Tencent is the company behind WeChat, a multi-purpose app which is like a mixture of WhatsApp, Google News, Uber, and Deliveroo. It has around a billion users.
Ma is the company's second-largest shareholder and largest individual shareholder with 8.6% of total shares, according to MarketScreener. Naspers, a South African internet conglomerate, owns 31.1%.
Pony and Tencent's names, as well as Ma's own surname, are all horse references.
Although his given name is Huateng, Ma also goes by Pony — a nickname likely chosen for its English meaning.
Pony and Tencent's names, as well as Ma's own surname, are all horse references. "Ma" means horse in Chinese, while Tencent's Chinese name, teng xun, stands for "an era of messaging in the speed of 10,000 horses running."
Tencent's first product was an adaptation of Israeli instant messaging ICQ for the Chinese market, according to The Economist.
Ma held a series of ten bruising meetings behind closed doors, where independent experts took the company to task, according to Bloomberg.
WeChat and its sister service in China, Weixin, recorded 1.1 billion monthly active users at the end of March 2019, according to Tencent's 2019 Q1 report.
Weixin and WeChat are formally the same entity — Weixin is for users with a Chinese telephone number, whereas WeChat is for those with foreign numbers.
The photo above shows a horde of people in China trying to give money to street musicians via a QR code, which is linked to the recipient's account.
It was taken by former Business Insider reporter Harrison Jacobs during a 2018 trip to China.
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Tencent has a stake in WeBank, China's first digital-only private bank, as well as in Chinese and international game developers.
Source: Bloomberg
In July 2017, Chinese state newspaper People's Daily said the game spread "negative energy," Forbes reported.
The accusations came even after Tencent announced restrictions limiting younger users to shorter game times — up to an hour for users under 12, and up to two hours for users between 12 and 18 — following complaints that children were getting addicted to the game.
Source: Tencent 2018 Q4 results
The list, published by the state-run People's Daily newspaper, also confirmed that Jack Ma was a member of the Communist Party.
Pony Ma was named as "non-partisan."
Ma led his company's leadership committee on a two-day hike through the Gobi Desert for their off-site retreat last year, according to Bloomberg.
The trip — meant to represent the "culture of the company" — consisted of two 26-kilometer hikes spread across two days, Bloomberg reported.
Some members petitioned to abandon the trip and go home early, but Ma and Tencent president Martin Lau insisted on continuing.
"The trip is representative of the culture of the company," Lau later said. "We are much more focused on the direction of where we are going and the process than the share price."
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