Jack Ma is one of the world’s most successful business people. And, until recently, he was also quite talkative.
The founder of China’s giant company Alibaba often turned up in interviews or at conferences. In 2017, he spoke at the World Economic Forum.
“Every day is uncertain. The only certain day was yesterday,” he said.
The man who said every day is uncertain now faces an uncertain fate. And the man who so often spoke in public has not appeared in months. He recently missed scheduled TV appearances.
It’s becoming more clear that this billionaire is out of favor with China’s government.
So what, exactly, happened to Jack Ma?
Duncan Clark, an investor and adviser on China’s tech sector who knows Ma’s business empire, has some ideas.
Clark says that while Amazon and Alibaba have some similarities, Alibaba is in some ways more powerful because of its financial reach.
Alibaba created a service called Alipay, a system for making payments by phone, using QR codes. It’s now used for billions of transactions and is making cash nearly obsolete in China.
“Imagine if half of the transactions you do in your day in the U.S. were also controlled by the same company,” Clark says.
Alipay was spun off into a company called Ant Financial. Last fall, Ant Financial was on the verge of an initial public offering of stock — potentially the largest in history.
And that’s when things started to go wrong. Regulators abruptly suspended the IPO, the Chinese government opened an investigation into Alibaba, and Ma has been largely out of public view after he criticized regulators.
Clark, who wrote the book Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built, has known Ma for decades.
“Jack Ma is an unusual tech entrepreneur in that he’s not a tech guy at all,” Clark tells NPR’s Morning Edition in an interview. A former English teacher who turned into a successful entrepreneur, Ma “doesn’t come from wealth or connections,” Clark says. “He’s an amazing communicator, which is odd because the reason we’re talking about him is that he gave a terrible speech … much like a bit that didn’t go well at all.”
