Ma Foundation , formed in 2014, a charity dedicated to improving education, the environment and public health.

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Understanding Jack Ma

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Few could have predicted the meteoric rise of Jack Ma and his tech giant Alibaba when it launched as an e-commerce platform in 1999. Two decades later, that rise is as profound and important as any of the staggering changes that have defined the “Asian Century” to date. When Alibaba was first listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2014, it was the largest initial public offering in history. In the years since its launch, Ma’s company and its subsidiaries have extended their reach into every stratum of Chinese society, and far beyond. Alibaba Group’s marketplaces stretch across 200 countries and are responsible for more than 11% of all retail sales in China.

If you shop online or stream music in China, if your company uses the cloud, if you buy a snack from a street vendor, chances are you’ve used one of Ma’s products. In the two decades since Alibaba launched, its growth has traced that of China’s internet explosion. Here, in five questions, Duncan Clark, Asia Society trustee and author of Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built , discusses the rise of Jack Ma and Alibaba, and the changes in China that have made such entrepreneurism possible.

Were Jack Ma’s achievements, or the overall success of Alibaba, unlikely in any way? Could you see someone like Ma emerging from the tech landscape today?

Given Ma’s lack of connections and wealth, few would have predicted his rise. Ma struggled as a student and failed in his first two ventures. His story is a story of endurance. He did, though, display a talent for seeing the essential trends ahead of others. He saw it in the internet in the mid-1990s — five years before he founded Alibaba — and in its applicability to helping small private exporters first in selling overseas and then, crucially, in selling to Chinese consumers.

Today, the rise of companies like ByteDance (Toutiao), Pinduoduo, and others shows that you can still come from behind by embracing tech and seeing new opportunities emerge before the incumbents and competitors do. Maybe, though, it’s even less likely now for an English teacher to come from nowhere and launch a successful company. Tech-savvy entrepreneurs are really the ones grasping the opportunities today.

In what ways does Ma’s rise reflect changing opportunities in China over the past two decades?

Twenty years in China is like a century in the U.S. — the physical and psychological make-up of China has changed so completely. Now China is far beyond the “copy to China” ideas of the dotcom era. In many ways we can see how the mass online and mobile market combined with ample (perhaps too much) capital, and entrepreneurs have created a “white heat” of new business creation and innovation.

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For someone unfamiliar with China, can you explain the role the internet plays there — and particularly Alibaba?

A life in China without the internet is almost like a life without oxygen. It is hard to survive without the internet, and in China that means mobile internet, and not just in big cities (99% of access is via mobile). The mobile coverage is ubiquitous, fast, and inexpensive. And there are so many choices of phones, from the high-end iPhones and Huaweis all the way to low-cost but still powerful smartphones from a plethora of providers.

Yes, the “great firewall” blocks access to some of the most familiar sites in the West, from Google to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and so on, but then the local apps are highly diversified and tailored to local needs of consumers. There are applications like the ubiquitous mobile payment/QR codes from Alipay and Tencent WeChat Pay that make the West look positively antiquated. Utilities and government services from paying taxes to parking are also easily available online or through in-app features on Alipay and WeChat. Online/mobile life here really is effortless.

And where does Alibaba sit in this ecosystem?

Alibaba is the biggest player in e-commerce and increasingly in offline or on-and-offline retail through Hema (Fresh Hippo) supermarkets and as a driver of payment (with Tencent) and other fintech offerings, logistics, entertainment, healthcare, and more.

What is Ma’s biggest legacy?

The fusion of China’s massive, pent-up entrepreneurial know-how with the internet, creating private companies that have eclipsed even state-owned incumbents in their scale and reach.

Before the internet, most entrepreneurs were very local in scale. The internet opened up national and even international opportunities and visibility to them. And Alibaba’s platforms and investments in logistics companies helped drastically reduce the friction and barriers to scale that had held entrepreneurs back in the past. Jack Ma is forever tied to that entrepreneurial and tech breakthrough for China.

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Duncan Clark is the author of Alibaba: The House that Jack Ma Built , the definitive work on China's e-commerce and technology giant, its founder Jack Ma, and the forces and people that propelled its rise. Clark is chairman of BDA China, an advisory board he founded in 1994. He is a member of Asia Society's Board of Trustees. Clark is a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Institute of Global Affairs at the London School of Economics; and a former Visiting Scholar at Stanford University.

Jack Ma Biography

About Jack Ma

Jack Ma, synonymous with innovation, entrepreneurship, and perseverance, has left an indelible mark on the global business landscape. Ma Yun, popularly known as Jack Ma, was born in Hangzhou, China, on September 10, 1964. Despite having modest origins, he became one of the most significant individuals in the technology and e-commerce sectors. Jack Ma’s journey from early struggles and failures to the meteoric rise of Alibaba Group, the company he co-founded and transformed into a global e-commerce powerhouse, illustrates the power of vision, determination, and relentless pursuit of one’s dreams.

This biography delves into Jack Ma’s life, achievements, and enduring legacy, exploring his remarkable entrepreneurial journey, leadership style, philanthropic endeavors, and profound impact on business and society.

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Early Life and Education

Jack Ma’s story begins in the picturesque city of Hangzhou, China, where he was born on September 10, 1964. Growing up in a modest family, Ma experienced the challenges of China during a period of economic transition. Jack Ma demonstrated resilience and resourcefulness in his early years, defining his entrepreneurial journey.

Jack Ma persevered despite facing academic setbacks, including multiple failures in the Chinese college entrance exams. He eventually gained admission to Hangzhou Teacher’s Institute (now Hangzhou Normal University), where he pursued an English degree. The challenges he encountered in his academic journey would later shape his perspective on success and failure.

Ma’s fascination with the English language and foreign cultures led him to become a tour guide, providing him with opportunities to interact with visitors from Western countries. This exposure was pivotal in broadening his horizons and fostering a global perspective, which would prove crucial in his future endeavors.

Upon graduating in 1988, Jack Ma faced a limited job market. He dabbled in various professions, including teaching, translation, and even working as a street performer. These diverse experiences laid the groundwork for the eclectic skill set that would later contribute to his success as an entrepreneur.

Early Career

• English Language Advocate: Despite initially struggling with the subject, Jack Ma developed a deep interest in English. After graduating in 1988, he became an English teacher at Hangzhou Dianzi University.
• Entrepreneurial Ventures: In the early 1990s, Jack Ma attempted various entrepreneurial ventures, including starting a translation service and establishing a local guide company. These early endeavors provided valuable experience and insights into the world of business.
• Introduction to the Internet: Jack Ma’s first encounter with the Internet happened during a trip to the United States in 1995. He recognized its potential and saw an opportunity to connect China with the global market.
• Founding China Pages: In 1995, Jack Ma founded China Pages, one of China’s first internet-based companies. The company focused on creating business websites. Although the venture faced challenges and eventually failed, it marked Jack Ma’s entry into the online business world.
• Government Appointment: In 1998, the Chinese government assigned Jack Ma to create the nation’s first industry website for foreign trade, laying the foundation for his future engagement in e-commerce.
• Creation of Alibaba: Drawing inspiration from the story of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, Jack Ma co-founded Alibaba in 1999 with a group of friends. Initially an online marketplace connecting Chinese manufacturers with international buyers, Alibaba rapidly gained traction.
• Early Challenges: Alibaba faced early challenges, including investors’ skepticism and the dot-com bubble burst. However, Jack Ma’s strategic vision and resilience allowed the company to weather the storm and emerge stronger.
• Alibaba’s IPO: In 2014, Jack Ma solidified his status as a pioneering entrepreneur and propelled Alibaba into a global e-commerce giant by leading one of the world’s largest initial public offerings (IPOs) .

Founding Alibaba

In 1999, amidst the dawn of the Internet age in China, Jack Ma and a group of like-minded entrepreneurs founded Alibaba in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province. Jack Ma’s vision led to the founding of Alibaba, which aimed to empower small and medium-sized firms (SMEs) in China by utilizing the Internet to connect them with international markets.

Inspiration and Vision

• Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves: “Alibaba” was inspired by the famous Arabian folk tale “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.” The story resonated with Jack Ma’s vision of creating a digital marketplace where small businesses could access opportunities previously available only to large corporations.
• Empowering SMEs: Jack Ma envisioned Alibaba as a platform to democratize e-commerce, enabling SMEs to reach customers worldwide and compete on a level playing field with larger enterprises.

Early Days and Growth

• Online Marketplace: Alibaba initially operated as an online marketplace, Alibaba.com, connecting Chinese manufacturers with international buyers. The platform provided a cost-effective and efficient way for businesses to trade globally.
• Taobao and Tmall: In 2003, Alibaba launched Taobao, an online shopping platform catering to the domestic Chinese market. Taobao quickly gained popularity, offering consumers various products and services. Additionally, Alibaba launched Tmall, a business platform to sell brand-name goods directly to consumers.

Global Expansion

• Alibaba Group: Over the years, Alibaba expanded its services beyond e-commerce, encompassing a wide range of sectors, including cloud computing, digital entertainment, logistics, and financial services. Alibaba Group became a global conglomerate with a significant impact on various industries.
• International Presence: Alibaba expanded its presence beyond China, establishing operations in key international markets and actively pursuing partnerships and acquisitions to drive global growth.

Leadership Style and Philosophy

• Visionary Leadership: Jack Ma’s visionary leadership characterizes a bold and innovative approach to business, for which he is known. He has a knack for foreseeing industry trends and leveraging emerging technologies to drive Alibaba’s growth and success.
• Empowerment and Trust: Jack Ma believes in empowering his team members and instilling a culture of trust within the organization. He delegates authority and encourages employees to take ownership of their roles, fostering creativity and initiative.
• Customer-Centric Focus: The core of Jack Ma’s leadership ethos is an unwavering commitment to providing value and satisfying customer requirements. He emphasizes listening to customers, understanding their preferences, and adapting Alibaba’s products and services accordingly.
• Adaptability and Agility: Jack Ma values adaptability and agility in the face of change and uncertainty. He encourages a culture of experimentation and iteration, embracing failures as opportunities for learning and innovation.
• Inclusive Leadership: Jack Ma believes in inclusive leadership, valuing diverse perspectives, and fostering an inclusive work environment. He highlights the value of cooperation and teamwork and uses the pooled knowledge of Alibaba’s heterogeneous staff.
• Long-Term Vision: Jack Ma adopts a long-term perspective in his strategic decision-making, prioritizing sustainable growth and longevity over short-term gains. He focuses on building enduring relationships with customers, partners, and stakeholders, laying the foundation for Alibaba’s continued success.
• Social Responsibility: Jack Ma is a proponent of corporate social responsibility, advocating for businesses to positively impact society. He believes companies are responsible for addressing social and environmental challenges and actively engage in philanthropy and social initiatives through the Alibaba Group.
• Lead by Example: Jack Ma leads by example, demonstrating integrity , resilience, and a relentless work ethic. He inspires his team members through his actions and words, setting high standards of excellence and motivating others to strive for greatness.

Impact of Alibaba’s Success

• Revolutionizing E-commerce: Alibaba revolutionized the e-commerce industry, introducing innovative platforms like Alibaba.com, Taobao, and Tmall. These platforms transformed how businesses engage with consumers, creating new opportunities for sellers and providing consumers unprecedented access to various products and services.
• Empowering Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs): One of the most significant impacts of Alibaba’s success has been empowering small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The platform provided a global stage for smaller businesses, enabling them to compete internationally. This empowerment has contributed to the growth of countless entrepreneurs and fostered economic development.
• Digital Payment Revolution: Alibaba’s financial arm, Ant Group, played a pivotal role in the digital payment revolution. Alipay, created to facilitate transactions on Alibaba’s platforms, became China’s leading mobile payment platform. This transformation in payment methods has influenced how people conduct financial transactions, both in China and beyond.
• Technological Innovation and Cloud Computing: Alibaba’s success has driven technological innovation, particularly in cloud computing and data analytics. Alibaba Cloud, the company’s cloud computing arm, has become a major global player, providing services ranging from hosting to artificial intelligence.
• Global Economic Impact: Alibaba’s initial public offering (IPO) in 2014 marked one of the largest in history. The success of the IPO not only solidified Alibaba’s position but also had a broader impact on global financial markets, influencing investor confidence in the potential of e-commerce and technology companies.
• Job Creation and Economic Growth: Alibaba’s success greatly benefited economic expansion and employment creation. The platform’s e-commerce, logistics, finance, and other ecosystems have created numerous jobs within Alibaba Group and its affiliated businesses. Additionally, the development of SMEs on Alibaba’s platforms has had a cascading effect on employment.
• Inspiration for Entrepreneurs: Jack Ma’s journey and Alibaba’s success continue to inspire entrepreneurs globally. Their stories of overcoming challenges, embracing innovation, and achieving unprecedented success resonate with aspiring business leaders, motivating them to pursue their visions with determination and resilience.
• Cultural and Social Impact: Alibaba’s success has shaped the business landscape and had a cultural and social impact. It has influenced consumer behavior, altered traditional retail models, and shaped the digital economy, reflecting the dynamic interplay between technology and society.

Other Ventures and Investments

• Yunfeng Capital: In 2010, Jack Ma co-founded Yunfeng Capital, a private equity firm focusing on technology, media, and telecommunications investments. The firm has strategically invested in Focus Media, China’s leading digital media company.
• Ant Group (formerly Ant Financial): Jack Ma was pivotal in establishing Ant Group (formerly known as Ant Financial), Alibaba’s financial affiliate. Alipay, one of the biggest online and mobile payment networks globally, is run by Ant Group. Under Jack Ma’s guidance, Ant Group expanded its services beyond payments to include wealth management, credit scoring, and other financial technology solutions.
• AliExpress: Jack Ma oversaw the launch of AliExpress, an online retail platform targeting international consumers. AliExpress contributes to Alibaba’s global expansion plan by providing products from Chinese vendors to buyers globally.
• Alibaba Pictures: In 2014, Alibaba Group entered the entertainment industry by establishing Alibaba Pictures. The company focuses on film production, distribution, and investment in the entertainment sector, aiming to leverage Alibaba’s digital ecosystem to transform the traditional film industry.
• Cainiao Network: Recognizing the importance of logistics in the e-commerce ecosystem, Jack Ma co-founded Cainiao Network in 2013. Cainiao is a logistics platform integrating various logistics providers to streamline the delivery process for Alibaba’s e-commerce platforms and other merchants.
• Health and Wellness Ventures: Jack Ma has shown interest in the health and wellness sector, investing in companies such as HeHeGu, a mobile health management platform , and United Family Healthcare, a private healthcare provider in China.
• Green Initiatives: Jack Ma has committed to environmental sustainability through investments in green technology and initiatives. He has supported projects on renewable energy, environmental conservation, and eco-friendly initiatives.
• Education and Philanthropy: Jack Ma is passionate about education and philanthropy. He founded the Jack Ma Foundation, which promotes education, entrepreneurship, and environmental conservation. The foundation has launched various initiatives to support education and entrepreneurship in underprivileged communities, including the Rural Teacher Initiative and the Africa Netpreneur Prize Initiative.

Controversies

• Ant Group’s IPO Suspension (2020): In November 2020, Ant Group, Alibaba’s financial affiliate founded by Jack Ma, was set to launch what would have been the world’s largest initial public offering (IPO). However, Chinese authorities suspended the IPO just days before the scheduled listing, citing regulatory concerns. This move underscored the regulatory scrutiny facing large tech companies in China and raised questions about the relationship between private enterprises and the government.
• Regulatory Scrutiny and Alibaba Fine (2020-2021): In late 2020, the Chinese government initiated an antitrust investigation into Alibaba Group, focusing on allegations of monopolistic practices. In April 2021, Chinese regulators fined Alibaba a record $2.8 billion. The fine signaled increased oversight of tech giants and impacted Alibaba’s stock value.
• Jack Ma’s Critique of Chinese Financial System (2013): In 2013, Jack Ma made headlines when he criticized China’s state-owned banks, referring to them as “pawnshops” and expressing frustration with the lack of financial support for small and medium-sized enterprises. While his comments resonated with many entrepreneurs, they also drew scrutiny from Chinese authorities.
• Retirement Announcement and Reappearance (2018-2021): In 2018, Jack Ma announced his plans to step down as Alibaba’s executive chairman, fueling speculation about the company’s future leadership. Initially, stakeholders met his retirement with uncertainty and concerns about Alibaba’s stability without its charismatic founder at the helm. Furthermore, Jack Ma’s brief disappearance from the public eye in late 2020 added intrigue and speculation, though he later reappeared, attributing his absence to a low-profile lifestyle.
• Alibaba’s Counterfeit Controversies: Alibaba has faced persistent accusations of tolerating and profiting from selling counterfeit goods on its platforms, particularly Taobao. Despite implementing measures to combat counterfeiting, the company has encountered challenges in fully eradicating these issues, leading to ongoing criticisms and legal battles.
• Tension with Chinese Authorities (Ongoing): Jack Ma’s outspoken nature and Alibaba’s rapid ascent to economic prominence have occasionally led to tensions with Chinese authorities. The government’s increasing scrutiny of tech companies, coupled with concerns about their market dominance, has resulted in a complex relationship between Alibaba and the regulatory landscape in China.

Legacy and Influence

Jack Ma’s impact on the global business landscape and the entrepreneurial community is profound and enduring. Through his visionary leadership, innovative spirit, and relentless pursuit of excellence, he has left a lasting legacy that continues to shape the business world and inspire future generations.

• Pioneering Entrepreneurship: Jack Ma’s entrepreneurial journey with Alibaba is a testament to the transformative power of vision and perseverance. He defied the odds and revolutionized the e-commerce industry, paving the way for countless entrepreneurs to dream big and pursue their aspirations.
• Empowering Small Businesses: One of Jack Ma’s greatest legacies is his commitment to empowering small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) through technology and innovation. Alibaba’s platforms have democratized e-commerce, providing SMEs unprecedented access to global markets and leveling the playing field against larger competitors.
• Technological Innovation: Jack Ma’s emphasis on technological innovation has been pivotal in shaping the digital economy. From pioneering online marketplaces to advancing financial technology and cloud computing, his vision has fueled a wave of innovation that continues to drive progress in various industries.
• Global Impact: Alibaba’s global expansion under Jack Ma’s leadership has profoundly impacted international trade and commerce. The company’s presence extends beyond China, influencing consumer behavior, market dynamics, and the broader global economy.
• Philanthropy and Social Responsibility: Jack Ma’s philanthropic endeavors through the Jack Ma Foundation reflect his commitment to giving back to society and supporting causes close to his heart. Initiatives such as the Rural Teacher Initiative and the Africa Netpreneur Prize Initiative demonstrate his dedication to education, entrepreneurship, and social empowerment.
• Inspiring Future Leaders: Jack Ma’s entrepreneurial journey and leadership philosophy continue to inspire aspiring entrepreneurs and business leaders worldwide. His story of overcoming challenges, embracing innovation, and positively impacting is a beacon of hope and motivation for those seeking to create change and drive progress.
• Vision for the Future: While Jack Ma has stepped down from his executive roles at Alibaba, his influence and vision continue to shape the company’s trajectory and the broader tech ecosystem. His foresight and commitment to innovation ensure that Alibaba remains at the forefront of technological advancement and continues pushing the digital age’s boundaries.

Personal Life of Jack Ma

Though less publicized than his professional endeavors, Jack Ma’s personal life offers insight into the man behind entrepreneurial success. From his early experiences to his family life and hobbies, Jack Ma’s journey reflects his values, interests, and the influences that have shaped him outside the business world.

• Family and Childhood: Jack Ma was born on September 10, 1964, in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, China. His parents and older brother raised him in a poor home. Despite facing financial challenges, Jack Ma’s family instilled in him the values of hard work, resilience, and determination from a young age.
• Marriage and Children: Jack Ma married Cathy Zhang, whom he met while studying at Hangzhou Teacher’s Institute. The couple has three children together. Even with his hectic schedule and career responsibilities, Jack Ma has highlighted the significance of balancing work and family.
• Education and Personal Development: Challenges and setbacks, including failures in academic pursuits, marked Jack Ma’s journey in education. However, he persisted in his quest for knowledge and self-improvement, eventually earning a Bachelor’s degree in English and pursuing further studies in business administration.
• Hobbies and Interests: Jack Ma enjoys various hobbies and interests outside his business endeavors. He is known for his passion for martial arts, particularly Tai Chi, which he has practiced for many years. Tai Chi serves as a form of relaxation and physical exercise for Jack Ma, allowing him to maintain a healthy lifestyle amid his busy schedule.
• Public Persona and Philanthropy: Jack Ma’s public persona extends beyond his role as a business leader. His ability to relate to people from all walks of life, sense of humor, and captivating personality are well known. His philanthropic efforts through the Jack Ma Foundation reflect his commitment to giving back to society and supporting causes related to education, entrepreneurship, and environmental conservation.
• Retirement and Future Plans: In 2019, Jack Ma stepped down as executive chairman of Alibaba Group, signaling a transition towards a more advisory role within the company. He intended to focus on philanthropy, education, and environmental conservation in retirement. However, Jack Ma remains actively involved in various business and social initiatives, leveraging his expertise and influence to drive positive change.

Recognition and Awards

Jack Ma’s remarkable journey from humble beginnings to global entrepreneurial success exemplifies the transformative power of vision, perseverance, and innovation as the visionary leader behind Alibaba Group. Ma’s impact on the e-commerce industry and the global business landscape is undeniable. His legacy extends beyond business, inspiring future generations and leaving an indelible mark on entrepreneurship and philanthropy.

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Jack Ma's Net-Worth and Influence

What is Jack Ma, founder and former executive chairman of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. ( BABA ), worth? As of Jun. 21, 2023, Jack Ma's net worth is $34.1 billion as the 39th richest person in the world, according to an article from Bloomberg.

Much of Ma’s wealth is linked to Alibaba. He used to own the largest controlling interest in the company and its subsidiaries, though he has been divesting his shares over time. In July 2020, he sold another $8.2 billion worth of shares. According to the company's 13D filing in February 2022, he now ownes 3.9% of the business.

The firm's roots date back to 1995, when Ma and his wife started a site-creating company called China Yellow Pages. Less than five years later, Ma co-founded Alibaba with 17 friends in Hangzhou.

Alibaba’s holdings now include outright ownership and or important ownership stakes in a movie studio, venture capital funds, Yahoo! China, healthcare technology makers, Internet messaging and voice apps, supply chain management companies, taxi-hailing app services, video streaming sites, social media apps, and online clothing retailers.

Ma stepped down as Chairman of Alibaba on Sept. 10, 2019, on his 55th birthday, as part of a long-standing succession plan.

When a person makes Forbes ’ The World’s Billionaires list, investors are naturally interested in what they're investing in.

Buffet-Style Investing

With a wide array of investments spread out over a number of different companies and sectors, Ma’s web of deals and diversification are often likened to that of Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (NYSE: BRK) fame. Ma is a prolific investor who is not shy of financing all stages of a venture, from seed funding to established company. Much of his investing has been done through Yunfeng Capital or various shell companies.

Ma established venture capital firm Yunfeng Capital with four associates in 2010. The five principals came to be known as the “Zhejiang Gang,” referring to the province where they were born. Yunfeng, invests in early-stage companies across a number of industries; almost all of of the companies are located in China . Yunfeng investment sectors include:

• Healthcare (the fund, for example, put 200 million RMB into China Resources Wandong Medical Equipment Co. Ltd. [Shanghai: 600055.SS], a maker of medical devices),
• Insurance ($1.7 billion worth of shares in China Taiping Insurance Holdings Company Limited [HKSE: 0966.HK])
• Clean energy
• Consumer goods
• Finance (with a 56% stake in REORIENT Group Limited (HKSE: 0376.HK), a mid-cap brokerage located in Hong Kong)
• Internet products and services

Private Investments

Not all of Ma's funds are invested in public companies; a large portion of his wealth is invested privately, through various connections and holding companies. One such private equity fund is Star Capital, which invests in a variety of business sectors, including real estate , in China and across Europe. Star Capital is majority-controlled by Fosun International. A major part of Alibaba’s financial services businesses, including Alipay, is overseen by another holding company that is controlled by Ma and other investors.

In 2014, Jack Ma and several other investors put up $1 billion to purchase a 20% stake in Wasu Media, (Shenzhen: 000156.SZ). While this transaction may look fairly straightforward, a closer look at the way the deal was structured revealed a somewhat complex arrangement.

The Hangzhou Yunxi Investment Partnership Enterprise, which made the investment on behalf of its three partners, including Ma, is controlled by three separate entities. One of those, Hangzhou Yun Huang Investment Management, is 99% controlled by Ma, with the other 1% owned by Simon Xie. The $1 billion loan was made to Xie from Alibaba, and then invested into the Yunxi partnership for the purchase of the Wasu shares. Taking a very circuitous route, Ma was investing personally in Wasu, and his appetite for media.

Media, Sports, and Entertainment

The Huayi Brothers (Shenzhen: 300027.SZ) entertainment company, originally formed in 1994, is just one example of Ma's growing interest. Yunfeng, Chinese Internet giant Tencent Holdings Limited (OTC: TCTZF), and Huayi purchased controlling interests in it through an empty shell corporation called China Jiuhao Health Industry Corporation Limited (HKSE: 0419.HK).

In January 2019, Alibaba's Pictures Group (a subsidiary of Alibaba) extended a $1 million loan to Huayi Brothers. In return, Huayi pledged to produce 10 theatrical films over the next five years, giving Alibaba Pictures priority as a potential investor, distributor, and merchandiser.

In 2015, Yunfeng participated in an initial funding round of $129 million for Le TV Sports, a then-fledgling sports rights and streaming company, that went on to secure $1.2 billion in Series B funding in 2016.

Jack Ma's Causes

Ma is a charismatic, flamboyant, and energetic leader, and his influence in business and leadership has been recognized by various organizations. He was named one of the world’s most influential people by Time Magazine in 2009 , Asia’s Heroes of Philanthropy in 2010 by Forbes Asia, and one of 30 world’s best CEO s by Barron’s in 2008.

His influence has transcended business into social causes, primarily environmental ones. Ma has been a board member of The Nature Conservancy in China since 2010. He has taken on the shark fishing industry, pledging to end the consumption of shark fin dishes, and working to bring about the end of trading fins and other shark-based products on Alibaba.

A small (but meaningful in absolute value) percentage of Alibaba’s profits are allocated to fund environmental causes. Ma has also begun sounding the alarm bells (albeit cautiously) on the environmental impact of China's fast-developing industrial economy. He is advocating for China to take steps to further diversify its economy and reduce its reliance on manufacturing.

Ma is an active advocate for women’s fair treatment and advancement in business. Within Alibaba, six of the eighteen founding partners are women, and five of the fourteen executive team members are women. He has asserted, adding proudly, "We have many women CEOs, CFOs , directors and so on."

He also aims to use his influence to encourage and advance fledging business owners. "For the rest of my life, I want to encourage entrepreneurship , to help more small and midsize enterprises ," he has stated. He is also flirting with the idea of returning to his academic roots—he is a graduate of Hangzhou Teacher's Institute —someday. "I want to go back to school because I was trained to be a school teacher," says Ma. "I have been doing business for 15 years, and I think most of the things that I learned from the business school are not correct—I want to go back and share with others."

In 2023, he did return to academia, taking a role as a Visiting Professor at the University of Tokyo, researching sustainable agriculture and food production between May and October 2023.

Expanding Access to Capital Through Alibaba

Ma also suggests that various Alibaba ventures have a philanthropic bent. In 2016, he coined the term "TechFin" as a way to not only set the company's payment platform Alipay apart from its competitors, but to underscore the company's goal of providing young people, small companies, and poor nations access to capital .

He wants Alibaba, already the world's largest e-commerce platform, to also be the go-to financier for emerging markets . And the company's Alipay e-wallet service, which boasts more than 1.3 billion users, is going to serve as the backbone for Ma's payment platform expansion efforts.

“ Fintech takes the original financial system and improves its technology,” said Ma during a 2016 China Conference organized by the South China Morning Post (SCMP). “TechFin is to rebuild the system with technology. What we want to do is to solve the problem of a lack of inclusiveness.”

The South China Morning Post, a publication owned by Alibaba, quoted Ma as saying, "Everyone should have a bank account." To that end, Alibaba’s financial services affiliate Ant Financial Services Group (which manages Alipay) has begun to focus on emerging markets such as India, the Philippines, and Malaysia—areas that are considered underserved, compared to established markets like Europe and the United States.

Ant also runs Yu’E Bao, a  money market fund launched in 2013 that offers higher interest on savings and greater liquidity than many of China's traditional banks.

As for how Alipay and the concept of "TechFin" stands up against existing payment platforms, Ma described his ambition as being less about competition and more about solving a problem. “It’s not a business model competition... getting a business model is simple if you really solve a big problem and create value.”

An article from the South China Morning Post quoted him as saying. “In India, we have over 150 million users who can run mobile payments within 20 months. This [enabling the poor to have bank accounts] is something we feel proud of.”

However, his efforts have faced some headwinds. In 2020, the Indian government banned many Chinese apps, include Alipay Cashier and other apps from Alibaba.

What inspired Jack Ma to start Internet businesses?

Jack Ma's first encounter with the Internet came in 1995 when he visited the United States. He was inspired, and noted the lack of Chinese web sites. He identified this as a business opportunity and founded his first company China Pages, which helped build websites for Chinese businesses.

How many languages does Jack Ma speak?

Jack Ma is bilingual, speaking both Mandarin and English. He took an interest in English at the age of 12, practicing his English with foreign tourists while offering tours of Hangzhou. He also studied to become an English teacher.

What are Jack Ma's work habits?

Jack Ma encourages hard work over long hours. He is a proponent of "996," which means working from 9 AM to 9 PM 6 days a week.

The Bottom Line

Jack Ma is an entrepreneur and founder of one of the largest holding companies in the world and one of the 50 richest people on the planet. That gives him significant influence in his home country of China and abroad. His unique investing style can provide significant insight for investors looking to mimic his success.

Bloomberg. " Bloomberg Billionaires Index ." Accessed Jun. 21, 2023.

Bloomberg. " Bloomberg Billionaires Index #39 Jack Ma " Accessed Jun. 21, 2023.

Alibaba Group. " Alibaba Group Announces Executive Chairman Succession Plan ."

The Wall Street Journal. " Alibaba's Jack Ma in Deal for Hong Kong Broker Reorient ."

Reuters. " Alibaba's Jack Ma, Partners to Pay $1.05 bln for 20% Wasu Media ."

U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. " Alibaba Group Holding Limited Amendment No. 4 to Registration Statement on Form F-1 File No. 333-195736 ."

The Wall Street Journal. " Alibaba Founder's Recent Deals Raise Flags ."

China Business Review. " Alibaba Affiliate to Pay $1.05 Billion for 20 Percent Stake in Wasu Media ."

China Film Insider. " Headlines from China: Huayi Brothers Takes a $103 Million Loan from Alibaba Pictures ."

Sports Business Journal. " LeSports Secures $1.2B in Series B Financing, Now Has Value of $3.3B ."

Time. " The 2009 Time 100-Builders & Titans-Jack Ma ."

Forbes. " Asia's Heroes of Philanthropy ."

Barron's. " World's Best CEO's ."

Financial Times. " Alibaba founder Jack Ma takes up teaching post in Tokyo ." Accessed Jun. 21, 2023.

Quartz. " Alibaba's Gender Diversity Puts Silicon Valley to Shame ."

Hanadi Falki. " Alibaba & Jack Ma ." Prabhat Prakashan, 2021.

Financial Times. " Alibaba founder Jack Ma takes up teaching post in Tokyo. " Accessed Jun. 21, 2023.

South China Morning Post. " TechFin: Jack Ma Coins Term to Set Alipay's Goals to Give Emerging Markets Access to Capital ."

Techwire Asia. " Ten years later, Alipay is still the most popular digital wallet in the world ." Accessed Jun. 21, 2023

South China Morning Post. " Ant Financial to Raise US$3 Billion in Debt to Fund Expansion ."

South China Morning Post. " TechFin: Jack Ma Coins Term to Set Alipay's Goal to Give Emerging Markets Access to Capital ."

The Times of India. " Government bans AliPay, WeTV, Lalamove India and 40 other 'Chinese apps '." Accessed Jun. 21, 2023.

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World Meets Media

Chinese Entrepreneur – Jack Ma – The Biography of a Self-Made Billionaire

Net Worth: $23.4 billion as of 2022

Jack Ma, originally Ma Yun, (born September 10, 1964, Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, China), a Chinese entrepreneur who was head of the Alibaba Group, which consists of several of China’s most popular Websites, including the business-to-business marketplace Alibaba.com and the shopping site Taobao.com.

jack Ma got intrigued by the English language as a little fellow, and during his teenage, he functioned as a guide for unfamiliar vacationers to Hangzhou. He bombed the placement test for the Hangzhou Teachers College twice. (His frail point was mathematics). He was conceded on the third attempt, in 1984, and he graduated with a four-year college education in English in 1988. From 1988 to 1993 he was teaching English at the Hangzhou Institute of Electronics and Engineering (presently Hangzhou Dianzi University). In 1994, he established his first organization, the Haibo Translation Agency, which gave English interpretation and understanding.

How Jack ma started Alibaba?

While traveling to the United States for the benefit of the Hangzhou regional government in 1995, Ma had his first experience with the Internet and saw the absence of Chinese Web destinations as an extraordinary business opportunity. On his return, he established China Pages, which made Web locales for Chinese organizations and was one of China’s first Internet organizations. He left the organization two years later on account of solid rivalry from the correspondence organization Hangzhou Telecom, which had established an adversary organization, the Chinese page.

From 1998 to 1999 jack Ma was top of an Internet organization in Beijing that was upheld by the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation. He felt, in any case, that if he stayed with the administration, he would pass up the monetary open doors that the Internet was bringing. Ma convinced his group at the service to return to Hangzhou with him and found the Alibaba Group, which dispatched a Website that encouraged arrangements between independent ventures.

Jack Ma persuaded that the private company to-independent venture Internet market had a prominent potential for development than the business-to-customer Internet market had. Independent companies paid a participation expense to be ensured as reliable dealers on Alibaba, with a more noteworthy expense being charged to organizations that wished to offer to clients outside China. Development was quick; in 2005 Alibaba pulled in the consideration of the American Internet entry Yahoo!, which purchased a 40 per cent stake, and in 2007 Alibaba.com brought 1.7 billion dollars up in its first sale of stock (IPO) in Hong Kong.

In 2003 Ma created a new company, the customer-to-purchaser online commercial centre Taobao (Chinese: “looking for treasure”). At that point, the American organization eBay, as a team with the Chinese organization EachNet, had a piece of the overall industry of 80 per cent, yet Ma felt that eBay-EachNet’s approach of charging clients an exchange expense was a shortcoming. Taobao didn’t charge such an expense yet brought in cash from internet publicizing and the offer of extra administration to clients.

Ma’s instinct demonstrated right; by 2007 Taobao had a 67 per cent piece of the pie, and eBay yielded lion’s share responsibility for Chinese activities to the Chinese-language media organization TOM Group, which made the auxiliary TOM EachNet. In 2011 Ma reported that Taobao would part into three organizations: Taobao Marketplace, where people could purchase and sell merchandise; Taobao Mall, an internet shopping gateway; and a shopping-related web crawler. In September 2014 the Alibaba Group appeared an IPO on the New York Stock Exchange that raised $21.8 billion.

That IPO was the biggest ever in the United States and gave the organization a market estimation of $168 billion, the most elevated incentive in IPO history around than for any Internet organization. In September 2018 it was reported that Ma would step down as administrator of Alibaba the next year, however, he would stay on the board.

Alibaba Fires 10,000 employees

As per media reports, Alibaba has fired 10,000 employees. The step has been taken as a part of cost-cutting measures amid the slowing economy.

During the June 2022 quarter, the company fired more than 9,241 employees. The report from South China Morning Post stated that with the recent layoff, the company trimmed its overall headcount to around 245,700 employees.

However, in other news, the CEO of Alibaba, Daniel Zhang Yong said that the company plans to add around 6,000 fresh university graduates to its headcount by later this year (2022).

Jack Ma Achievements

Jack Ma has received many awards and has been appreciated a lot throughout his life. He was mentioned in the “Top 10 Economic Personalities of the Year” list by China Central Television in 2004. He was also featured in the “25 most powerful Business People in Asia” list in 2005. Another significant achievement added to his list when “Business Week” magazine named him “Businessperson of the year” in 2007.

The list does not end here. 2009 was one of the special years for him as Jack Ma successfully secured a spot in “World’s 100 most influential People” in Time Magazine. He is named as the 30 th most powerful person in the world in the year 2014.

The “Entrepreneur of the year” award in 2015 in the “Asian Awards” ceremony was honoured to him. At the international level when UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres appointed him as a new advocate alongside 16 other influential global leaders to promote sustainable development growth.

Jack Ma was recently honoured with the “Malcolm S. Forbes Lifetime Achievement Award” at Forbes Global Conference.

These rewards and achievements suggest that Jack Ma is one of the most significant influential figures in the world. He is one of the great entrepreneurs in today’s world. Even though he stepped down from one of the largest e-commerce businesses but he continues to influence others through his extraordinary works.

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• World Biography

Jack Ma Biography

Chief Executive Officer of Alibaba.com

Born in November, 1964, in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, China. Education: Earned degree from Hangzhou Teachers Institute, 1988.

Addresses: Office —Alibaba.com, 39899 Balentine Dr., Ste. 355, Newark, CA 94560.

Informal tour guide in Hangzhou, China, in the late 1970s; taught at Hangzhou Teachers Institute after 1988, and founded a translation agency; founded China Pages, one of the first commercial websites in China, c. 1995; worked for a joint telecommunications venture with Chinese government as a general manager, and for the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation seeking out new business; launched Alibaba.com, 1999, and Taobao.com, 2003; signed deal with Yahoo! that made Alibaba.com China's largest Internet company, 2005.

Jack Ma is the founder and chief executive officer of Alibaba.com, a pioneer in China's growing information-technology sector. He launched Alibaba.com in 1999 as an e-commerce site that facilitated business deals between companies in China and the rest of the world, and moved into consumer trading four years later with Taobao.com, an auction site that quickly bested eBay as the homegrown favorite. Ma is known for his excellent command of English idiom and business jargon mixed with traditional Chinese proverbs. In discussing the Taobao startup, he told Justin Doebele in Forbes Global that "eBay may be a shark in the ocean, but I am a crocodile in the Yangtze River. If we fight in the ocean, we lose—but if we fight in the river, we win."

Born in 1964, Ma grew up in Hangzhou, a city in an eastern coastal province of Zhejiang not far from Shanghai. As a youngster, Ma was determined to learn English, and once the first foreign visitors began arriving in Hangzhou thanks to China's new economic policies that opened up the country to the outside world in the late 1970s, he began showing up at the single hotel in Hangzhou that hosted the foreign tourists. For the next nine years, he came daily and offered a free tour of the city for English-speaking guests, which allowed him to practice his conversational English skills. He made his first trip outside of China in 1985 when he traveled to Australia. He recalled being stunned by the obvious prosperity, he told the San Francisco Chronicle some years later. "I was educated in China that we were the richest country in the world and that we were the happiest people in the world."

Ma earned a degree from the Hangzhou Teachers Institute in 1988, and took a job as a teacher there when he finished. His English skills were by then so proficient that he founded his own translation agency, and worked with some of the first U.S. companies doing business in China. In 1995, he traveled to the United States for the first time as an interpreter for one such venture, and contacted a friend from China who was living in Seattle by then. That stint as a houseguest provided his first contact with a personal computer, which were virtually nonexistent in China at the time. It was also his first contact with the Internet. "I was scared, because very few companies in China had computers. Computers were considered very high technology and very expensive," he remembered in the interview with the San Francisco Chronicle . "So my friend said, 'Jack, it's not a bomb, just touch whatever you want.'" Fascinated, he asked his friend to help him put up a website for his translation business, and began receiving e-mails almost immediately.

The Internet was an entirely new idea in China, but Ma returned and became one of the country's first Web entrepreneurs, though this was still the dial-up connection era. "The day we got connected to the Web, I invited friends and TV people over to my house," he told New York Times writer David Barboza, "[and] we waited three and a half hours and got half a page. We drank, watched TV and played cards, waiting. But I was so proud. I proved the Internet existed." He soon launched China Pages, an Internet company that is believed to have been the first commercial website in China, with $2,000 he borrowed from family and friends, and spent a little over a year as general manager for a joint telecommunications venture with Chinese government. That failed, and he took a job with the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation, which served to introduce him to Yahoo!'s Taiwan-born co-founder Jerry Yang in 1998.

Inspired once again to test China's free-market information-technology waters on his own, he culled enough money—this time, $60,000—from a new batch of investor-friends to launch Alibaba.com in 1999. Designed as a business-to-business (B2B) marketplace that connected buyers and sellers of various goods, it quickly emerged as a successful new player in the global bazaar, and another round of financing—this one $25 million—arrived when some major financial players showed interest. Among them were the Wall Street investment bank Goldman Sachs, and Japanese Internet entrepreneur Masayoshi Son.

Alibaba.com hit the one-million user mark in March of 2002, and finally began making money later that year, as Ma had promised its backers. Initially it had been free to join, but offered a host of extras, such as personalized Web pages, that brought in revenue. He hoped to someday take the company public, which is based in his hometown of Hangzhou—one of China's fastest-growing cities—but its formal paperwork was filed in Hong Kong to take advantage of the island-city's special economic status. "Alibaba is founded by Chinese, but it's not a Chinese company," he asserted in the San Francisco Chronicle . "It belongs to Alibaba's users, all over the world."

In 2003, Ma stepped into the consumer online auction marketplace with Taobao.com, which means "searching for treasure." It quickly emerged as a serious rival to eBay, a relative newcomer to the Chinese consumer market, and its success helped Ma ink a historic 2005 deal with Yahoo!, the U.S.-based online consumer services provider. Yahoo! bought a 40 percent stake in Alibaba.com for $1 billion. In return, Alibaba—valued at the time of the deal as worth $4 billion—assumed control over Yahoo! China's operations. His company was now China's largest Internet company, with Ma as chief executive officer.

The Yahoo! deal allowed Ma to begin working on his next Internet triumph: to make Yahoo!'s Chinese-language search engine as pared-down and fast as Google or Baidu, the top search engine in China at the time. Yahoo! China does have to abide by some freedom-of-information restrictions imposed by the Chinese government, such as automatically blocking domestic-user access to websites about Chinese political reform or human rights. Ma is a firm believer, however, in the revolutionary possibilities that technology brings. "The Internet in China is definitely improving China in many ways: financially, politically and socially," he told the San Francisco Chronicle . "Today, I think the Chinese government is changing very quickly. Whether it's because of the Internet or not, I don't know."

Periodicals

Forbes , July 17, 2000, p. 74.

Forbes Global , April 25, 2005, p. 30.

Japan Inc. , May 2003, p. 14.

New York Times , August 15, 2005.

San Francisco Chronicle , May 7, 2006, p. F1.

"Net Search in China," BusinessWeek Online , http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jan2006/tc20060126_146586.htm (July 22, 2006).

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Jack Ma Biography: Birth, Childhood, Education, Philanthropy, Business and Entertainment Career

Jack ma biography: jack ma is a chinese businessman. investor and politician. after serving for around 13 years, jack ma has stepped down from softbank group’s board of directors. in september 2019, he was retired as alibaba 's executive chairman. .

Jack Ma (age 55 years) is a Chinese businessman. investor and politician. Jack Ma, the co-founder of Alibaba was retired as its Executive Chairman in September 2019. After serving for around 13 years, Jack Ma has stepped down from Softbank Group’s board of directors. Alibaba is the multinational technology conglomerate. 

Jack Ma or Ma Yun is one of the world's most powerful people and is the global brand ambassador for Chinese business. With a net worth of $42.1 Billion, Jack Ma is the second wealthiest person in China, as of April 2020. 

Jack Ma: Childhood and Education

Jack Ma was born on September 10, 1964, as Ma Yun in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China. Jack Ma started studying English at a very young age. At the age of 9 years, Jack Ma travelled 27 kilometres on his bicycle to guide tourists so that he can practise English. Jack Ma further became pen pals with a foreigner who nicknamed him Jack as the Chinese name was hard for him to pronounce.    

Jack Ma: Business Career

Jack Ma applied for 30 different jobs but faced rejection. He went for a job with the police and was told that he is not good. He went to KFC with 24 other people, everyone was selected except him. 

In 1994, Jack Ma heard about the Internet and started his own company 'Hangzhou Haibo Translation Agency'.

In the year 1995, Jack Ma along with his friends visited the United States. In the US, he found information related to beer from several countries except for China. He was surprised to find no general information about China on the Internet. Thus, Jack Ma along with his friends created a website 'ugly' related to China and launched it at 9:40 AM. By 12:30, Jack started receiving e-mails from several investors. 

In April 1995, Jack Ma started his second company with He Yibing named 'China Pages'. On May 10, 1995, Jack Ma and He Yibing registered the domain of the China Pages in the US 'chinapages.com'. Within 3 years, the company's worth was 800,000 USD. 

After the success of China Pages, Jack Ma started building websites for different Chinese companies. However, in 2010, Jack Ma revealed that he never wrote a code nor made any sale to the customers. 

During 1998-1999, Ma was the head of an IT company established by the China International Electronic Commerce Center,  Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation. In 1999, Jack Ma resigned and founded 'Alibaba' with his 18 friends. 

In October 1999 and in January 2000, Alibaba won a total $25 million foreign investment twice. To improve the global e-commerce system, Jack Ma founded  Taobao Marketplace, Alipay, Ali Mama and Lynx. After its huge success, eBay offered to purchase Taobao but Ma turned down the offer. Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang invested $1 billion in Taobao. 

In September 2014, Alibaba was rising on the New York Stock Exchange over $25 billion in IPO and became one of the most valuable technology companies in the world. This was the largest initial public offering in US history. Jack Ma served as executive chairman of Alibaba Group, which holds-- Alibaba.com, Taobao Marketplace, Tmall, eTao, Alibaba Cloud Computing, Juhuasuan, 1688.com, AliExpress.com, and Alipay.

In November 2012, Alibaba's online transaction exceeded one trillion yuan. In 2015, Jack Ma founded a business school 'Hupan School'.  

On January 9, 2017, Jack Ma met US President Donald Trump and discussed 1 million job openings in the coming five years in favour of Alibaba. 

Jack Ma: Entertainment career

Jack ma: philanthropy.

Jack Ma founded a philanthropic organization 'Jack Ma Foundation' which focused on improving education, environment and public health.

In 2008, Alibaba donated $808,000 after the Sichuan earthquake caused destruction. In 2009, Jack Ma was appointed as the trustee of The Nature Conservancy's China program, and in 2010, became one of the Directors of the organization. 

In 2015, Alibaba Hong Kong Young Entrepreneurs Foundation was launched to support the entrepreneurs of Hong Kong to help grow their business. The same year, Alibaba funded for the construction of the houses damaged by the earthquake in Nepal. 

In 2018, Jack Ma started the  Jack Ma Foundation and announced his retirement from Alibaba citing several reasons-- educational work, philanthropy, and environmental causes.

In 2019, Forbes awarded him the 'Malcolm S. Forbes Lifetime Achievement Award' for his help to the underprivileged communities-- China, Africa, Australia, and the Middle East. He was also listed as 'Asia's 2019 Heroes of Philanthropy'.

In 2020, Alibaba Foundation and Jack Ma Foundation launched several initiatives to ease the distress caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Both the foundation donated medical supplies to several countries-- the United States and in the countries in Asia, Africa and Europe.

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Inspiring Biography of Jack Ma

By: Author Naveen Reddy

Posted on Published: February 18, 2021

Jack Ma is a co-founder of Alibaba Group.

Introduction-

Jack Ma (Mǎ Yún) was born on 10 September 1964 in Hangzhou, China.

In school, Jack Ma was a very poor performing student.

He used to pass examinations in many attempts.

Jack Ma was born into a poor family, his father used to work as a story-teller for living.

Since his childhood, Jack Ma wanted to badly learn English language.

During those times, Chinese was the official language in China and learning English was not mandatory, but Jack Ma was fascinated to learn English.

But his family was too poor to afford him a good education by which he can learn English.

So, Jack Ma thought of an amazing idea by which he can learn English for free.

Jack Ma started working as a tourist guide for the English speaking foreigners visiting China in hopes of learning English from them.

He offered his services for free and used to learn English by conversing with them.

For many years, Jack Ma worked as a tourist guide by which he eventually gained fluency in speaking English.

Mǎ Yún becomes Jack Ma-

Mǎ Yún is the original name of Jack Ma.

A foreign tourist found it difficult to pronounce Mǎ Yún, so he renamed him as Jack Ma.

Starting with failures-

Jack Ma was a very poor performing student; he failed twice in his fifth grade and failed thrice in his eighth grade.

After completing his schooling, Jack Ma applied for a university for three times, but he failed each and every time.

He wanted to study form the prestigious Harvard University, so he applied for Harvard University.

But unfortunately, Jack Ma got rejected by Harvard University ten times.

So, he finally joined the Hangzhou Normal University, in China.

Here, he graduated in B.A. in English.

And after completing his graduation, Jack Ma applied for several jobs in numerous companies.

But he failed to secure a job anywhere.

At last, Jack Ma applied for a job in the police department, but here also he faced disappointment.

Unluckiest person-

When Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) opened its outlet in his city for the first time, Jack Ma along with 23 people applied for the jobs in KFC.

But all the 23 people got selected and Jack Ma was the only one to get rejected by KFC.

He was rejected 30 times during his job hunt.

Jack Ma got depressed from these rejections.

Getting employed-

Finally, Jack Ma got employed as an English lecturer by the Hangzhou Dianzi University.

He worked in this university for six long years.

Even here, Jack Ma was very frustrated because of the low pay, he received a meagre 10 dollars per month.

This made him resign from this job.

Later, Jack Ma started to work as a translator.

This gave him an opportunity to travel to America in 1995.

Influenced by internet-

Jack Ma was stunned to see the vast usage of the internet in the United States.

The Internet was a very new thing for him and this was the first time he learned about the internet.

And out of curiosity, Jack Ma searched beer in Yahoo.

He was saddened to see that there was no information about beer originating from his homeland, China.

Later, Jack Ma searched something specifically about China but this time also he faced disappointment.

He was shocked to find no information about China, even though it was the most populated country in the world.

Experimenting on internet-

As Jack Ma was frustrated by the lack of good jobs, he decided to do something new with the help of the internet.

Jack Ma decided to make a website about China.

At that time he had no idea about websites or the internet so he took the help of his friend and launched an ugly website.

Luckily, his website became quite popular and Jack Ma also received many appreciation phone calls from his happy customers.

After this success, another idea sparked in his mind, by which he launched a new startup by name, China Yellow Pages.

Jack Ma and his friends invested their savings into this company.

But this time, the luck did not favour him and he faced huge losses by which he went bankrupt.

As a result, Jack Ma was again forced to do a regular job for a living.

But soon he resigned for the job and returned home.

Here, Jack Ma discussed with his friends on launching a brand new start-up, Alibaba .

So, he discussed this topic with his twenty-four friends.

Out of his twenty-four friends, twenty-three friends voiced against his ideas, they said that his idea was very stupid.

They also opined that Jack Ma did not know anything about computers.

Jack Ma tried to borrow 3000 dollars from banks for investing in his startup but he couldn’t succeed even after trying for three months.

Later, he approached forty venture capitalists but all of them turned him down.

Believing in himself-

Jack Ma believed in his idea wholeheartedly even when many people said that Alibaba was a terrible business model.

He hoped that one day, his business would grow big but he never imagined that it would grow this big.

He started working hard to prove himself and achieve success.

In the initial days, many people discouraged Jack Ma and his business model, they opined that his business would never succeed.

This was the hardest period of his life.

On 4 April 1999, Alibaba was founded in the apartment of Jack Ma in Hangzhou, China after he succeeded to raise $50,000 from Alibaba’s 17 co-founders.     

Alibaba started as a very humble startup with just 18 employees but now it employs nearly 117,600 people.

For the next three consecutive years, Alibaba failed to generate any revenue.

Alibaba didn’t make any profits in its first three years but he continued its operations due to gratitude.

Jack Ma received a lot of emails of thanks from his customers, who said that his business was a great thing and Alibaba helped them immensely but they said that they cannot pay Jack Ma anything.

They also said that if Jack Ma continued helping people, one day he will definitely be successful and Jack Ma believed in those words and this motivated him to carry on his work.

Eventually, Jack Ma build-up a very successful ecosystem and business model.

Jack Ma attributes his success to the team work.

Now, Jack Ma is one of the richest persons in the world.

Grand success-

Now, Alibaba is one of the most successful and well-known companies on earth.

The IPO of Alibaba Group Holding Limited on the New York Stock Exchange received the largest IPO in the history of the United States.

Feedback from readers is highly appreciated; it helps me to deliver better results to you.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Why is jack ma famous.

Jack Ma is famous because he became very successful despite facing many obstacles. He was born into a poor family and got rejected for jobs multiple times and he didn’t know coding but all these things couldn’t stop him from making his company, Alibaba a huge success. Also Jack Ma was a poor student in school and got rejected by Harvard University ten times. Everyone expects such a person to be a failure in life but Jack Ma proved everyone wrong with his persistence, self-confidence and hard work and this made him very famous worldwide.

How did Jack Ma get rich?

Jack Ma became very rich all thanks to Alibaba. He co-founded Alibaba and this company went on to become one of the biggest and most profitable technology companies in the world.

At what age Jack Ma became a billionaire?

Jack Ma became a billionaire when he was around 43 years old.

Why is Jack Ma a good leader?

Jack Ma is an excellent leader because thanks to his life experiences, he never lost his cool even in difficult situations. He always tried to be positive, responsible and never complained and had a different perspective.

Did Jack Ma go to Harvard?

No, Jack Ma couldn’t go to Harvard. After his schooling, he badly wanted to attend Harvard University but he got rejected from Harvard ten times. After these rejections, Jack Ma reluctantly joined Hangzhou Normal University, in China.

Can Jack Ma speak English?

Yes, Jack Ma can speak fluent English. From a young age, he developed an interest in learning English. As Jack Ma couldn’t afford to learn English from school, he learnt the language by working as a tourist guide for the English speaking foreigners. English helped him a lot in understanding other cultures and also helped him when he travelled to the US in 1995. This language helped him to set up a successful business.

Is Jack Ma richer than Jeff Bezos?

No, Jeff Bezos is much richer than Jack Ma. According to the real-time billionaires list of Forbes on February 2021, Jeff Bezos is the world’s richest person whereas Jack Ma comes at a distant 21st position.

Is Jack Ma the richest man in Asia?

No, Jack Ma isn’t the richest man in Asia. According to the real-time billionaires list of Forbes on February 2021, Jack Ma is the fifth richest man in Asia preceded by Zhong Shanshan, Mukesh Ambani, Ma Huateng and Colin Zheng Huang.

Are Jack Ma and Pony Ma related?

Even though both Jack Ma and Pony Ma are Chinese billionaire business magnates, they aren’t related. Ma Huateng (Pony Ma) founded Tencent on 11 November 1998 whereas Jack Ma co-founded Alibaba on 28 June 1999.

Featured image credit- Wikimedia Commons

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Ex-Goldman Executive Joins Jack Ma-Backed PE Firm in Tokyo

A former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. executive in Japan is joining a private equity firm backed by Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. founder Jack Ma , according to a person familiar with the matter.

Kei Tanaka will be in charge of Japan real estate investments at Yunfeng Capital in Tokyo when he starts later this year, the person said, asking not to be identified because the information is private. The firm is looking to invest 100 billion yen ($636 million) in property in the country, focusing on higher-return value-add and opportunistic deals, the person added.