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The mysterious disappearance has led to extreme speculation.
On October 24 last year, Jack Ma, one of the richest people in the world with a fortune of around $ 40 billion, took the stage at a conference in Shanghai. On the podium, he attacked China’s mighty financiers and compared them to mortgage lenders.
Ma, the richest sovereign man in China, actually said that Chinese banks (mainly state-owned) were outdated. He thought it was time to reform.
Unheard
In a Western context, such statements would not have surprised many. In communist China, however, such criticism of the system is practically unheard of. This is especially true when it comes to such a key businessman, a person who up to now has been extremely careful in commenting on these issues.
The speech would also be very fateful.
Ma has amassed China’s largest private fortune, mainly through Alibaba, the world’s largest online store, bigger than Amazon and Ebay combined. When Alibaba went public in New York in 2014, it was the largest IPO in history.
Thus, it sparked even more attention when Ma, shortly after the speech was delivered, disappeared without a trace from the audience. He has not been featured on the “Africa’s Business Heroes” talent show that he had produced and was a judge on.
Photos of Ma disappeared on the show’s website. He wasn’t in the show’s trailers either. During the finale, Jack Ma was replaced by another employee from his e-commerce company Alibaba.
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– Chilling
The Financial Times describes Mas’s absence as “terrifying” and refers to a long list of speculations about what happened. The most disturbing thing is undoubtedly that the Chinese authorities and President Xi Jinping himself are behind this. Parallels are drawn to what happened to Mikhail Khodorkovsky. He was one of the richest men in the world until he became too powerful for Vladimir Putin’s regime in Russia. Khodorkoski was jailed in 2003 on charges of fraud and tax evasion. He stayed there until 2013, while the state took over the remnants of his business empire.
But you don’t have to go to other countries to find examples of these kinds of stories. Several Chinese business moguls and powerful people have disappeared in the last ten years, then turned up in state custody, with heavy criminal charges against them. However, no one has come close to being as great, especially internationally, as Jack Ma.
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In coverage?
A more uplifting and perhaps more credible explanation is therefore that Ma himself has tactically retreated to avoid that fate, and that he is “undercover,” as CNBC claimed earlier this month.
What is certain, however, is that the speech has been extremely costly for Ma and Alibaba, and the price of the stock has completely collapsed in the wake of the disappearance. The Financial Times has calculated that the 20-minute speech cost the company $ 12.8 billion, or $ 107 billion, per minute it spoke. In addition to this, the highest listing of the financial group Mas Ant, which was going to trade for 37,000 million dollars in November, was stopped by Beijing.
As the Financial Times writes: “This indicates a status that will show that no one, no company, is out of reach.”
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