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BEIJING (AFP): Jack Ma, the exuberant and unconventional billionaire founder of tech giant Alibaba and China’s totem of entrepreneurial brilliance, now faces a communist leadership apparently determined to hack into his empire and teach a lesson that nobody is larger. than the party.
Ma, the most recognizable face in Asian business with an estimated fortune of around $ 58 billion, has already faced the ignominy of Chinese regulators firing the world’s largest initial public offering days before its launch.
The November share sale was scheduled to see his wealth surge to more than $ 70 billion in a record listing for the Ant Group’s financial arm in Hong Kong and Shanghai.
But Chinese regulators abruptly withdrew the deal, for what initially appeared to be concerns about the company’s reach into the finances of hundreds of millions of Chinese.
It was a brutal public reprimand for Ma, who was later called in for cracking down on regulators and has since evaporated from the spotlight that he normally so skillfully dominates.
Now, the poster boy from China for the company is once again caught up in the glare of the communist-led state, with the announcement on Thursday (December 24) of an antitrust investigation into Alibaba, the tech giant he founded, and the call for Ant Group by regulators. .
It’s another public relations catastrophe for Ma, a member of the Communist Party, whose background story from poverty to wealth has come to embody a self-confident generation of Chinese entrepreneurs ready to shake the world.
Charismatic, petite, and fast-talking, Ma was struggling with money and working as an English teacher when someone showed her the Internet on a trip to the United States in the 1990s, and she was hooked.
He toyed with various Internet-related projects, before convincing a group of friends to give him $ 60,000 to start a new business in 1999 in China, which was still emerging as an economic giant.
The result was Alibaba, an e-commerce empire founded from its room in Hangzhou that started an online shopping revolution and became a fintech titan.
The company changed the buying habits of hundreds of millions of Chinese and catapulted Ma into the global spotlight.
“The first time I used the Internet, I played the keyboard and I found ‘well, this is something that I believe, it’s something that is going to change the world and change China,'” Ma told CNN once.
In 2014, Alibaba traded in New York at a world record offering of $ 25 billion.
Ant Group, in which Ma is the largest shareholder, is now the world’s largest digital payments platform, with 731 million monthly users on the Alipay app.
But it is feared that too much is reaching the pockets of ordinary Chinese with its microloans, investments and insurance products.
Ma long enjoyed an image of a benevolent and unconventional billionaire.
Sometimes known in China as “Father Ma,” he is praised for his self-loathing (he reports being rejected by Harvard “10 times”) and his ability to illuminate company events with appearances of songs and dances such as Lady Gaga, Snow White and Michael Jackson.
As his fortune grew, Ma rebranded himself as a philanthropist – in 2019 he retired from the business to focus on giving.
But even his charitable work betrays an idiosyncratic touch.
After images of a boy in a village in central China who looked like Ma went viral, the businessman promised to pay him to study at university.
But that reputation may be balanced by the regulatory slap playing in a growing sense shared on Weibo, similar to Twitter in China, that it has leaned toward arrogance in criticizing fintech regulators.
He has faced his share of tribulations over the years in a country where getting rich runs the risk of attracting the attention of the powerful.
Eyebrows rose when the state-run People’s Daily revealed that he is a member of the Communist Party, something that Ma has never fully commented on.
He had previously indicated that he preferred to keep the state at arm’s length, telling the World Economic Forum in 2007: “My philosophy is to be in love with the government, but never marry them.”
But perhaps the biggest challenges lie ahead, as the size and scale of your business means the relationship may need to be renegotiated.
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