Jack Ma: tycoon who soared on China's tech dreams grounded by regulators

Since a Communist Party crackdown reduced his empire, Jack Ma, the unorthodox billionaire founder of digital giant Alibaba and the icon of China’s entrepreneurial prowess, has stepped out of the spotlight.

Ma, the most recognisable face in Asian business, has seen his fortune plummet by about half, to an estimated $25 billion, after regulators cancelled what would have been the world’s largest-ever IPO in 2020.

Chinese regulators destroyed Ma’s Ant Group’s planned offering in Hong Kong and Shanghai, and the following year smacked Alibaba with a record $2.75 billion penalties for suspected unfair acts.

A restructure of Ant’s ownership structure has resulted in Ma relinquishing control of the fintech behemoth he created in 2014.

He will have just 6.2 percent of the voting rights as the business strives to assure “no shareholder, alone or jointly with other parties, will have control over Ant Group” according to a statement released on Saturday.

It is the latest humiliation for China’s erstwhile poster boy for entrepreneurship, who has since retreated from the spotlight he once adored.

Ma, a Communist Party member, came to represent a self-assured generation of Chinese entrepreneurs poised to shake up the globe.

Ma was cash-strapped and working as an English teacher when someone showed him the internet on a trip to the United States in the 1990s – and he was hooked.

He experimented with numerous internet-related businesses before convincing a group of friends to fund him $60,000 to establish a new firm in China, which was still rising as an economic powerhouse at the time.

The outcome was Alibaba, an e-commerce powerhouse created from his bedroom in the eastern city of Hangzhou that launched an online shopping revolution and developed into a finance titan.

The firm transformed the purchasing patterns of hundreds of millions of Chinese consumers, propelling Ma to international fame.

“The first time I used the internet, I touched on the keyboard and I find, ‘Well, this is something I believe, it is something that is going to change the world and change China’,” Ma told CNN.

Alibaba went public in New York in 2014 in a world-record $25 billion offering.

With hundreds of millions of monthly users on its Alipay app, Ant is the world’s largest digital payments provider.

However, any potential IPO looks to be a long way off, with concerns that its personal finance products delve too far into the pockets of regular Chinese people.

Ma has long been portrayed as a kind and unorthodox billionaire.

Sometimes known as in China as “Father Ma”, he was commended for his self-deprecation — he remembers being rejected by Harvard “10 times”.

He is also known for brightening corporate occasions with song-and-dance performances by Lady Gaga, Snow White, and Michael Jackson.

Ma rebranded as a philanthropist as his money expanded, quitting from business in 2019 to focus on philanthropy.

However, he has had his share of difficulties over the years in a society where being wealthy risks attracting the notice of the powerful.

The state-run People’s Daily newspaper disclosed that he is a member of the Communist Party, something Ma has never completely commented on.

He previously stated that he prefers to keep the state at bay, addressing the World Economic Forum in 2007: “My philosophy is to be in love with the government, but never marry them.”

A swaggering Ma launched a blistering public tirade against Chinese authorities, accusing them of impeding growth, just days before Ant’s IPO was cancelled.

He is significantly less vocal these days, rarely making news save for charity appearances and infrequent trips abroad.