Chinese billionaire Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba and Ant Group, is suspected of missing, Jessica Yu reported for Yahoo Finance.
The 56-year-old businessman has not been seen in public for more than two months, the report said.
Ma has been in the spotlight since China recently broke away from its business empire. In late December, Chinese regulators launched an antitrust investigation into Alibaba, the country’s largest e-commerce company, which some refer to as “China’s Amazon.” And in November, China introduced a series of new rules that would have stopped the massive initial public launch of Mani Fintech company Ant Ant Group.
The new rules come weeks after Mae criticized China’s financial regulatory system at a conference in Shanghai in October. At the convention, Mae repealed the global financial rules used by China as a “club for the elderly” and said, “We cannot use yesterday’s methods to regulate the future.”
Blair Silverberg, CEO of debt-financing startup Capital, told Business Insider’s Katie Kana Nals in November that the new rules were introduced “so that the government could assert its supremacy over Jack Ma.”
In a Financial Times report, Maan was replaced as a judge at an African talent show he founded in November. The Lent show did not immediately respond to a business insider’s request for comment, but an Alibaba spokesman told the business that Ma could no longer be on the judge’s panel for the show’s finale – which was filmed in November but has not yet been released. “Due to a scheduled contradiction.”
“We have nothing Add to that, “the spokesman said in response to questions about Mana’s whereabouts.
Mae resigned as chairman of Alibaba in 2019.
Mae resigned as chairman of Alibaba in 2019.
Wang HE / Getty Images
Most recently, Ma was the richest man in China with a fortune of over billion 60 billion. Mani has earned 12 billion in networth in the last two months as China tightens rules for the financial technology industry. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, today’s value is .6 50.6 billion, making him the fourth richest person in China.
Following the news of Maa’s suspicious disappearance, another billionaire Chinese businessman’s August August 2019 predictions about Ma are reappearing on social media.
In a video interview, Gua Wengui, who fled China as a fugitive in 2014 and claims to be a whistleblower exposing corruption in the country, said that next year, Ma will probably end up in jail or die because China “wants to take over.” There is a group of amazing ants “back”.
Last week, the Chinese government ordered Anti Group, which owns Alipay, China’s largest digital payment platform, to resume operations after expressing concern that its corporate governance “does not sound”.
A spokesperson for Ant Story did not immediately respond to a request from Business Insider for comment on the story.
