Who Is Jack Ma?

1. A teacher from Hangzhou

Jack Ma, whose Chinese name is Ma Yun, was born on 10 September 1964 in Hangzhou, in eastern China, during the early years of the Cultural Revolution. His parents were traditional storytellers and performers, and the family was not wealthy. He grew up in a China that was still largely closed to the outside world, and his main window onto it was the English language. As a boy he rode his bicycle to the Hangzhou Hotel to offer free tours to foreign visitors in exchange for English lessons, and he kept up the practice for nine years. It was an unusual habit for a Chinese schoolboy of the time, and it gave him fluent English and a confidence in dealing with foreigners that later set him apart from other Chinese entrepreneurs.

At school he was not a strong student in mathematics, and he failed the national university entrance examination twice before passing on his third attempt in 1984. He went to Hangzhou Teachers College, now Hangzhou Normal University, where he studied English and became the chairman of the student union. After graduating in 1988 he taught English at a local institute for five years, earning a modest salary. He applied for many jobs and was rejected for almost all of them, including, famously, a job at a newly opened fast-food restaurant in Hangzhou, where twenty-four people applied and twenty-three were hired. He has told these stories often, and they have become part of his public image: the outsider who failed repeatedly before succeeding.

His first encounter with the internet came in 1995, when he visited the United States as an interpreter for a business delegation and was shown a computer connected to the web. He searched for the word beer and found results from many countries but none from China. He searched for China and found almost nothing. The experience convinced him that the internet would change China and that Chinese businesses would need a way to be found online. He returned to Hangzhou and started one of China's first internet companies, a directory of Chinese businesses called China Pages. It was a small venture and it struggled, but it taught him the market, and it led him to his second and far more important idea.

2. Eighteen people in an apartment: the founding of Alibaba

In February 1999 Ma gathered seventeen friends and former students in his apartment in Hangzhou and told them about a new idea: a website where small Chinese manufacturers could find buyers overseas. The group pooled their savings and started Alibaba, named after the character in the story of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, because the name was known around the world and because, as Ma liked to say, Ali Baba opened the door to treasure with the words open sesame. The company began as a business-to-business marketplace, helping Chinese factories, many of them small and unknown outside China, to sell to foreign buyers. It was a modest idea, but it solved a real problem: China's factories could make almost anything, but they could not reach customers.

The early years were difficult. The company had little money, and the bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2000 wiped out many of its rivals. Alibaba survived because it kept its costs low and because it focused on the small businesses that other internet companies ignored. In 2003 it launched Taobao, a marketplace for consumers, to compete with the American company eBay, which had entered China. Taobao was free for sellers, while eBay charged fees, and it grew rapidly. In 2004 Alibaba launched Alipay, a payment service that held buyers' money in escrow until they received their goods, solving the problem of trust in a market where buyers and sellers had never met. Alipay later became the foundation of Ant Group, Alibaba's financial affiliate.

In 2005 the American company Yahoo invested in Alibaba, giving it the money it needed to grow, and in return Yahoo took a large stake in the company. Alibaba continued to expand, adding a cloud computing business, a logistics network, and a business-to-consumer marketplace called Tmall. In September 2014 Alibaba listed its shares on the New York Stock Exchange in what was then the largest initial public offering of shares ever held. Ma, who had started as a teacher with no technical training and no family connections, was suddenly one of the best-known businessmen in the world, and his company was one of the most valuable internet companies on earth.

3. How Alibaba changed China

Alibaba's importance goes beyond the size of its business. It changed how China shops, how small businesses operate, and how money moves. Before Taobao, most Chinese retail was done in small shops and markets, and a manufacturer in a small town had almost no way to reach a customer in another province, let alone another country. Alibaba's marketplaces gave millions of small sellers a shop window, and they gave hundreds of millions of Chinese consumers access to goods they could never have found locally. The annual Singles' Day shopping festival, which Alibaba turned into a one-day sales event every 11 November, became the largest shopping day in the world, far larger than any single day of sales in the United States.

The company also changed China's financial system. Alipay began as a way to make online shopping safe, but it grew into a payment system used by hundreds of millions of people for almost everything: paying bills, transferring money to friends, buying train tickets, and investing small savings. For many Chinese consumers, Alipay and its rival WeChat Pay became the main way they paid for things, and cash became rare in cities. Ant Group, which grew out of Alipay, offered loans to small businesses and consumers who had never had access to a bank, using data about their transactions to judge whether they could repay. This was a genuine innovation, but it also worried regulators, because Ant was doing the work of a bank without being regulated like one.

Alibaba's cloud computing business, Alibaba Cloud, became the largest cloud provider in China and one of the largest in Asia, providing the computing power behind many of the country's apps and services. The company also built a logistics network that could deliver a parcel to almost any town in China within days. Together, these businesses made Alibaba not just a shopping company but a piece of China's infrastructure, as important to daily life as the roads and the banks. Ma's role in building it made him a hero to many young Chinese, who saw in his story proof that an ordinary person could succeed in the new economy.

4. The speech, the halted listing and the disappearance

In October 2020 Ma gave a speech at the Bund Finance Summit in Shanghai in which he criticised China's financial regulators and its state-owned banks. He said that China's financial system was like an old man's club, that it held back innovation, and that it was time for a new system built on data and technology. The speech was blunt, and it was delivered in front of senior regulators. Within days, the consequences began. The authorities summoned Ma and the senior executives of Ant Group for a meeting, and then, on 3 November 2020, the Shanghai and Hong Kong stock exchanges suspended the planned public listing of Ant Group, which had been expected to be one of the largest share offerings in history. The listing has never taken place.

The regulators then opened an investigation into Alibaba for monopolistic practices, and in April 2021 they imposed a large fine on the company and ordered it to change its business practices. Ma himself largely disappeared from public view. He stopped giving speeches, stopped appearing at Alibaba events, and was rarely seen in China. He was reported to be spending time in Japan and Europe, and in 2023 he became a visiting professor at the University of Tokyo, teaching about sustainable agriculture and food production. In China, his name became a symbol of the limits of private power: the state had shown that even its most famous entrepreneur could be brought low, and other technology companies moved quickly to show their loyalty and to donate money to government causes.

Commentators disagree about what the episode means. Some say Ma made a serious error of judgement, publicly attacking the regulators who controlled his industry, and that the response was a predictable consequence of challenging the state. Others say the response was disproportionate and that it damaged China's private sector, frightening entrepreneurs and investors and slowing innovation. What is not disputed is the sequence of events: the speech, the halted listing, the fine, and the disappearance. Ma himself has said almost nothing in public about the episode, and he has not given a detailed account of what happened. The silence is part of the story: in China, a public figure who has fallen from favour does not usually explain himself.

5. Giving up control and stepping back

Ma had already begun to step back from Alibaba before the troubles of 2020. In September 2018 he announced that he would retire as executive chairman on the company's twentieth anniversary, 10 September 2019, and hand over to Daniel Zhang, the chief executive. He said he wanted to return to education, the profession he had started in, and to philanthropy. He founded the Jack Ma Foundation, which supports education and rural teachers in China, and he became involved in environmental causes. The retirement was presented as a planned succession, and at the time it was widely praised as a rare example of a Chinese founder handing over power smoothly.

After the events of 2020, the stepping back became more complete. In January 2023 Ma gave up control of Ant Group, agreeing to a restructuring that reduced his voting rights and ended his status as the company's controlling shareholder. Alibaba itself was restructured in 2023 into six separate business groups, each with its own chief executive and board, a change that the company said would make it more agile but that many observers read as a response to regulatory pressure. Ma remained a large shareholder and a founder, but he no longer ran the company, and he no longer spoke for it in public.

His life in these years became quieter and more private. He was reported to be spending time on agriculture and on teaching, and he made occasional visits to the Alibaba campus in Hangzhou, where employees photographed him and posted the pictures online. He wrote a long internal memo to Alibaba staff in April 2024, praising the company's restructuring and urging it to embrace artificial intelligence, which was read as a sign that he was still engaged with the company's future. But he did not return to a public role, and he did not give interviews. For a man who had once been the most visible businessman in China, the change was striking, and it raised the question of whether he would ever come back.

6. The return: February 2025 and after

On 17 February 2025 Ma appeared in the front row at a meeting of private business leaders with President Xi Jinping at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. State television showed him standing and applauding as Xi entered the room, and shaking hands with the president. The meeting was the first of its kind in about six years, and it was attended by the founders of Huawei, BYD, Xiaomi, Tencent and the artificial intelligence company DeepSeek. Xi told the gathering that the private sector should develop in a healthy and high-quality way, and the official message was that Beijing supported private enterprise. Ma's presence, after more than four years out of the spotlight, was widely read as a signal that relations between the state and the private sector were thawing.

The interpretation was reinforced by what followed. Ma spoke at Ant Group events, praised artificial intelligence, and pushed Alibaba's cloud and artificial intelligence efforts. Alibaba's shares rose on optimism about its artificial intelligence business, and the company presented itself as a central player in China's push for leadership in the technology. Commentators noted that Ma had not spoken at the February meeting and that his role remained unclear: he was present, but he was not presented as a leader of the private sector in the way he once had been. The meeting was a signal, not a restoration, and the distinction matters. Ma's return to visibility was real, but it was on the state's terms, not his own.

As of November 2026, Ma's position remains that of a founder who no longer runs his company, a public figure who appears occasionally but does not lead. He is involved in philanthropy and education, and he remains associated with Alibaba's artificial intelligence ambitions, but he has not returned to an executive role and has not given a public account of the years when he was out of view. His story is now told in two halves: the rise of the teacher who built a company that changed China, and the fall of the entrepreneur who challenged the state and discovered its limits. Both halves are part of his legacy, and neither makes sense without the other.

7. Legacy: the teacher who built an empire

Jack Ma's legacy is the story of China's internet age in a single life. He showed that a person with no technical training, no family connections and no money could build a company that changed how a country shops, pays and does business. His story inspired a generation of Chinese entrepreneurs, and it became a model for founders across Asia. He also showed the limits of that story. In China, private enterprise exists by the permission of the state, and when a founder's ambitions and the state's interests collided, the state won. The lesson was not lost on other Chinese entrepreneurs, who became more careful about what they said in public and more generous in their donations to government causes.

Ma's distinctive contribution was not technology but imagination. He did not invent e-commerce, and he did not write code. What he did was to see, earlier than almost anyone else in China, that the internet would connect the country's small manufacturers to the world, and that trust was the missing ingredient. Alipay solved the trust problem, Taobao solved the market problem, and Alibaba Cloud solved the computing problem. Each of these was a business answer to a practical question, and together they built a company that was more than the sum of its parts. His famous optimism, his habit of telling his employees to think big, and his willingness to keep going after repeated failure were not just personal traits but management tools, and they shaped the culture of his company.

He also leaves a more personal legacy in education. His foundation supports rural teachers, and his own return to teaching, even in a part-time and symbolic role, reflects the profession he started in and the one he has said he values most. He has said that he wants to be remembered as a teacher, not as a businessman. Whether that wish will be granted is uncertain: the public will remember him first as the founder of Alibaba, and second as the man who disappeared and came back. But the teacher's story is the one he tells about himself, and it is the one that explains the rest: a man who learned English by talking to tourists, who failed his exams twice, and who believed that persistence mattered more than talent.

Frequently asked questions

Sources and further reading

• Encyclopaedia Britannica — Jack Ma
• Wikipedia — Jack Ma
• Alibaba Group — About Alibaba
• Forbes — Jack Ma profile

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• Who Was Alexander the Great? — Alexander the Great built one of history's largest empires before dying at 32. This explains his conquests, his cities and the debate over his legacy.
• Who Was Alfred Nobel? — Alfred Nobel invented dynamite, held 355 patents and founded the Nobel Prizes. This explains his explosives empire, his will and the prizes' legacy.
• Who Was Allama Iqbal? — Allama Iqbal was Pakistan's national poet, whose ideas shaped the case for Pakistan. This explains his poetry, his philosophy and his legacy.
• Who Was Benazir Bhutto? — Benazir Bhutto was the first woman to lead a Muslim-majority country, serving as prime minister of Pakistan in 1988-90 and 1993-96.
• Who Was Bob Marley? — Bob Marley took reggae from Jamaica to the world and became a symbol of peace, resistance and unity. This explains his life, his music and his legacy.
• Who Was Bruce Lee? — Bruce Lee was the martial artist and actor who carried Hong Kong action cinema to the world and founded Jeet Kune Do, leaving a lasting influence.
• Who Was Charles Darwin? — Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, published in On the Origin of Species in 1859, became the foundation of modern biology.
• Who Was Charles Dickens? — Charles Dickens was the greatest novelist of the Victorian era, whose serialised novels mixed comedy, social criticism and unforgettable characters.
• Who Was Charlie Chaplin? — Charlie Chaplin created the Little Tramp, the most famous screen character of the silent era, and directed classics City Lights and The Great Dictator.
• Who Was Cleopatra? — Cleopatra VII was the last ruler of Ptolemaic Egypt, a multilingual stateswoman who kept her kingdom independent for 21 years before Rome annexed it.
• Who Was Diego Maradona? — Diego Maradona was an Argentine footballer who captained Argentina to the 1986 World Cup and is widely regarded as one of the greatest players in history.
• Who Was Don Bradman? — Don Bradman was an Australian cricketer who averaged 99.94 in Test cricket, a record so far ahead of any other batsman that it remains famous in sport.
• Who Was Elvis Presley? — Elvis Presley took gospel, country and rhythm and blues and turned them into rock and roll, becoming the most famous singer of his century.
• Who Was Emily Dickinson? — Emily Dickinson was an American poet who wrote nearly 1,800 poems in private in Amherst, Massachusetts, and was barely published in her lifetime.
• Who Was Faiz Ahmed Faiz? — Faiz Ahmed Faiz was Pakistan's most celebrated modern Urdu poet, whose verse joined romantic lyricism with resistance to injustice.
• Who Was Franz Beckenbauer? — Franz Beckenbauer was a German footballer known as Der Kaiser, who won the World Cup as captain in 1974 and as manager in 1990.
• Who Was Freddie Mercury? — Freddie Mercury was the lead singer of Queen, a four-octave voice and fearless showman who wrote Bohemian Rhapsody and We Are the Champions.
• Who Was Frida Kahlo? — Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter known for uncompromising, brilliantly coloured self-portraits exploring identity, the body and death.
• Who Was Galileo Galilei? — Galileo Galilei reshaped astronomy with his telescopic discoveries of 1610, defended a Sun-centred universe, and was tried by the Inquisition in 1633.
• Who Was Genghis Khan? — Genghis Khan united the Mongol tribes and built the largest contiguous land empire in history, a conqueror and lawgiver whose legacy is still argued over.
• Who Was George Washington? — George Washington won American independence, presided over the Constitutional Convention, and as first president defined the office — then walked away.
• Who Was Guglielmo Marconi? — Guglielmo Marconi was an Italian inventor who built the first practical wireless telegraph and sent the first transatlantic radio signal in 1901.
• Who Was Henry Ford? — Henry Ford was an American industrialist who founded the Ford Motor Company, built the Model T and perfected the moving assembly line.
• Who Was Isaac Newton? — Isaac Newton wrote the laws of motion and universal gravitation, invented calculus and transformed optics, leaving a lasting legacy in science.
• Who Was James Watt? — James Watt did not invent the steam engine, but his separate condenser of 1765 made it efficient enough to power the Industrial Revolution.
• Who Was Jane Austen? — Jane Austen published six novels in her lifetime, anonymously, and died at 41. This explains her life, her novels, her irony and her growing reputation.
• Who Was Jesus Christ? — Jesus of Nazareth is the central figure of Christianity, the world's largest religion. This explains his life in the Gospels, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Johan Cruyff? — Johan Cruyff was the star of Total Football, won three Ballon d'Or awards, and as a manager built the Barcelona team that shaped modern football.
• Who Was Johannes Gutenberg? — Johannes Gutenberg built the first mechanised printing press in Europe and printed the Gutenberg Bible around 1455, changing how the world shared ideas.
• Who Was John Keats? — John Keats died of tuberculosis in Rome at 25, having written his six great odes in a single year. This explains his short life, his poetry and his fame.
• Who Was Joseph Stalin? — Joseph Stalin led the Soviet Union from the 1920s until 1953, industrialised the country and led it through the Second World War, ruling through terror.
• Who Was Julius Caesar? — Julius Caesar conquered Gaul, crossed the Rubicon and remade Rome's calendar and government, and was murdered by senators who feared he would be king.
• Who Was Kobe Bryant? — Kobe Bryant won five NBA championships with the Los Angeles Lakers and became known for the Mamba Mentality, on and off the court.
• Who Was Leo Tolstoy? — Leo Tolstoy wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, then abandoned literary fame for a radical moral philosophy that influenced Gandhi and the world.
• Who Was Leonardo da Vinci? — Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper and filled notebooks with anatomy and engineering, becoming the symbol of the Renaissance.
• Who Was Ludwig van Beethoven? — Ludwig van Beethoven wrote nine symphonies, 32 piano sonatas and the Missa Solemnis, much of it while deaf. This explains his life and legacy.
• Who Was Mahatma Gandhi? — Mahatma Gandhi led India to independence through nonviolent resistance, and his ideas shaped civil-rights movements worldwide.
• Who Was Mao Zedong? — Mao Zedong founded the People's Republic of China in 1949 and led it until 1976, bringing unification and the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.
• Who Was Margaret Thatcher? — Margaret Thatcher was the first woman to serve as British prime minister, leading the UK from 1979 to 1990 through reform, the Falklands War and division.
• Who Was Marie Curie? — Marie Curie discovered polonium and radium and remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, a pioneer of radioactivity research.
• Who Was Marilyn Monroe? — Marilyn Monroe was the biggest star of the 1950s, the blonde bombshell of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Some Like It Hot, who fought the studio system.
• Who Was Mark Twain? — Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, wrote Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and became America's most famous humorist.
• Who Was Maya Angelou? — Maya Angelou was a poet, memoirist and civil rights activist whose autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings made her widely read.
• Who Was Michael Jackson? — Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, made Thriller, the best-selling album in history, and changed music video, dance and pop stardom.
• Who Was Mirza Ghalib? — Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869) is the pre-eminent Urdu and Persian poet of the last Mughal era, whose ghazals on love, loss and doubt are still recited.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali Jinnah? — Muhammad Ali Jinnah was the barrister and statesman who led the All-India Muslim League and became Pakistan's first Governor-General in 1947.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali? — Muhammad Ali was the three-time heavyweight champion who called himself The Greatest, and the most famous athlete of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Napoleon Bonaparte? — Napoleon Bonaparte rose from Corsica to Emperor of the French, redrew the map of Europe, and left a legal code that still shapes law across the world.
• Who Was Nelson Mandela? — Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison under apartheid, then became South Africa's first democratically elected president and a Nobel Peace laureate.
• Who Was Nikola Tesla? — Nikola Tesla developed the alternating-current power system, the induction motor and the Tesla coil, making long-distance electric power practical.
• Who Was Osama bin Laden? — Osama bin Laden founded al-Qaeda in 1988 and organised the September 11, 2001 attacks, in which nearly 3,000 people were killed.
• Who Was Pablo Neruda? — Pablo Neruda was Chile's great poet, a Nobel laureate, a communist senator and a diplomat. This explains his poetry, his politics and his death.
• Who Was Pablo Picasso? — Pablo Picasso co-founded Cubism, painted Guernica, and spent 75 years breaking the rules of art — the most influential artist of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Pelé? — Pele is the only footballer to win three World Cups, the youngest winner, and the game's first global icon. This is his life, his goals and his legacy.
• Who Was Pope Francis? The People's Pope — Pope Francis, the first pope from the Americas and the first Jesuit pope, led the Catholic Church from 2013 to 2025 with an emphasis on mercy and the poor.
• Who Was Prophet Muhammad? — The Prophet Muhammad is the founder of Islam, the world's second-largest religion. This explains his life, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Queen Elizabeth II? — Queen Elizabeth II reigned for 70 years, from 1952 to 2022 — the longest reign in British history. This explains her life, her reign and her legacy.
• Who Was Rabindranath Tagore? — Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the author of the national anthems of India and Bangladesh.
• Who Was Rosa Parks? — Rosa Parks was not a tired seamstress who acted on impulse. She was a trained activist and NAACP secretary whose bus refusal was a deliberate act.
• Who Was Rosalind Franklin? — Rosalind Franklin's X-ray image, Photograph 51, gave Watson and Crick the key evidence for the double helix. This is her life and the credit debate.
• Who Was Rumi? — Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian poet of Konya, wrote the Masnavi and the Divan-e Shams, and became the most widely read poet in the world.
• Who Was Shane Warne? — Shane Warne took 708 Test wickets, bowled the Ball of the Century in 1993 and won the 1999 World Cup with Australia. This explains his career.
• Who Was Stephen Hawking? — Stephen Hawking was a theoretical physicist who showed that black holes emit radiation and wrote A Brief History of Time. He died in 2018, aged 76.
• Who Was Steve Jobs? — Steve Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976, was forced out in 1985, built Pixar, and returned to launch the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad. He died in 2011, aged 56.
• Who Was Thomas Edison? — Thomas Edison held 1,093 US patents, invented the phonograph and the practical incandescent lamp, and built the first commercial electric power system.
• Who Was Vincent van Gogh? — Vincent van Gogh produced about 2,100 artworks in a single decade, including The Starry Night and Sunflowers, and became famous only after his death at 37.
• Who Was William Shakespeare? — William Shakespeare is the most performed playwright in history, yet almost nothing is reliably known about his private life.
• Who Was William Wordsworth? — William Wordsworth launched English Romanticism with Lyrical Ballads and wrote The Prelude, the great autobiographical poem. This explains his life.
• Who Was Winston Churchill? — Winston Churchill led Britain through the Second World War and won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and his record on empire is still debated.
• Who Was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart? — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a child prodigy who composed more than 600 works before his death at 35, defining the Classical era.
• Why Van Gogh Became Famous After Death — Vincent van Gogh died in 1890 almost unknown, and within a few decades his paintings were among the most loved in the world.