A "preacher-founder" who knew nothing about technology yet mobilized others through language and vision — proof that persuasive power can build an empire, and a demonstration of its cost when persuasion collides with state power.
Born in Hangzhou in 1964, Ma was terrible at math and excellent at English; as a boy he cycled daily to West Lake to act as a free tour guide for foreigners to practice the language. He failed the college entrance exam twice, scraping into Hangzhou Teachers College on the third try, then taught English. In 1995 he encountered the internet for the first time on a trip to the US and returned to found "China Pages." In 1999 he gathered 18 partners in his own apartment, pooled 500,000 yuan, and founded Alibaba, aimed at serving small and medium businesses (B2B). Taobao and Alipay rose in turn; in 2014 Alibaba listed on the NYSE, raising roughly $25 billion — a record at the time. He voluntarily stepped down as chairman in 2019, and after the 2020 Ant Group listing storm retreated into the background.
In spring 2003 eBay had bought EachNet and held about 80% of China's C2C market, boasting it could "settle China in a month." That same year SARS broke out; one Alibaba employee was infected and the whole company was quarantined at home. Amid the chaos, Ma pulled a few engineers into an old apartment in Hangzhou's Lakeside Gardens — kept secret even internally — to build Taobao, a direct rival to eBay.
The real swing factor was pricing: while eBay charged sellers listing and transaction fees, Ma made Taobao completely free for three years. To the "how do you survive on free?" objection, his judgment was that Chinese e-commerce was still in its nurturing phase — grow users and trust first, monetize later via payments and ads. Paired with the localized "Wangwang" instant messenger and Alipay's escrow, by 2006 eBay EachNet had all but exited China. The lesson is not "free" itself, but that he dared to use a completely different monetization sequence to fight a stronger, richer opponent who was force-fitting its home playbook onto China.
Sources: Duncan Clark, Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built (2016), Ch. 8; Porter Erisman documentary Crocodile in the Yangtze (2012).As Alibaba prepared to list in 2013–2014, Hong Kong was the first choice. But Alibaba insisted on its "partnership structure" — roughly 30 partners nominate a majority of directors, letting the founding team steer the company with very little equity. The Hong Kong Stock Exchange rejected this dual-class-style arrangement and talks collapsed. Ma did not compromise; he turned instead to the New York Stock Exchange, which permitted dual-class shares.
On September 19, 2014, Alibaba (BABA) listed on the NYSE, raising about $25 billion and becoming the largest IPO in human history at the time. The foresight and the cost are equally real: it preserved management control, but bound this Chinese company's fate to US capital markets and geopolitics, seeding future regulatory and delisting risk.
Sources: Duncan Clark, Alibaba (2016), Ch. 12; Alibaba prospectus (SEC F-1, 2014).In 1995 Ma was sent to the US as an interpreter to handle a business dispute and took the chance to visit a friend in Seattle. There he sat at an internet-connected computer for the first time. His friend told him to search any word; he typed "beer" and got beers from every country except China; he searched "China" and got almost nothing. On the spot he decided to build a website for China.
Back home he borrowed money to start "China Pages," pitching door to door to small-business owners who didn't believe in the internet and took him for a con man — a near-total failure. But that experience shaped the leitmotif of everything he built afterward: take a future no one else can see and explain it in the plainest language until the listener believes. In 2000 it took only six minutes to win over Masayoshi Son, who, after hearing him out, decided to invest $20 million. Ma's gift was set at that Seattle computer: he doesn't write code, but he can make others bet on his picture.
Sources: Duncan Clark, Alibaba (2016), Ch. 4-5; multiple public interviews with Masayoshi Son.Turning the company into a wuxia world. Ma is a fanatical reader of Jin Yong's martial-arts novels. He took the nickname "Feng Qingyang" (a hidden master swordsman from The Smiling, Proud Wanderer) and required every employee to adopt a martial-arts alias on joining; meeting rooms and the campus are named after wuxia locales. He used this shared "jianghu narrative" to forge values and flatten hierarchy.
Deliberately distant from technology. He has repeatedly admitted in public that he "knows nothing about technology — I can only do email and browse the web." But he treats this as an advantage: someone who doesn't understand the tech can, in building products, stand in for the most ordinary user. His hiring rule was to recruit people stronger than himself in some dimension, while he handled only direction and "lighting the fire."
Performance as part of the job. He loved taking the stage at company galas before tens of thousands: at Alibaba's tenth anniversary in 2009 he wore a wig and leather pants to sing rock; at the 2017 gala he danced dressed as Michael Jackson. To many founders this is undignified; to him the stage was a mobilization tool — he knew a workforce of 100,000 needs emotion and faith, not only KPIs.
Sources: Duncan Clark, Alibaba (2016); public footage of Alibaba galas; Ma's public speeches.First, defending 996. In April 2019, amid the overwork controversy over China's tech industry "9am–9pm, six days a week," Ma told an internal session that "being able to work 996 is a huge blessing — many companies and people don't even get the chance." The remark set off a firestorm, criticized for dressing up the exploitation of workers in the rhetoric of "struggle."
Second, the 2011 Alipay carve-out. To obtain a Chinese third-party payment license (regulators required domestic ownership), Ma transferred ownership of Alipay into a domestic company he personally controlled. The problem: this move was reportedly made without the explicit consent of major shareholders Yahoo and SoftBank, catching both off guard and seen as a breach of contractual good faith. Ma's defense was that it was "100% legal but not perfect" — a classic business-ethics case: which comes first, compliance or trust?
Third, the Bund speech and the fall. On October 24, 2020, at the Bund Finance Summit in Shanghai, Ma publicly criticized regulators, saying "today's banks still run on a pawnshop mentality" and that the Basel Accords were "like an old people's club." Nine days later, Ant Group — set to list in both Shanghai and Hong Kong at a valuation of about 2.1 trillion yuan, in what would have been the largest IPO in history — had its listing halted on the night of November 3. Ma then faded from public view for a long time, and in April 2021 Alibaba was fined 18.2 billion yuan in an antitrust ruling. Entrepreneurial hubris and misjudgment, or an inevitability under the system? There is still no simple answer.
Sources: Alibaba official Weibo (Apr 2019); Duncan Clark, Alibaba (2016) on Alipay; Xinhua and Shanghai Stock Exchange notices on Ant's suspended listing (Nov 2020); transcript of the Bund Finance Summit speech (Oct 24, 2020).What you can most take from Jack Ma is "translating an unseen future into language anyone can believe": he never wrote a line of code, yet a six-minute story mobilized capital and the faith of 100,000 people. For anyone chasing the AI super-individual, this is a reminder: beyond technical depth, the narrative power to "make others bet on your judgment" is equally a lever. But he is also a cautionary mirror — once a narrative loses its sense of boundaries, it turns from an asset into a liability: both the 996 "blessing" and the Bund speech prove that the same mouth that ignites hearts can, at the wrong moment and before the wrong audience, devour an entire empire. Learn to articulate vision as he did — and learn the lesson he never did: knowing when to shut up.