Jack Ma

• 1. Introduction

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  Jack Ma rode his bicycle 17 miles every day for nine years to reach the Hangzhou International Hotel, where foreign tourists gathered, so he could practice English. He was twelve years old when it started. He had a pocket radio he used to tune into English-language broadcasts, and a foreign pen pal who gave him the nickname "Jack" because the man could not pronounce his Chinese name, Ma Yun. No one who watched that skinny kid cycling through Hangzhou in the early 1970s would have predicted he would one day co-found Alibaba Group, one of China's largest companies, or sit across a table from Donald Trump at Trump Tower discussing a million jobs. How did a boy who failed the college entrance exam twice, who got 1 point in mathematics on his third attempt, build one of the most consequential business empires in modern Chinese history? And what happened when he stood up to criticize China's financial regulators, and then disappeared from public view for months?

• 2. The Long Road to University

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  At 18, Ma sat the gaokao, China's national college entrance exam, and scored 1 point in mathematics. The following year he sat it again and improved to 19 points. In 1984, he tried a third time and reached 89 points on the mathematics section. That score was still five points below the minimum threshold his score required to qualify for university admission. What saved him was administrative chance: Hangzhou Normal University's English department had not filled its enrollment target, and Ma was promoted into the foreign language major. Once inside, he transformed. He ranked consistently among the top five students in the department, was elected chairman of the student union, and later became chairman of the Hangzhou Federation of Students for two terms. He also claims to have applied to Harvard Business School ten times and been rejected every time. After graduating with a bachelor's degree in English in 1988, Ma applied for 31 entry-level jobs and was rejected by every one. He described one attempt at KFC: twenty-four people applied, twenty-three were hired. He was the only one turned away.

• 3. The Internet Revelation

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  In 1994, Ma heard about the Internet and started Hangzhou Hope Translation Agency, launching a website the next year. Early in 1995 he traveled to the United States on behalf of the Hangzhou municipal government and searched for information about Chinese beer. He found beer from many countries but nothing from China. He and a friend built what he called an "ugly" website about Chinese beer. They launched it at 9:40 in the morning. By 12:30 that afternoon, emails had arrived from prospective investors asking to know more. Ma understood immediately that something significant had arrived. In April 1995, he and computer instructor He Yibing opened Hangzhou Hope Computer Services, which ran China Pages, one of China's first Internet startups, as an online yellow pages service. They registered the domain chinapages.com in the United States on the 10th of May 1995. Within three years, the venture cleared approximately 5 million RMB in profit, then equivalent to roughly 643,000 US dollars. That operation was acquired by China Telecommunications Corporation in 1996, but the collaboration with the state-owned enterprise proved uneasy, and Ma left in 1997 to build websites for China's Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation.

• 4. Building Alibaba

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  In 1999, Ma returned to Hangzhou with his team and gathered 18 friends in his apartment to launch Alibaba, a business-to-business marketplace, with 500,000 yuan in starting capital. The name was chosen deliberately for its international recognizability. By October 1999 and January 2000, Alibaba had secured a combined 25 million dollars in foreign venture capital from Goldman Sachs and SoftBank. Three years after launch, the company began showing signs of profitability. Ma then built out an entire ecosystem: Taobao Marketplace, Alipay, Ali Mama, and Lynx all emerged from the Alibaba orbit after 2003. When American e-commerce giant eBay moved to acquire Taobao, Ma rejected the offer. Instead he turned to Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, who invested 1 billion dollars to expand Alibaba's operations. In November 2012, Alibaba's online transaction volume crossed one trillion yuan. Ma stepped down as CEO on the 10th of May 2013, though he remained executive chairman. The following September, Alibaba raised over 25 billion dollars in an initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange. Ma himself was explicit about his unusual profile at the helm of a technology giant: at a press conference in 2010, he revealed he had never written a line of computer code, never made a single sale to a customer, and had only bought his first personal computer at the age of 33.

• 5. Disappearance and Crackdown

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  On the 3rd of November 2020, the Shanghai Stock Exchange halted the anticipated IPO of Ant Group, Ma's financial technology company, which had been deriving roughly 90% of its revenue from financial services while positioning itself as a tech company. The People's Bank of China had been seeking to regulate Ant Group as a financial holding company since 2018, and regulators grew concerned about its high valuation during the IPO process. Shortly before the halt, Ma had delivered a public speech criticizing China's state banks for operating with what he called a "pawn shop mentality" and dismissing the Basel Accords as a "club for the elderly." After that, Ma largely vanished from public view for months. Wired magazine reported he may have chosen to retreat not only because of government pressure but because investors and employees at Alibaba had lost significant sums due to the stalled IPO. Ma reappeared on the 20th of January 2021, speaking via video link to rural teachers at his annual Rural Teacher Initiative. The following January 2023, Ant Group restructured its ownership, cutting Ma's voting rights from 50% to 6%, so that no single shareholder held a controlling stake. In early 2024, Ma became Alibaba's largest individual shareholder, displacing SoftBank. On the 17th of February 2025, he attended a symposium at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing alongside Xi Jinping; state-run media showed his image but omitted his name, leaving analysts divided on what his cautious return to public life actually signified.

• 6. Philanthropy and Later Views

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  Ma founded the Jack Ma Foundation with a focus on education, the environment, and public health. In 2008, Alibaba donated 808,000 dollars to victims of the Sichuan earthquake. In 2015, Alibaba funded the rebuilding of 1,000 houses damaged by the Nepal earthquake and raised money toward 9,000 more. In 2020, the Jack Ma Foundation and Alibaba Foundation donated medical supplies to the United States and to countries across Asia, Africa, and Europe in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In May 2025, Time Magazine named Ma one of its Time100 Philanthropy honorees. He also served as chairman of The Nature Conservancy's China program beginning in 2013, the day after he stepped down as Alibaba's CEO. Ma's views on technology have evolved publicly over time. In 2019, he debated Elon Musk on the risks and rewards of artificial intelligence, taking the optimistic side and predicting that machine learning would create more jobs rather than eliminate them, that people might eventually work four hours a day three days a week, and that human lifespans could reach 120 years. In December 2024, he expressed continued confidence in AI's potential, particularly for fintech, while arguing that machines could never fully replace people because success ultimately requires what he called a "love quotient" that no algorithm can replicate. From May 2023 to October 2024, Ma held a visiting professorship at Tokyo College at the University of Tokyo, where his research focused on sustainable agriculture and food production.