Background and career
Ma Yun (Chinese: 马云; pinyin: Mǎ Yún; born 10 September 1964), also known as Jack Ma, is a Chinese businessman and philanthropist. He is the founder of the Jack Ma Foundation, and co-founder of Alibaba Group and Yunfeng Capital. He is one of the richest men in China with a net worth of approx US$27.5 billion.
After taking the gaokao three times, Ma earned a bachelor's degree in English from Hangzhou Normal University in 1988 and was assigned as a lecturer at Hangzhou Dianzi University. A pioneer of Internet business in China, he founded a translation agency in 1994 and launched its website the following year, before leaving his university position to run an online yellow pages service, which was acquired by China Telecommunications Corporation in 1996. Following an uneasy collaboration with the state-owned enterprise, Ma left the company in 1997 and went on to develop websites for China's Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation. In 1999, he co-founded Alibaba Group, initially as a business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce marketplace and later expanded into a multinational conglomerate.
Ma has been the face of Chinese entrepreneurship. His influence declined after Chinese authorities halted the anticipated initial public offering (IPO) of his financial technology company, Ant Group, in 2020, following his public criticism of regulators for prioritizing risk aversion over innovation.
Ma was born in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, on 10 September 1964. He became interested in learning the English language as a young boy and began practicing it with English-speaking visitors who frequented the Hangzhou International Hotel. At the age of 12, Ma bought a pocket radio and began listening to English radio stations frequently. For nine years, Ma rode 27 km (17 miles) on his bicycle every day to work as a tour guide of Hangzhou for foreigners in order to practice his English. He became pen pals with one of those foreigners, who nicknamed him "Jack" because he found it hard to pronounce his Chinese name. When Ma was 13 years old, he was forced to transfer to Hangzhou No. 8 Middle School as he kept getting in fights. In his primary school days, Ma struggled academically, and it took two years for him to gain acceptance at an ordinary Chinese high school, as he only got 31 points in mathematics on the Chinese high school entrance exam.
In 1980, while he was riding his bike to practice English with tourists, he met Ken Morley, who was traveling with his family with the Australia-China Friendship Society. Ken's son, David, became pen pals with Ma and kept in touch after the family left China. Years later, the Morleys hosted Ma in Australia, changing the course of his life completely. Ma later said: "Those 29 days in Newcastle were crucial in my life. Without those 29 days, I would never have been able to think the way I do today."
How Jack Ma makes money
He is one of the richest men in China with a net worth of approx US$27.5 billion. Within a span of three years, China Pages cleared approximately 5,000,000 RMB in profit which at the time was equivalent to US$642,998 (approximately $1.18 million today). In October 1999 and January 2000, Alibaba won a total of a $25 million foreign venture seed capital from the American investment bank, Goldman Sachs and the Japanese investment management conglomerate SoftBank.
