Jack Ma

Jack Ma, born Ma Yun, failed China’s university entrance exam twice and was turned down for job after job. He became an English teacher, saw the internet on a trip to America, and built Alibaba into one of the largest companies in the world. Then, after one speech, he almost disappeared from public life — and years later, came back.

Hangzhou

He was born on 10 September 1964 in Hangzhou, in eastern China. His parents were performers of pingtan, a traditional form of storytelling and ballad singing. The family was not well off, and his childhood coincided with the upheaval of the Cultural Revolution.

As a boy he became determined to learn English. From about the age of twelve he would cycle to a hotel by Hangzhou’s West Lake in the mornings and offer to guide foreign tourists around the city for free, in exchange for practising English with them. He did it for years. One of the visitors, a pen friend, gave him the name “Jack”.

Rejections

He failed the national university entrance exam, the gaokao, twice, largely because of his maths scores. On the third attempt he got into Hangzhou Teachers College, now Hangzhou Normal University, and graduated in English in 1988.

He has often described the rejections of those years: applying for many jobs and being turned down by almost all of them, including, in his own telling, the KFC restaurant that came to Hangzhou, where he says he was the only one of twenty-four applicants not hired. He became an English lecturer at a local university, earning, he has said, about $12 a month.

He married Zhang Ying, known as Cathy Zhang, a fellow student. She later worked alongside him as one of Alibaba’s founders. They have three children.

The Internet

In the early 1990s he started a translation agency. In 1995 he travelled to the United States as an interpreter, and in Seattle a friend showed him the internet. He has said that he typed in “beer” and found results from many countries, but none from China. He then searched for “China” and found almost nothing.

Back home he set up China Pages, one of the first Chinese internet companies, a directory of Chinese businesses. It struggled against a state-backed competitor. He then worked for a government trade department in Beijing, helping to build websites.

The Flat

In 1999 he returned to Hangzhou and gathered seventeen friends and former students in his flat. He persuaded them to put in their savings, about $60,000 in total, and founded Alibaba. He chose the name because, he said, people all over the world knew the story of Ali Baba and “open sesame”.

Alibaba.com was a website that connected small Chinese manufacturers with buyers overseas. It made sense of the internet for Chinese small businesses, which had no other way to reach the world. In 1999 and 2000 it raised money from Goldman Sachs and from Masayoshi Son’s SoftBank, which invested $20 million after a short meeting — one of the most profitable investments in history.

Taobao and Alipay

In 2003 eBay entered China. Ma responded with Taobao, a shopping site that let people buy and sell for free, while eBay charged fees. He described it as a crocodile in the Yangtze River fighting a shark from the ocean: the shark might be bigger, but the crocodile knew the river. By 2006 eBay had largely retreated from China.

To make online shopping trustworthy, Alibaba created Alipay in 2004. It held a buyer’s money until the goods arrived. Alipay grew into Ant Group, one of the largest financial technology companies in the world. In 2005 Yahoo invested $1 billion for about 40 per cent of Alibaba. Alibaba later added the Tmall shopping site, the cloud-computing business Alibaba Cloud and the annual Singles’ Day sales festival, which became the biggest shopping event in the world.

On 19 September 2014 Alibaba listed on the New York Stock Exchange, raising $25 billion — then the largest IPO in history. Ma became the richest person in China. In September 2019 he stepped down as chairman, handing over to Daniel Zhang, and said he would focus on education.

The Speech

In 2020 Ant Group prepared to list in Shanghai and Hong Kong in what would have been the largest IPO ever, raising about $35 billion. On 24 October 2020, at a conference in Shanghai, Ma gave a speech criticising China’s financial regulators and banks, comparing the banks to pawn shops.

Days later, regulators summoned him and Ant’s executives. On 3 November 2020 the listing was suspended. Ma largely disappeared from public view for months. In 2021 Alibaba was fined 18.2 billion yuan, a record, for anti-competitive behaviour, and Ant was forced to restructure. In 2023 Ma gave up control of Ant Group. He spent much of this period abroad, in Japan and elsewhere, teaching and studying agriculture.

The Return

From 2023 he began to reappear in China. In February 2025 he attended a meeting of leading private entrepreneurs with President Xi Jinping, widely read as a sign that the government’s attitude to the private technology sector had softened.

As Alibaba bet heavily on artificial intelligence, including its Qwen models, Ma was reported to be spending time on the company’s campus again and taking part in strategic decisions, without an official executive title. In August 2026 the South China Morning Post reported that he had bought more than HK$600 million of Alibaba shares, which was seen as a sign of his confidence in its AI plans.

The Showman

Unlike many Chinese technology founders, Ma loved the stage. He sang and dressed up at Alibaba’s staff parties, practised tai chi and in 2017 appeared in a short martial-arts film, Gong Shou Dao, alongside Jet Li. He gave speeches around the world about small businesses and globalisation, and was one of the most recognisable Chinese faces abroad.

He also built institutions around his ideas. In 2014 he set up the Jack Ma Foundation, which runs awards for rural teachers and headmasters. In 2015 he co-founded Hupan, a school for entrepreneurs in Hangzhou. At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, his foundation and Alibaba’s shipped millions of masks and testing kits to countries across Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas.

In 2023 Alibaba announced a plan to split itself into six separate businesses, each able to raise money and list on its own. Much of that plan was later scaled back, as the company refocused on shopping and cloud computing, and then on AI.

Years Away

During his years away from public life, Ma spent long periods in Japan and was appointed a visiting professor at the University of Tokyo in 2023, where he was reported to be studying sustainable agriculture. He also took up a teaching role at the University of Hong Kong.

The restructuring of Ant Group in 2023 reduced his voting control of the company from more than half to about 6 per cent. It was a clear sign of how much his standing had changed: the founder who had once been China’s most celebrated entrepreneur no longer controlled one of the two companies he had built.

He has said that he would like to be remembered as a teacher rather than a businessman, and has continued to give talks to rural teachers through his foundation.

The measure of him is what he gave China’s small businesses: a way to reach customers, and a way to be paid, when the country had neither. His fall showed the limits of a private entrepreneur’s power in China. His return shows that the company he built still needs him.

Common Questions

How This Was Written

Corrections are welcome and are made without argument: commissions@99founder.com.