Building Alibaba from an apartment
Ma's fortune comes from his stakes in Alibaba Group and Ant Group, two companies he helped start with no family money behind him. In 1999 he gathered a group of friends and colleagues in his apartment in Hangzhou and founded Alibaba, a website meant to connect small Chinese manufacturers with buyers around the world. The founders pooled their savings, and early outside investment came from Goldman Sachs and SoftBank.
Alibaba expanded from business to business trade into consumer shopping. Taobao, launched in 2003, competed with eBay in China and won by charging sellers no listing fees. Tmall followed as a marketplace for brands. To solve the problem of trust between buyers and sellers who had never met, the company created Alipay in 2004, an escrow style payment service that later became the foundation of Ant Group.
In 2005 Yahoo invested heavily in Alibaba in exchange for a large stake and its China business. Alibaba's business to business unit listed in Hong Kong in 2007, and in 2014 the whole group listed on the New York Stock Exchange in what was then the largest initial public offering in history. That listing set a public value on Ma's holdings and turned him into one of the best known business figures in the world.
Alibaba, Ant and personal investments
Ma's main assets have been:
- Alibaba Group: e-commerce marketplaces in China and abroad, cloud computing, logistics through Cainiao, and other units. He owns a minority stake, much reduced from the early years.
- Ant Group: the payments and financial services company behind Alipay. Ma long controlled it through holding entities, but a 2023 restructuring ended his control.
- Other investments: holdings in property and vineyards in France, along with interests in media and entertainment through Alibaba.
Ant Group was preparing a record stock market listing in Shanghai and Hong Kong in late 2020 when regulators halted it days before trading was due to start. The decision followed a speech in which Ma criticized Chinese financial regulation. Ant was then required to restructure as a financial holding company under tighter oversight.
Alibaba itself faced a large antitrust fine in 2021 and reorganized in 2023 into several business groups. Ma has no executive role, but he remains an influential shareholder and has made occasional internal statements encouraging staff.
From teacher to entrepreneur
Ma Yun, known in English as Jack Ma, was born in 1964 in Hangzhou. As a boy he practiced English by guiding foreign tourists around the city's West Lake, and a tourist gave him his English name. He failed China's university entrance examination twice before being admitted to Hangzhou Teacher's Institute, where he graduated in 1988.
He then taught English and international trade at a local college. He has often recounted being rejected for many jobs in those years. In 1995 a trip to the United States introduced him to the internet, and on his return he started China Pages, an early online directory of Chinese businesses. He later worked for a government backed e-commerce project in Beijing before returning to Hangzhou to start Alibaba.
Ma served as Alibaba's chief executive until 2013 and as chairman until 2019, when he retired on his 55th birthday and handed the chairmanship to Daniel Zhang. After the halted Ant listing he largely disappeared from public view, spending long periods abroad, including in Tokyo, and teaching as a visiting professor at the University of Tokyo before returning to China in 2023.
Education philanthropy and public voice
Ma created the Jack Ma Foundation in 2014. Its main programs reflect his background as a teacher, including awards and training for teachers in rural China and programs for rural school principals. The foundation has also run the Africa Netpreneur Prize, which supports young entrepreneurs across the African continent.
In the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Ma and his foundation donated test kits, masks and other protective equipment to many countries, including shipments to Africa, Asia, Europe and the United States.
Ma also co-founded Hupan University, a business school in Hangzhou for entrepreneurs, which was later reorganized. He signed on as a supporter of environmental causes, including conservation groups in China.
For many years Ma was a frequent speaker at international forums, known for humorous and plain spoken talks. After 2020 he became much quieter. In early 2025 he appeared at a meeting of private entrepreneurs with President Xi Jinping, which observers read as a sign of improved relations between the government and the private sector.