If Elon Musk disappeared from view for more than two months (to his unbearable extent, I’m sure we all wanted to), investors would send a search group. Where is the protagonist who has led your company and its actions to unprecedented heights?
His Chinese counterpart, Jack Ma, has been missing from the vision for more than two months, with his company being investigated by Chinese authorities. Nothing is known of his whereabouts. Here in Asia, we wonder where the Chinese poster entrepreneur has gone.
It is rumored and it is very likely that Ma was told not to leave China. He may keep his head under the parapets by himself. Either way, the situation is so serious and politically charged that the Beijing government appears to be censoring news in the Chinese media about the antitrust probe on Ma’s baby.
Ma, co-founder and chief figure of e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding (BABA), was last seen on October 31, when he participated in the live broadcast gala to kick off China’s spending festival , “Double 11”. “It was exactly a week after he delivered a speech at a financial conference in Shanghai in which he criticized China’s regulators and the banking industry, and called on state-owned banks to have a ‘pawn house mentality.’
Bad play. It was attended by several influential bankers and regulators, who scattered in the bottled water of the Nongfu spring. Behind the scenes, sorry, Chinese President Xi Jinping was furious.
Xi had already met privately a couple of years ago with Ma and the founder of video game maker and app operator WeChat Tencent Holdings (TCEHY), Pony Ma (who has no kinship), to remember the two China’s richest people and China’s most famous executives. that their companies only operate at the request of the Communist Party. Xi, I didn’t need to remind them, is the only sheriff in town.
Days after that speech in Shanghai, Ma and the two top executives of Ant Group, the Ma company founded to process payments on Alibaba’s websites, had been sent for questions about its free financial model, which expands the consumer loans and offers them a set of third party financial services. On November 3, Ant was blocked from listing his shares for the first time, just two days ahead of what was expected to be US $ 37 billion for being the largest initial public offering in the history of the US. world.
According to President Xi, he personally canceled the IPO The Wall Street Journal. This is true, as the Shanghai Stock Exchange had already approved the offer before ordering it to be withdrawn at the last minute. Xi “has shown a declining tolerance” for large private companies that wield capital and influence – and executives that have defied the iron rule of the man baptized as China’s “Emperor for Life”.
Now Chinese regulators are trying to restructure and possibly break up Ant Group, which manages the ubiquitous Alipay digital portfolio application. They are also concerned about business practices not only on Alibaba, but also on rivals such as JD.com (JD) and Pinduoduo (PDD). Chinese e-commerce sites have a notorious “1 in 2” policy for many merchants that forces them to bargain to sell their products only through a platform’s website.
The ant is also suffering from the other cinnamon. U.S. President Donald Trump makes one of his latest actions in office an executive order on Tuesday to ban U.S. people and businesses from transacting with Alipay and seven other Chinese apps, including Tencent’s WeChat Pay and QQ Wallet . Trump said the apps are capable of capturing “large expanses” of users ’personal and sensitive information, making them a threat to national security.
Suddenly, Ma finds himself a politician ungrateful person. The Chinese government’s propaganda arm has published a directive in the media in order to point out the official line of Alibaba’s investigation and not engage in any kind of analysis of the facts without permission. Financial Times reports today, citing two people who have read the order.
Several online blog posts about Ma’s whereabouts have been censored and removed, according to the FT. In addition, an online publication backed by Alibaba that issued an editorial warning about excessive punishment of Chinese technology companies was forced to stop operating for a month.
Ma did not appear on her own TV show in November. Personally, he listened to the launches of entrepreneurs who wanted to become Business heroes of Africa, in the show with that name. But when the final episode aired, it was nowhere to be seen, the place occupied by an Alibaba executive. An Alibaba spokesman said “Jack Ma had to lose the final due to a scheduling conflict.”
Ma is not on the official list of people barred from leaving China. But Bloomberg reports that he was told in December not to leave the country. Censors of the Weibo app (WB), similar to China’s Twitter, deleted a hashtag about the ban on leaving.
Musk may be the richest man in America and, indeed, now in the world. But Ma, who loves the protagonists, is his direct equivalent in China, his fortune of 65.6 billion US dollars makes him the richest man there. Ma resigned as Alibaba’s chief executive in September 2019, but his shadow over the company grows, while he is a mythical figure among Chinese investors chasing the upcoming “unicorn” startup to become a billion-dollar company.
There is a danger to the Communist Party in assuming Ma. Although political rights are non-existent in China, personal and commercial property rights are well protected. Putting Alibaba in the party’s eye will scare away other successful businessmen, most of whom are already trying to secrete large chunks of their wealth abroad, at the hands of the Communist Party.
Still, the Communist Party will usually find a way to bring it down if they want it to fall. Allegations of bribery and corruption are the usual charges.
It seems they temporarily already have their wish with Mr. Ma. I bet he shut up after opening his mouth in Shanghai made him suffer in Shanghai. But when and where will the next one come out ?!
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