Ali Hasan
If you don’t know who is Jack Ma, then you were probably living under a rock. Jack Ma is a Chinese billionaire entrepreneur, business magnate, investor and philanthropist who is also the co-founder and executive chairman of Alibaba Group which is the largest e-commerce company in China.
On 19 September 2014, Alibaba’s initial public offering (IPO) raised US$25 billion, giving the company a market value of US$231 billion and, by far, then the largest IPO in world history.
It is one of the top 10 most valuable corporations and is named the 31st-largest public company in the world on the Forbes Global 2000-2020 list. In January 2018, Alibaba became the 2nd Asian company to break the US$500 billion valuation mark, after its competitor Tencent. As of 2020, Alibaba has the 6th highest global brand valuation.
Enough said but why am I telling you this? That’s because Jack Ma has reportedly gone missing. Just recently he was going to launch the IPO of Ant Group which was set to raise $34.5 billion in the world’s largest IPO but the Chinese authorities stopped them from doing so on November 5, just 48 hours before they were supposed to go public.
Ant Group is an affiliate company of Alibaba Group. It was reported that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader XI Jinping personally stopped the Ant IPO and launched an antitrust investigation as they didn’t wanted an individual (Ma) to become powerful.
Alibaba and rivals such as Tencent Holdings are facing increasing pressure from regulators after amassing hundreds of millions of users and gaining influence over almost every aspect of daily life in China.
But now things have gone even further as Jack Ma has been missing. He gave a controversial speech in October 2020 where he criticized the regulation system of China and called the banks “Pawnshops”.
Moreover the tech magnate hasn’t made any public appearance since November 2020. In November 2020, Ma was replaced as a judge on the African talent show which he founded. This further added fuel to fire. Although the organizers of the show stated that this happened because of scheduling conflicts but no one knows what actually happened.
Until recently, Ma was China’s richest man, with a fortune of more than $60 billion. But Ma’s net worth has taken an $11-12 billion hit over the past 2 months as China has tightened the rules for the fintech industry. Ma is now worth $50.6 billion, making him the 4th richest person in China, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
But the main question is still unanswered – Where the hell is Jack Ma? No one knows as of now and we all have to wait for either insider information or maybe one day the Chinese authorities themselves will publicly confirm his whereabouts.
But one thing is sure that we all have to wait and the fact that Chinese government is really bad for even its own citizens. Maybe Donald Trump was right to impose trade restrictions on China and their companies.
