For years, no one flew higher in China than Jack Ma, the pixie-faced founder of the $ 500 billion Alibaba e-commerce conglomerate, Amazon in Asia.
Now it has faded and no one knows where it is.
Ma, a member of the Communist Party who famously began as an English teacher, symbolized the high-tech “Dream of China” until he confronted the political leaders who once lioness him. It has not been seen in public for two months.
“China used Jack Ma and Alibaba, as well as some of the other big fintech technology companies, to show the world what great leaders they were,” Craig Singleton, a Chinese expert with the China Defense Foundation, told The Post. the Democracies.
“But these private sector companies were operating without government controls and Jack went a little too far ahead of his skis. You only have to get off the line once and they’ll get you. They’ve probably hit him pretty hard.”
Insiders told The Post that 56-year-old Ma is highly unlikely to have disappeared permanently in one of China’s dreaded “black spots” reserved for the country’s dissidents. He’s not in Singapore either, according to some rumors.
Instead, heels are probably cooling off at home or in a “very cozy place,” where one expert said he might be reviewing “Marxist lessons” with party officials, a process called “embracing oversight” “.
While building her business on a monster almost bigger than China itself, the free-spirited Ma, married with three children, traveled the world. He spent time with stars such as Tom Cruise, Daniel Craig, Kevin Spacey and Nicole Kidman, had lunch with President Obama and former UK Prime Minister David Cameron, and dined around Davos, speaking English. fluid he learned as a child.
He even dressed as Elton John or Michael Jackson and performed his songs on stage while joking in front of thousands of beloved Alibaba employees at the company’s functions.
He behaved more like an American billionaire than even the heartbroken Jeff Bezos, and that was his mistake, China analysts say. In line with his open paths, Ma spoke at a conference in Shanghai in October about the retreat of the country’s state-owned banks and regulators, just days before Ma’s financial technology firm, ANT Group, was preparing what would have been the largest IPO in the world.
“The current financial system is the legacy of the industrial age,” Ma stated in the now infamous speech. “We need to create a new one for the next generation and for young people. We need to reform the current system. “
Among other things, Ma criticized the country’s bankers for having a “pawn house mentality.”
Ma’s wings were cut abruptly. Disappeared from public view, ANT’s IPO was canceled at the urging of Chinese President Xi Jinping and China has launched an antitrust investigation into Ma’s huge company.
“This is Icarus, a classic case of hubris,” Gordon Chang, author of “The Coming of the Collapse of China,” told The Post. “In Jack Ma’s mind he was a rock star, perhaps no more powerful than Xi Jianping but bigger than the central bank. Therefore, the party decided to overthrow him. They ran over Jack Ma and hoped he would send a message. “
It is a hard fall for Ma Yun-born man to parents who were traditional musicians in Hangzhou, southeast China, about two hours from Shanghai. Ma was a wacky boy from a poor family who was taught English at an early age by befriending Western tourists, as described in “Alibaba: The House Jack Built,” by Morgan Stanley’s former employee. Duncan Clark, who met Ma in 1999 in the small apartment where he founded Alibaba.
Ma met Ken Morley, an Australian tourist, and his family when he was 14, which led to a lifelong friendship. The Morleys brought Ma to Australia in 1985 to visit and Ma said the trip “changed her life. I learned to think for myself.
Ma’s new worldliness and ambition did not help him in school. He twice failed the remarkably difficult entrance exams to China’s university. He finally succeeded in his third attempt and went to Hangzhou Teacher’s Institute, from which he graduated in 1988 with a degree in English.
Ma met his future wife, Cathy, in college and they married in 1988. They live with their three children in their hometown of Hangzhou.
He encountered more hurdles after college, and was turned down for more than 12 jobs, including one at KFC.
He was eventually hired as an English teacher at $ 12 an hour. He also founded a translation company, but was on a visit to the United States in 1995 when he discovered the Internet and began trying online startup companies when he returned to China.
After several mistakes, he formed Alibaba from his small apartment in Hangzhou in 1999 with 17 friends. The initial concept – online shopping for small businesses – attracted $ 25 million from investors in the first year.
Today, Alibaba is the largest online trading company in the world. In addition to shopping, it also includes banking, technology and cloud computing.
Ma has played out how different he is from most internet billionaires who are math, science or coding geniuses. He prefers the kind of wild advertising tricks associated with Richard Branson, which is why, according to experts, he started going on stage in Alibaba in corporate celebrations. She wore a blonde wig and headdress to sing together in “The Lion King” in 2009. In 2017, she dressed up on a motorcycle with a mask and a Michael Jackson costume while dancing with “Billie Jean” and then joined a “style training” with security dancers.
Today, Ma is not an executive member of either the board or Alibaba or ANT, but he is Alibaba’s largest shareholder with shares worth at least $ 25 billion.
Alibaba lost more than $ 110 billion in market value on December 24, when China officially launched the probe. The Chinese government also told state media to censor reports on the Alibaba investigation in December, the Financial Times reported on Thursday.
It is not uncommon for China to take in public some of its most prized tycoons and tycoons for some infraction and show them who the boss is. Fan Bingbing, the country’s biggest movie star, disappeared in 2018 for alleged tax evasion and was out of sight for months. Finally, he wrote a blatant apology to the Communist Party on its social media pages and reportedly paid a tax bill of at least $ 70 million.
No one knows where Bingbing went missing, but a source told Vulture she had been kept under “residential surveillance at a designated place” described as a holiday spot in Jiangsu’s coastal province.
In Ma’s case, she was a no-show as a judge at the end of a business games program called “Africa’s Business Heroes,” sponsored by her philanthropic organization in Africa.
Alibaba spokesmen said there was a “programming conflict” that kept Ma out of his program. While some reports from China say Ma only keeps a low profile while Chinese regulators analyze Alibaba’s big books and order a restructuring of the ANTs, the situation seems dire, if not sinister.
Some say the West opened young Ma’s eyes too wide and has now gotten what it deserved.
“Jack Ma is a gangster,” Peter Navarro, White House director of trade and manufacturing policy and author of the 2011 book “Death By China: Confronting the Dragon,” told The Post. “He runs a company called Alibaba. The thought ends: Forty thieves. He set up a company with stolen goods, with our eBay business model. He stole all our e-commerce technology. ”
But despite all his cunning, Ma did not see what should have been obvious to him and to everyone around him, Navarro said. “Xi has been consolidating power for the last four or five years.”
“He is doing the same with the Chinese oligarchs as Putin with the Russian oligarchs. They get money and fall in love with the West and forget where they come from. Then they are slapped. There’s a Chinese expression called “kill the chicken, scare the monkey” which means to set an example for someone. That’s what they do to you. They will probably let him come back, but his marching orders will be silent and make money ”.
Singleton agreed.
“It will resurface and it will have to repent publicly, but not on its own terms,” Singleton said. “But I bet Jack Ma will comply because he doesn’t want to see this massive thing he built explode. He’s a strategic thinker and he’s still someone to be reckoned with.”