Jack Ma

Jack Ma: The Teacher Who Sold China the Internet

Twenty-four people applied when KFC opened in Hangzhou. Twenty-three were hired. The one rejection was a young English teacher named Ma Yun, who had already failed the national university entrance exam twice and would later claim Harvard turned him down ten times. In September 2014 the company he founded in his apartment listed on the New York Stock Exchange and raised more than $25 billion, the largest initial public offering ever staged.

The Boy on the Bicycle

He was born Ma Yun on 10 September 1964 in Hangzhou, Zhejiang. His obsession arrived early and from an unlikely direction: at twelve he bought a pocket radio to listen to English broadcasts, and for nine years he cycled 27 kilometres a day to the Hangzhou International Hotel to guide foreign visitors around the city for nothing but the conversation. He practised on tourists at West Lake. One of them, unable to manage his name, called him Jack, and it stuck.

In 1980 he met an Australian family, the Morleys, through the Australia-China Friendship Society, and the friendship reshaped him. He would later say that the twenty-nine days he spent in Newcastle were the crucial ones of his life. The lesson was not commercial but epistemic. "I knew the world was not as I was told," he said. "There was another world outside."

Academically he was a disaster. He failed the gaokao twice; on his third attempt in 1984 he scored 89, still five points short of the threshold. He got in only because the English department at Hangzhou Normal University had places to fill and moved him up into its foreign language programme. He took his BA in English in 1988 and became a lecturer in English and international trade at Hangzhou Dianzi University, teaching for five years. He applied for thirty-one jobs elsewhere and was refused every one.

Beer, and the Discovery of an Absence

In 1994 he set up the Hangzhou Hope Translation Agency. The following year, on a trip to the United States on behalf of Hangzhou's municipal government, he saw a computer for the first time and made a discovery that decided the rest of his career: there was almost nothing about China on the internet. He put up a crude page about Chinese beer and had enquiries from would-be investors within hours.

In April 1995, with a computer instructor named He Yibing, he launched China Pages — an online directory of Chinese businesses — registering chinapages.com on 10 May. Over three years it turned a profit of roughly five million yuan. From 1998 to 1999 he ran an IT company under the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation, then quit, went home to Hangzhou, and started again.

Seventeen People and a Flat

Alibaba was founded in 1999 in Ma's lakeside apartment with seventeen colleagues and 500,000 yuan of pooled money. The premise was that China's enormous population of small manufacturers had no way to find foreign buyers, and that a website could be that way. Between October 1999 and January 2000, Goldman Sachs and SoftBank put in $25 million of seed capital. Within two years the site had more than a million users. It made no profit for three.

The decisive expansion began in 2003 with Taobao, a consumer marketplace built to fight eBay for the Chinese retail market, and Alipay, which solved the problem that was actually strangling Chinese e-commerce: nobody trusted anybody. Alipay held a buyer's money in escrow until the goods arrived, converting a leap of faith into a transaction. eBay's Chinese operation lost, and lost badly. When eBay tried to buy Alibaba, Ma refused; instead Jerry Yang of Yahoo invested a billion dollars for a large minority stake. Ali Mama, Tmall and a string of other businesses followed. Taobao and Tmall now count their monthly active users in the hundreds of millions. In late 2015 Ma bought the South China Morning Post.

He never became a technologist. He wrote no code, and did not own a personal computer until he was thirty-three. His method was to hire engineers and make himself the promoter, organiser and morale officer — a role he played with theatrical relish, in costume, on stage, at company gatherings.

The Speech

He announced his retirement on 10 September 2018 and handed over the chairmanship in 2019 on his fifty-fifth birthday, twenty years to the year after founding the company. Then, in October 2020, at a financial forum in Shanghai, he attacked China's financial regulators in public. State banks, he said, operated with a pawn shop mentality; the Basel accords were a club for the elderly.

The reply was swift and total. On 3 November 2020 the Shanghai Stock Exchange suspended the initial public offering of Ant Group, his fintech company, days before it was to become the largest flotation in history; officials cited financial stability. Ma vanished from public view between October 2020 and January 2021, reappearing only by video link to an audience of rural teachers. He left Alibaba's board on 1 October 2020. In January 2023 Ant restructured, cutting his voting rights from roughly 50 per cent to 6 and ending his control. He moved to Tokyo in 2022 and taught as an invited professor at Tokyo College from 2023 to 2024, working on sustainable agriculture. In February 2025 he was seen again at a symposium hosted by Xi Jinping in the Great Hall of the People — a signal, most observers thought, of partial rehabilitation.

Why Jack Is Called a Genius

Time named him among its hundred most influential people in 2009 and again in 2014, and Fortune ranked him second on its list of the world's fifty greatest leaders in 2017.

The quality at issue is not technical and he has never pretended otherwise. It is a talent for seeing what a market is missing before the market can articulate it, and a capacity to persuade others to act on his conviction. The Alipay decision is the cleanest example: Ma identified that the binding constraint on Chinese e-commerce was not bandwidth or logistics but the absence of trust between strangers, and built an escrow system to manufacture it. Taobao beat eBay by charging sellers nothing while eBay charged fees — a reading of a young, price-sensitive market that eBay's American executives never made.

The counter-case is real. Alibaba's rise coincided with the fastest expansion of consumer demand in modern history, inside a market where foreign competitors laboured under handicaps that had nothing to do with Ma's brilliance. He invented no technology and has said so. His judgement has also failed publicly and expensively: his endorsement of the "996" regime of twelve-hour days, six days a week, as "a huge blessing" drew international criticism, and his 2020 speech destroyed the largest flotation ever attempted and much of his own position with it. What is left, after discounting, is a rare gift for reading a market and mobilising people — closer to the talent of a great impresario than a great engineer.

What Remains

He founded the Jack Ma Foundation in September 2018 for education, environment and public health, established the Hupan School for entrepreneurs in 2015, funded a thousand houses after the 2015 Nepal earthquake and committed Alibaba to carbon neutrality by 2030. But his lasting mark is structural: a country that in 1995 had almost nothing on the internet now conducts a very large share of its commerce through the machinery he assembled, and the story of the failed exam candidate rejected by a fried chicken franchise has become China's national parable about persistence.

Achievements

• Knight of the Legion of Honour — 2016
• Worked as entrepreneur, philanthropist and businessperson