Jack Ma Born: Alibaba's Future Architect Arrives

Jack Ma failed the national university entrance exam twice, was rejected from Harvard Business School ten times, and applied to KFC along with 23 other candidates when it opened in Hangzhou. Twenty-three were hired. He was not. He learned English by cycling to a hotel near his home in Hangzhou for nine years to practice conversation with foreign tourists, a routine he began at age twelve. Born Ma Yun on September 10, 1964, in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, he eventually passed the entrance exam on his third attempt and attended Hangzhou Teachers Institute, graduating in 1988 with a degree in English. He became an English teacher, earning $12 a month. He first encountered the internet during a visit to the United States in 1995 and was struck by the near-total absence of Chinese content online. He returned to China and launched China Pages, one of the country's first internet companies. It failed. In 1999, he gathered seventeen friends in his apartment and pitched them on an internet company that would connect Chinese manufacturers with international buyers. He called it Alibaba, after the character from One Thousand and One Nights, because the name was recognizable across languages. The company grew into the world's largest online marketplace. Alibaba's Singles Day sale on November 11, an annual shopping event Ma essentially invented, processed more merchandise in a single day than Amazon did in a typical month. The company went public on the New York Stock Exchange in September 2014 in the largest IPO in history at that time, raising $25 billion. He retired from Alibaba in 2019 at 55, declaring he wanted to focus on education and philanthropy. Then, in October 2020, he gave a speech criticizing Chinese financial regulators for stifling innovation. Days later, regulators blocked the IPO of Ant Group, Alibaba's financial affiliate, which would have been the largest public offering in history. Ma largely disappeared from public life for months. When he reemerged, he was notably quieter. The trajectory in both directions was instructive: the rise showed what Chinese entrepreneurship could achieve; the fall showed the limits the state would impose on it.