Jack Ma: China's ecommerce CEO

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Welcome to Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service.

Each episode, we pick a billionaire and find out how they made their money.

And then we judge them.

Are they good, bad, or just another billionaire?

I'm Simon Jack, the BBC's business editor.

And I'm Zing Sing.

I'm a journalist, author and podcaster.

And before we introduce this episode's billionaire, I think it would be churlish to not dwell on the fact that Good, Bad, Billionaire is a winner.

Yes, we have won a British podcast award for best business podcast.

It just happened recently.

It's very exciting.

We are still basking in the afterglow of that victory.

And we would just like to thank all the listeners, all the judges, everyone involved, and our super production team for a real team effort to win the gold award.

However, I will also point out that we have no idea where our trophy has gone, and I think a producer has made off with it.

So, if that's you and you're listening, please at least let me touch it one more time.

You know who you are.

Where is it?

Anyway, let's dive in.

In this episode, we've got one of the richest men in the world.

Open Sesame.

It is Alibaba founder Jack Maher.

Now, Jack Maher is worth a very cool $25 billion, which makes him right now at least the 80th richest person in the world and in the top 10 richest Chinese billionaires.

But just a few years ago, he was the richest person in Asia with over $60 billion.

So where did half his fortune disappear?

It's a fascinating story involving the Chinese government.

Well worth listening to.

So his wealth came from, as he mentioned, Alibaba, which is an e-commerce company he founded in 1999.

It's been called the Chinese Amazon.

It does a lot of the things that Amazon does.

And if you go to China, Alibaba is everywhere.

In fact, his online payment system, Alipay, has more than 1.2 billion users.

There are more transactions in China done with Alipay than with actual cash.

Jack is a beloved national celebrity in his homeland.

That's right.

He's actually been nicknamed Daddy Ma and has even appeared in a short kung fu movie fighting martial arts superstars like Jet Li.

You can actually watch it on YouTube.

Yeah, he's got the full set of billionaire toys that we come across, like a $50 million Gulfstream jet, a $200 million super yacht.

And he's also bought two historic French vineyards for around $13.5 million.

So he makes his own wine.

Plus he spent $23 million on a 28,000-acre property in the Adirondacks in upstate New York, which has its own trout stream, of course, woodlands, its own maple syrup operation.

So wine, trout, maple syrup.

I mean, he's living.

the life.

Let's hear from Jack himself, speaking to Tim Sebastian for the BBC in the year 2000.

You're ambitious.

Yeah.

Ambitious for what?

Ambitious that,

well, change the world, change

the way people work.

When we started Alibaba, I mean the company, we thought that we're going to build a business that can last for 80 years.

It's not for 80 months.

So we're very ambitious, but people, my parents also laugh at me.

So what are they talking about?

You want to set up a business for 80 years?

We say, yeah, let's go ahead.

but i never thought about 80 years later what the company will look like he actually sounds quite serious in that clip but you've actually met him and he seems quite a different kind of character right it was the weirdest thing and one that i kind of shudder about to this day because i was asked to moderate this rather boring panel of business people at the british library in central london and there were all these people this person from a big trade body person from you know one of the big accounting firms and then there was this other guy called jack who i'd never heard heard of and we started this debate and he keeps butting in he's full of beans he's quite flamboyant he's very noisy he's very energetic and he's kind of dominating a little bit so I'm just going um thank you very much Mr Maher if you could just shut up now and let the other people speak because we don't I think we've heard quite enough from you because I honestly never heard of him never heard of Alibaba this must have been about 2007 or 8 or something like that and of course to this day I think I could have made best friends with one you know we're not very useful contact with one of the with the richest men in China.

You could be drinking Jack Ma's

maple syrup in the Adarots.

I know.

So, yeah, no, but incredibly charming, incredibly engaging, full of energy.

And he could see when he talked, the rest of the room was really engaged with him.

So you could see why he's such a popular person in China to this day.

Let's rewind to the start and find out how he got his beginnings.

Jack Ma began life with very little and he got into a lot of fights as a little kid.

He was born in 1964 in Hangzhou, eastern China and his original name was Ma Yun.

He has an older brother and a younger sister.

His parents were actually musicians.

And that is China under Chairman Mao.

Remember the Cultural Revolution would begin just two years after Jack was born and that's a period when Chinese youth were encouraged to sort of purge society of things that were anti-communist, which included, of course, his parents' occupation as musical storytellers.

So, Mark grew up in a really poor household, and he was a very small, scrawny kid.

In fact, he's still quite small.

He's actually five foot four.

And I guess the generous word for it would be odd-looking.

He is an unusual-looking guy.

I'm not going to try and describe him any further.

Have a look for yourself, but he's not your average-looking Joe.

Now, despite his small stature, he'd often get into fights with his classmates.

And he has said, I was never afraid of opponents who were bigger than I.

Yeah.

Quite an interesting billionaire mentality there.

I think.

Maybe, yeah, he's a scrapper for sure.

Yeah.

And as we'll see as his story goes on, you know, he tries a lot of different things, he comes up against obstacles, and I think we have seen that from a lot of billionaires.

One of the common characteristics is how they treat adversity.

And also, crucially, not being afraid to take on a fight.

In fact, at 13, Jack even got moved to a different school altogether because he was getting into so many of them.

And he collected crickets, which he made fight each other, which sounds kind of cruel maybe but it's a traditional Chinese game which again had been banned under Chairman Mao.

So clearly he displayed a bit of a rebellious spirit even when he was a kid.

Yeah, but he has one obsession.

He wants to learn English.

So he saved up his money to buy a pocket radio to help teach himself the language.

And then he has this other idea, right?

He's 13.

It's a year after Mao dies.

Ruse are kind of loosening in China.

It's starting to attract overseas tourists.

So every day he gets up at 5 a.m.

and cycles 40 minutes to the best hotels in the city.

And there he approaches travelers and offers them tours of the city.

But instead of asking for cash, he does the tour in exchange for English lessons.

And it works.

Tourists like him.

He makes pen pals.

And he keeps giving tours for the next nine years.

And in fact, if you're wondering, wait a second, where does a Jack come from then?

It's actually a tourist who was unable to pronounce his Chinese name Ma Yun who gives him the name Jack.

As we were saying, how you treat adversity is a common denominator in our billionaires, and Jack's young life is filled with rejection and failure.

He initially wants to study to become a teacher, but he repeatedly fails the university entrance exams, which are notoriously tough in China.

Maths apparently his worst subject.

He gets apparently one out of 120 for maths in one exam.

Even if you put a random number in, you think you get more than one out of 120?

Statistically speaking, you think you do a little bit better than one out of 120.

But on his third try, he gets into an English teaching course at what he described as his city's worst university.

You know, so at least he's got a sense of humour about things.

But when he graduates in 1988, he faces even more rejection from job interview after job interview.

In fact, at one point, he interviewed for KFC.

When it opened in its city, they interviewed 24 candidates and employed 23.

He was unlucky, number 24.

And he's got similar stories for police jobs, jobs at hotels, where his cousin did worse than a test but was employed before him anyway.

And he sometimes blames, we've already mentioned this, his physical appearance for the rejections.

But as with a lot of our billionaires, he keeps on believing.

He even applies to Harvard, that prestigious Ivory League university in America, 10 times.

And it goes without saying, always failing.

But he's got one thing going for him.

He's popular at university.

He was elected student chairman and later chairman of the whole city students' federation.

And he also has the love of his school sweetheart, a woman called Zhang Ying, who is also known as Kathy.

They get married right after their graduation and they are actually still together today, but details of their life are kept very private, so they have kids, but it's unclear how many they even have together.

So he's not single.

And Kathy, interestingly, has reportedly said of her husband, Jack, that he's not a handsome man, but I fell for him because he can do a lot of things handsome men cannot do.

That'd be nice.

That's nice, isn't it?

I think that's a good thing.

I think my wife would say the same thing.

Could you become a billionaire?

It's looking a long way off right now.

Yeah, if there's anything we've learned from this podcast, it's that neither me or Simon have anything remotely near the chops to become a billionaire.

Too true.

But anyway, Jack persists, and at 24, he gets a job as an English teacher.

It only pays about $12 a month, which is, you know, not a lot, not even in 80s China.

But he loves it.

He's said to have described it as the best life I had.

And he actually teaches for the next decade.

I mean, that's a long time, 10 years.

He still says he was the best teacher in Hangzhou.

Yeah, and he seems quite settled.

And maybe he could have done this for the rest of his life, but he's a bit of a hustler, he's entrepreneurial, so he starts his first business, which is an agency providing English translation and interpretation.

And then a crazy trip to America introduces him to something that will completely turn his life upside down.

Yeah, in 1995, Jack Ma is now 31 and he has a chance to visit the USA.

Rumours persist actually that the Chinese government had sent him on an internet fact-finding mission, but it seems more likely he was there because of his English skills on behalf of a local company.

So, he was apparently sent to mediate between a Chinese company and their American partner.

And so, Jack gets on a plane and goes to Malibu, California to meet the U.S.

boss, who is this tough guy who shows him a really good time.

They go to Las Vegas to have fun.

Jack wins $600 just by playing on slot machines, so pretty lucky guy.

But back in Malibu, Jack soon realizes all is not as it seems.

The boss, it turns out, is a con man with a fake company.

And when he turns down a bribe, the boss turns on him flashing a gun and locking him in his house I mean this is crazy this sounds this is like one of those kind of hangover movies or something

it really is and you know obviously Jack is terrified at this time and but he uses his charm to kind of convince the man they can do business together but at the first opportunity he escapes he takes his $600 winnings from the slot machines to go north to Seattle and it's in Seattle that he logs on for the very first time to a brilliant new invention known as the internet.

Jack's first web search apparently was to have been for beer and there are no results for any Chinese beers, although beer is very popular in China.

So when he returns home, he is determined to put China on the internet.

Now, when he's back home, Jack invites all his friends and a local TV crew round to his place for a party, and he's going to introduce them to this thing called the internet.

So they sit around, they drink beer, they play cards, and after three hours, he's managed to download half a page.

Jack says of the time, I was so proud I proved the internet existed.

It's quite strange to think of a time when this was considered a big deal.

Yeah, but I remember, I mean, I'm at my ripe old age, in my mid-50s.

I do remember the first faltering days of the internet when it did seem like this mythical thing.

Is it out there?

What's on it?

Can I access it?

How do I do it?

What are the code words to get in?

It felt like this kind of, you know, whole new domain that you took your first faltering steps into, like a newly born foal in a forest clearing.

Do you remember what your first internet search was for?

Oh, gosh, now you're asking me a question.

I don't know.

I think it might have been for myself.

You know, it's, you know, typical, really.

I'm still doing it.

Still doing it.

But presumably it takes a little bit faster than three hours to download half a page of web results.

So he's proved to his friends, at least, and to a TV crew, that the internet existed in China.

So he borrows $2,000 from friends and family to set up a website with a friend who's a techie.

And this is actually quite typical of Jack Ma and a lot of our other tech billionaires.

They're very good at getting better techies to work for him.

And actually, Jack is probably one of the least technically skilled of all the tech billionaires we've covered.

I don't think he knows how to code even.

Don't let pesky skills get in the way of a good entrepreneur.

He sets up a site, one of China's first website.

It's a digital directory called China Pages, and it's a hit.

So at this point it's probably worth thinking about how China has changed from Jack's childhood under Mao by the 1990s.

And this is really interesting because I actually know this period sort of firsthand.

Some of my family were kind of born in this period.

They're a little bit younger than Jack Mao, but they tell me stories about how they grew up in villages where there was no electricity, very little running water, wild dogs running around in the street.

And now they go back to these villages and everyone's got high-speed internet.

And it happened so quickly.

I remember visiting family in the 90s in China and feeling as if I'd stepped back in time.

It felt like I was in the 70s or the 60s even because of how underdeveloped some parts of the country was.

And now when you go to a shopping mall in China, I mean...

It feels like you're in the future.

It feels like you're in the future.

But the nation is having a decade of explosive growth.

China's becoming the world's second largest economy.

But this isn't...

rampant capitalism and the state is still ultimately in control.

And in fact, the state decides to take over China pages and Jack is forced into a partnership with the government.

Yeah, state-owned China Telecom puts in $185,000, but they take five out of the seven seats in the company board, so essentially totally in charge.

Jack says everything we suggested they turned down.

It was like an elephant and an ant, and presumably Jack is the ant.

Well, maybe that's why he later on he calls his company Ant Group.

We'll get to that in due course.

But Jack resigns from the site that he founded.

He briefly heads a government-backed internet agency.

And these experiences shape his relationship with the Chinese authorities, which will play a big part going forward, as we'll see.

He's told his employees to, quote, be in love with the government, but not to marry them, which is an interesting way of putting it.

Really interesting.

The fact that, you know, China is becoming much more commercial, much more international.

And there was a thought in both the US and Western Europe that a bit like what happened with the Soviet Union, the more commercial it becomes, the more McDonald's you have, the more internet stuff, the more Western brands you have available to buy China, the more capitalism in its Western form would take root and that would lead to a kind of dilution of communism.

But as we'll see, that was a miscalculation by the West.

So it's around the 90s, Mars left China pages, but then here comes the venture that will eventually make him very, very rich.

Yeah, he doesn't want to miss out on the online boom and he thinks e-commerce will be big.

So he decides to pioneer an online marketplace in China.

He convinces a group of 17 friends to quit their jobs and join him in setting up this marketplace.

Yeah that includes Jack's wife and a Yale University graduate called Joe Tsai who actually gives up a job which had an annual salary of $750,000 to work for just $50 a month.

That is quite a move and a gamble.

I mean, having said that, it's worked out for him because he's now chairman of Alibaba and he is a billionaire in his own right.

So Jack has convinced this group to put in $60,000 between them for his startup, Alibaba, and it's named after 1001 Arabian Nights character because of the phrase open sesame.

Yes, it's a kind of business-to-business platform that Jack says will open sesame to treasure for its users.

Yes, he said our focus is on helping small and medium-sized companies make money at exactly the moment when lots of small and medium-sized companies in China want to do exactly that.

It's actually quite interesting because if you visit the Alibaba website now, you will see a very confusing array of different products and goods.

So I actually took a look at this last night before we recorded.

On the most popular page in Alibaba, you can buy 500 quilted handbags for $11 each, but you could also buy an off-road motorbike for $500.

aircon units for $100, diesel generators for $300.

I mean, everything and anything at very, very low prices shipped over in bulk.

Fascinating what it's become.

In the early days, it's starting out well, but he needs more investment to expand.

But he's being being quite choosy about who he takes money from.

After his China Page experience, he seems quite wary of actually Chinese investors.

So he actually turns to the West.

He accepts $5 million from the leading global investment bank, Goldman Sachs, in 1999.

Yeah, when asked how he convinced them, he said it was more how they convinced him.

They clearly saw China as the greatest economic growth opportunity and wanted in.

And the next year after that, he meets the now legendary investor, Masayoshi-son, Masayoshi-son, who is a CEO of the investment bank SoftBank.

Yeah, Son was very briefly the world's richest man.

He prides himself on making a quick decision.

So in five minutes, Son decides to invest $40 million.

But Jack will only accept 20 million.

And actually, Son's investment, despite the fact he cut it in half, is one of the greatest investments ever because SoftBank's initial $20 million stake actually peaked in value at just over $129 billion.

Crikey.

That's an astonishing return.

But when Son invested, it confirmed the value of Jack Ma's stake in Alibaba was worth at least a million dollars.

So in 2000, Jack Ma is a millionaire.

So he's gone from English teacher, translator, to one of China's first e-commerce millionaires.

For sure.

So Jack is now a millionaire in the year 2000.

Alibaba is expanding rapidly.

It's making money for small and medium-sized companies just as Jack's planned.

But many of those customers pay nothing for the service, so Alibaba's not making any money for itself.

And also, internationally, the dot-com bubble is bursting.

So, Jack has to lay off staff, and he's reported to say, I call Alibaba 1001 mistakes.

By 2002, Alibaba is near bankruptcy with only enough cash to keep going for 18 months.

So, how does Jack Maher go from near bankruptcy to billionaire?

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Suffs, playing the Orpheum Theater, October 22nd through November 9th.

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So at this point, Jack Ma is a millionaire, but Alibaba is on the verge of going bust.

So to take that company from near bankruptcy to one of the biggest companies in the world, the first thing Jack does is that he doesn't panic.

No, he set up Alibaba as a company that would last for 80 years, so he sets about learning from his mistakes and he does two things.

He says that one mistake was limiting how high his partners could rise in the company, so he changes that.

Yeah, so instead of saying the highest you'll ever reach as a manager, I'm the ultimate boss, he says that they can rise higher in the ranks of the company.

He actually says, the lessons I learned from the dark days at Alibaba are that you've got to make your team have value, innovation and vision.

So they've got to be able to see where they can get to.

Yeah, and the other big thing he does is once again, to look outside China's borders to the US.

He develops a product that enables China's exporters to trade with US buyers online.

And it's an immediate success.

By the end of 2002, Alibaba has made a $1 million profit.

Now, this is truly lift off for the company because with Alibaba now in profit, Jack Ma starts expanding his operations.

Yeah, and I think you can see some parallels here between Jack Ma and Jeff Bezos at Amazon.

It took Amazon a long, long time to actually turn a profit.

Any money they made, they plowed back into the business.

I think the first 15 years of Amazon's existence, it only made a profit in one year.

And Jeff Bezos said that was an accounting mistake.

But Alibaba actually went into profit quicker than Amazon did.

And when Jack started making money, he reinvested into new areas of the business.

He set up a customer-to-customer market, which is a little bit like eBay.

It's called Dow Daopao, which translates to searching for treasure.

Unlike eBay, it earned money from advertising and selling additional services rather than sale commission fees.

And then he sets up Alipay, the online payment system, which is now another enormous part of his business.

For instance, it's now got over a billion customers in China and it's expanding.

So this year, in 2024, it was a major sponsor of the European Championships soccer tournament in Europe, which then ups its European profile.

In fact, on my way to this studio this morning, I passed a bus which was plastered from top to toe in AliExpress with the Euro 2024 livery on it.

So later on, he'll also add cloud computing, which is a bit like Amazon Cloud, a site offering discounts by buying in bulk, which is a bit like a Chinese Groupon, a video platform, which is a bit like YouTube.

A bit like this, a bit like that.

He's basically chopping and changing and taking bits that are working here and there and making them the number one kind of platform in China.

He's even got a grocery delivery app and an end-to-end delivery system that aims to get packages anywhere in China in 24 hours and anywhere in the world in 72 hours.

Wow, sounds like a bit like Jeff Bezos' company, Amazon, right?

And over the next decade, Alibaba cements itself as a dominant force in e-commerce in China.

And Jack funds all this growth with some massive investments.

In 2005, his old friend Master Yoshi Son had invited Jack to an entrepreneur event in California, and it was there that Jack bumped into Jerry Yang.

Remind us of who he is.

Who's one of the founders of Yahoo.

So one of the OG internet bosses, I would say.

They reportedly had a conversation that lasted just 10 minutes.

And within that 10 minutes, whatever Jack said clearly convinces Jerry to invest $1 billion in Alibaba for a 40% stake in the company.

Wow, so it's growing fast.

This is the perfect time to do something we've discussed a lot in these podcasts, which is to go public, to have a sale of shares, an IPO.

In 2007, Alibaba had its first IPO on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

It raised another $1.7 billion,

with Jack's share putting him on the verge of billionaire status.

And that was confirmed when the finance magazine Forbes Asia lists him as worth $1.3 billion in 2009.

So, Jack is officially a billionaire, but he isn't about to slow down.

So on Good Bad Billionaire, we often talk about the jump from a million to a billion being huge.

And the jump from one to two billion is the same amount, it's another billion, but I would say it's arguably a little bit easier.

But the point is, is that we've got lots of people who hit the billion dollar mark.

There are 3,000 of them in the world.

To go higher up the tree, it gets rarefied the higher up that mountain you climb.

There are only 200 worth 10 billion and there's only 25 in the world who have 60 billion which is what jack mar was worth at his peak so he's top of the tree i mean when you think about going from a million to a billion we've talked a lot about the work that goes into it but to get to the point where you are one in a group of only 25 people i mean you would all fit probably onto a single bus yeah not even half a bus a van yeah a big van to scale those heights you've got to be the right person with the right business at the right time.

And Jack Miles Alibaba, I think, ticks all of those boxes.

Yeah, it's one of those spectacular success stories that I think don't come around very often.

Yeah, I mean, the internet has spawned...

many of the billionaires we've talked about but this combines also as I say the sort of huge economic expansion in China and its reach out into the rest of the commercial world.

Right.

And this huge boom in Chinese consumerism, right?

People wanted to buy stuff coming out of the communist era.

People were kind of exposed to the marketplace, they were exposed to foreign goods for the first time.

Alibaba was perfectly placed to take advantage of that.

You're taking hundreds of millions of people from what you described as an almost agrarian economy into a consumer economy in a couple of decades.

It's incredible.

And you know, the incredible success of Alibaba was confirmed when they had that IPO.

First in Hong Kong, and then in 2014, they had another IPO on the New York Stock Exchange.

The biggest IPO in history, which to this day has only been surpassed once, and that was by Saudi Arabia's national oil company, which was worth I think something like two trillion dollars.

So that IPO raised twenty-one billion dollars for Alibaba.

It gave the company a market share of 168 billion.

It was the highest value in IPO history for an internet company.

That's incredible, because that includes Facebook, remember.

So, you know, it's it's huge.

So when you think about these big names like Bazar, Zuckerberg, really Jack Ma is

right up there.

Right up there at the top of the tree.

And it sees him become the richest man in China.

He's become a celebrity in his homeland.

His success is venerated.

The public nickname him Ma Baba or Daddy Mark.

His regular appearances around the world often go very viral.

He even at one point visited then U.S.

President Donald Trump in the White House in 2017.

Which is quite something when you give the rhetoric that the Trump White House was talking about China at that time.

Exactly.

He makes regular appearances in Time magazine's list the world's hundred most influential people.

And he even becomes a judge on a TV show called Africa's Business Heroes, which is a TV contest for budding African entrepreneurs.

It's a little bit like Shark Tank in the US or Dragon's Den in the UK.

The show is actually funded by his philanthropic foundation.

By 2020, his wealth has grown to $61 billion.

He's the richest man in the whole of Asia and he's planning an IPO for Ant Group.

Now, that's the holding company of Alipay and others, which is set to be even bigger than the Alibaba IPO.

But then something happens.

He gives a speech in Shanghai where he makes critical remarks about China's financial regulatory system.

This is a huge moment in this story, absolutely massive, because his success has always relied on having a reasonable relationship with the Chinese state.

It was even reported that he's a member of the Chinese Communist Party, but this time it looks like he's crossed the line.

And the line he crossed was that he criticized China's financial regulatory system, calling it outdated and suggested it stifled innovation.

He also compared Chinese banks to porn shops.

That it seems was enough to bring about a rapid change in his fortunes.

It's so interesting because those comments to someone based over in Western Europe or America probably doesn't even register as being anything other than mildly critical.

But I imagine if your relationship with the state has to remain uniformly positive so your businesses can function, otherwise you will face a crackdown.

That kind of thing is like lobbing a grenade.

Yeah, and who knows?

I mean, it may have been that they wanted to take a bit of a more interventionist approach on this kind of massive global success he was having and were looking for the slightest opportunity in which to do it.

We just don't know the answer to that.

Right, it's still a pretty opaque business as to what happened.

Yeah.

Because after making those comments, he'd mysteriously disappeared from public view.

He suddenly dropped as a judge on Africa's business heroes.

A spokesperson for Ali Barber at the time said due to a schedule conflict, Mr.

Ma could no longer be part of the final judge panel.

And most significantly, the Ant Group IPO is blocked by the Chinese government.

That is a big moment because that was going to be a huge IPO and Jack Ma reportedly loses $12 billion of his fortune in just a few months.

And Alibaba Group faces a Chinese antitrust investigation which focuses on allegations of monopolistic practices.

That investigation concluded with a fine of nearly a billion dollars in 2023.

So oddly, while Alibaba Group's annual revenues are higher than they've ever been, in total, the combined loss of value to Ant and Ali Barber of the state crackdown reported by CNN is $877 billion.

That is a lot of money.

That's nearly a trillion bucks.

Yeah, that is a lot of money to lose.

It makes me kind of break out in a sweat thinking about that.

And actually, in 2024, Jack's own wealth is down to about 24 billion.

Still a lot of money, but he's lost a significant chunk of money.

More than half, yeah.

But then comes a period of a few years where everyone's on the lookout for him.

There are some shadowy traces of him.

There's a couple of unconfirmed sightings of him doing things like playing golf, being on his super yacht.

So they'll begin these rumours of a comeback.

They do seem to be slightly premature, though.

The main thing that Jack has returned to is his first love teaching.

So he's actually now an honorary professor at Hong Kong University and a visiting professor at universities in Japan, Rwanda and Israel.

But he's certainly not the figure on the international stage he once was.

He's not the Jack Maher who used to be this kind of huge presence on the international stage.

If CMC's gone into semi-retirement, but he's still with us and it's time now for us to judge him.

Is he good, bad or just another billionaire?

So on our first category, we judge our billionaires on wealth.

Just how rich are they?

And on this one, he's got to score pretty highly.

The richest person in Asia at one point, at its peak, he had a fortune of $61 billion.

That puts him, I think, in the the top 10 easily.

Now he's worth just over a third of that, $24 billion.

He's about 80th on the world's rich list, 7th on China's rich list.

Still.

Still, I mean, $61 billion is not to be sniffed at.

Yeah, I think having been China's richest man at a time when vast fortunes were being amassed as China

economy expanded so rapidly, the internet expanded rapidly, I think it puts him really high on the list.

And also, remember, we do save a little bit of this category about how he spends it he's got the gulfstream jet he's got the super yacht he's got the vineyards he's got that with his own wine yeah i'm gonna give him a good nine on this one oh yeah oh well i was gonna go for an eight but then i remember the vineyards and what was it the trout stream the trout stream the maple syrup yeah okay it's a nine out of ten okay so nine out of ten very high score there we have another category rags to riches how far have they come from where they started to where they got to and this one again he's got a score pretty high yeah i would give him maybe even an eight out of ten for this.

Yeah, because if you go back to him, his parents were storytelling musicians in Mao's China, not the best profession to have during the Cultural Revolution.

No, exactly.

And they really suffered as a result of that.

He went to, and by his own admission, a terrible university.

He kind of languished doing teaching for a bit.

Yeah, okay, I'm going to give him a nine out of ten.

So eight from me, nine from you.

Nine from me.

Villainy.

Now, there has been some criticism, and this is not just of Jack Marr generally, but of the 996 working schedules at some companies like Alibaba.

That means working from 9am to 9pm six days a week, high-pressure environments, demanding performance targets, lack of job security.

You know, it's a pretty attritional kind of environment, I would say.

Yeah, having said that, Alibaba has responded to some of these criticisms.

They've implemented some measures to improve work-life balance, like having flexible working.

They've promoted employee well-being programs.

But there are concerns about the vast collections of data big tech companies accrue.

That's not, again, this is not an Alibaba specific kind of concern.

But in China, you know, it's really hard to go about your daily life without even interacting with an Alibaba app once, you know, just Alipay alone.

So there are always questions in China, at least, about what data is being passed on to the Chinese authorities.

Yeah, and that's a debate that continues to go on as we speak.

There's also been reports of people getting to lots of debt via Alipay and the safety measures that need to be put in place.

But you could say that about lots of apps.

So apart from

a brutal working environment, which I think is common of China generally, I don't see any massive villainy on Jack Marr's part.

No, it doesn't seem like he's screwed anyone over in his race to get to a billion, which is actually quite unusual for quite a lot of our billionaires.

There's always someone.

Yeah, that's true.

Also worth remembering on the relationship with the state, going back to that quote that you gave us earlier about on the relationship with the chinese government be in love with them but don't marry them yeah was that was that the right one yes it's basically it basically translates to get into bed with them but don't put a ring on it oh that's probably the like simpler explanation from what he said okay all right so villainy i don't know i'm gonna i don't see anything particularly villainous here uh i may be being naive about this but i'm gonna give it a four yeah i would give him a four it doesn't really seem like he's been personally villainous i mean obviously the buck stops of him because he was the boss of of Alibaba, but a lot of these things that we've just discussed are actually quite common to tech companies.

I would say that what AliExpress and Alibaba do is that they create probably what is so much product and so much waste which they're then shipping all around the world.

So the environmental impact of something like that, I think is probably huge.

Yeah you could level the same thing and a number of other companies.

Alibaba did set out some ambitious environment goals in 2021 including achieving carbon neutrality in their own operations by 2030 and enabling and engaging the platform ecosystem to reduce emissions by 1.5 gigatons over 15 years.

In 2023, they announced they'd reduced their own CO2 emissions by 13%.

So some progress, but does that mitigate the damage?

Yeah, I would give it a 4 out of 10 because, and I know plenty of people who buy things on AliExpress, and the main reason you buy things is because they are dirt cheap.

And that encourages you to spend a lot of money.

you know maybe not as much as you would spend if you went into a shop in the uk and bought it on the high street but you're buying a lot of stuff that you probably don't need which probably contributes quite a lot to the environmental impact of something like alibaba yeah encourages you to buy stuff throw it away buy again blah blah blah blah blah exactly okay um okay four each on that one philanthropy is another one of the categories what have they given away of their vast wealth so in 2006 alibaba launched its first organized philanthropy to help underprivileged underprivileged mothers in China.

By 2020, some 20,000 mums had been given free training and funding to become online entrepreneurs.

In 2010, Alibaba started to earmark 0.3% of its revenues, not profits, revenues, which is a big difference, to philanthropy.

The Alibaba Foundation was set up to manage that philanthropic effort with $56 billion in revenues for 2019.

0.3% is $168 million, although Alibaba hasn't disclosed the actual figure they put into the foundation in 2014, Jack set up the Jack Ma Foundation and he put aside shares in Alibaba before that record-breaking IPA that we talked about.

And in 2019, it was reported that the foundation's shares were worth $4.6 billion and it had paid out over $300 million, which is less than a tenth of what's in there.

So, causes have included $14 million to protect wetlands in Hangzhou, a joint pledge with the Ali Pei Foundation and Joe Tsai Foundation, and a $143 million pledge to support the development of women's soccer in China, causes in Africa, Australia, and the Middle East.

So quite a global, if slightly China-centric kind of approach to philanthropy.

Yeah, well, that's nothing wrong with a China-centric if you're a Chinese billionaire.

I mean, I imagine there's quite a US-centric bent to lots of US billionaires' charitable efforts.

So there's a few hundred million there.

There's a few billion apparently in the foundation.

It's not clear how much they've distributed, but those shares in the foundation are pretty big chunk of his overall wealth.

So I'm going to say I'm going to give him a five and hope that I would upgrade that five when I see more evidence of what's been paid out.

Yeah, I think it's quite unusual to have someone put aside shares to give to their foundation.

I've not heard of it before with any of our billionaires.

I think, well, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation definitely have Microsoft stock in there.

That's the foundation of Bill and Melinda Gates's foundation's vast fortune.

Well, their vast fortune and also the foundation's fortune.

That's where most of that comes from.

So it's kind of similar in that regard.

Maybe I'll be more generous and give him a six out of ten.

Okay.

It does seem like he's given away more than you would expect.

Okay.

All right.

We'll keep our eye on that one.

And then power.

One of our tests that we always use is, could this person pick up the phone and talk to a head of state?

And I would say this is a definite yes.

Yeah.

So he actually met with a lot of heads of state and business leaders when he was at Alibaba Group.

So they discussed trade, investment, innovation, social development.

So he's out and about.

Yeah, and he's one of those interesting people which is highly anglicized, if you like, in his business approach and his business network of contacts.

And yet, if we are, you know,

if some theories are to be believed, has very close ties or some ties with the Communist Party and what have you.

So he's an interesting figure as an interlocutor in some ways between governments, between Western governments and Chinese governments.

And actually, according to the Financial Times in 2021, Jack reportedly sits on UN committees with a rododex, including kings, queens, presidents, and prime ministers.

So I would say he ranks quite highly with power.

Yeah, I don't think he's as powerful as Zuckerberg and Murdoch, who I think we gave nines or tens to, but I'm going to give him an eight on power.

I think he's a very powerful figure.

He's someone who can move quite easily between Washington and Beijing.

And I think that makes him a very powerful figure.

I'm going to give him an eight.

Yeah, I'll give him an eight out of ten.

He's definitely a really interesting personality.

Yeah.

And then legacy is our last category.

Have they left something behind that will, you know, endure?

Again, one of the tests we apply to this is that if he hadn't done it, would someone else have done it?

And I think the answer to that is definitely yes.

Oh, yeah.

Some other Chinese entrepreneur would have come up with something like Alibaba.

Yeah.

But there was something about his charm, his energy, the fact that he spoke flawless English, which allowed him to become the personification, if you like, of Chinese commerce beyond Chinese borders.

But,

But then he sailed a bit too close to the wind and was slapped down when he was critical of the Chinese system.

So maybe that is meant to be a sanitary lesson.

So he's got a legacy in that respect.

I also think maybe his legacy is yet to be determined because you can obviously see, you know, we've talked about the huge amounts of advertising Alibaba have spent on the Euros this year.

You know, I've seen Alibaba adverts for the first time, like in the last few years in the UK.

I think if they managed to nail the Western expansion, it could be an even huger story.

Yeah.

And I think that is very much in the works.

Okay, so legacy

eight?

I would give it a seven because I think, you know, you could add on more points.

Like depending on how it goes in Western Europe and America, it could maybe even surpass Amazon if they play their cards right.

I'm sure Jeff Bezos is losing sleep over it.

And also, the reason I'm giving him an eight also is because of his place in Chinese Chinese culture as this kind of folk hero.

I mean, I think that, you know, like Richard Branson was a well-known entrepreneur in the UK and people wanted to be rich like Richard Branson.

I'm imagining that Jack Maher is a very similar character in China.

And therefore, he is a lightning rod for Chinese entrepreneurialism, which has clearly been a world-changing phenomenon.

So eight out of ten from you.

Yeah.

And eight out of ten from me.

Did I manage to talk you up?

Yeah, I think.

That's the first time I've ever done that.

It's okay.

It's a victory for me.

Eight out of billionaire first, and then we've got then the ultimate decision: is he good, bad, or just another billionaire?

I think he's just another billionaire, right?

I think it's probably one of the easiest cases for me to decide ever because his story is really interesting, but he hasn't done other than his philanthropy, which you know is quite impressive, but not half the course, half of the course, yeah.

But he isn't bad either, yeah.

So, yeah, he's just a clearest cut case of just another billionaire for me.

Albeit in a very rich one.

Yeah.

I'm going to agree with you.

I think he's just another billionaire.

You know, having met him, he seems like a really nice guy.

He doesn't seem like he's out to conquer the world with evil intent.

If you think that the Amazonification or the alibabification of retail and the world is a bad thing, then you may think that he is bad.

But if he hadn't done it, somebody else would.

So Jack Ma, you are just another billionaire.

A rich one.

A very rich one, but you were even richer at one point.

So who have we got next episode?

So we've got South Africa's first black billionaire.

In fact, he remains the country's only black billionaire.

He's also part of a power couple.

His wife is considered one of South Africa's most glamorous women and is an entrepreneur in her own right.

And his sister is the current First Lady of South Africa, making him probably the most well-connected businessman in the country.

He is Patrice Mozzepe, a byword for black wealth and success in post-apartheid South Africa.

Good Bad Ballina is a BBC World Service podcast produced by Mark Ward with additional production by Emma Bettridge.

James Cook is the editor, and it's a BBC Studios production for BBC World Service.

For the BBC World Service, the senior podcast producer is Kat Collins, and the podcast commissioning editor is John Mannell.

If you enjoyed this podcast, then please rate and review us.

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