Jack Ma is resigning from SoftBank's board. Here's a look at how the cofounder of Alibaba and the richest person in China built his fortune.

Advertisement

On Monday, SoftBank announced that Ma would resign from the troubled investment fund's board of directors.

When the coronavirus pandemic brought the world to a halt in March, Ma sourced and shipped N95 face masks and COVID-19 testing kits to over 100 countries dealing with shortages, including the U.S.

Advertisement

Ma picked Daniel Zhang, who has been the CEO of Alibaba since 2015, to replace him as chairman. According to CNN Business, Ma is now pivoting to full-time philanthropy.

Ma stepped down as Alibaba's chairman on September 10, 2019, his 55th birthday. The company threw him a farewell party in an 80,000-seat stadium in Hangzhou, and Ma performed with other Alibaba executives.

Advertisement

Company lore has it that Ma came up with the name "Alibaba" while sitting in a San Francisco coffee shop. In "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves," a secret password unlocks a trove filled with unbelievable riches. Ma's company has, in a way, revealed the potential of small and mid-sized businesses across the globe.

The company also hosts annual talent shows, and Ma is a natural entertainer. At a company anniversary event, he dressed up as a punk rocker for a performance in front of 20,000 Alibaba employees.

Advertisement

Ma is something of a celebrity in China, and crowds of people show up to listen to him speak.

In 2017, Ma made headlines after meeting President Donald Trump. Despite Trump's protectionist attitude towards trade, Ma said China and the United States were not about to be drawn into a trade war. "Give Trump some time. He's open-minded," Ma told a panel at Davos in January.

Advertisement

Ma has largely kept his family life out of the spotlight. He married Zhang Ying, a teacher he met at school, after they graduated in the late 1980s. They have two children — a daughter and a son.

One of his greatest passions is the environment. According to Fortune, Ma developed an interest in environmentalism when a member of his wife's family became sick with an illness that Ma suspected was caused by pollution. He sits on the global board of The Nature Conservancy and spoke during a session of the Clinton Global Initiative in 2015. He has also, according to Fortune, been instrumental in funding a 27,000-acre nature reserve in China.

Advertisement

In March 2013, Alibaba spent a reported $49.7 million on a Gulfstream G550, mostly for Ma's use.

His big splurge was a vineyard and a chateau in Bordeaux, France, in 2016.

Advertisement

Alibaba's success may have made Ma an extremely wealthy man, but he has made very few flashy purchases, and he still has some pretty modest hobbies. "I don't think he has changed much, he is still that old style," Xiao-Ping Chen, a friend of Ma, told USA Today. He likes reading and writing kung fu fiction, playing poker, meditating, and practicing​ tai chi.

In 2019, Singles' Day generated $13 billion in sales in the first hour alone — just after Taylor Swift performed at the event's opening gala in Shanghai.

Advertisement

The biggest day in the calendar for Alibaba is China's "Singles' Day" — a retaliation to Valentine's Day — which supposedly celebrates the country's singletons. In 2016, the site recorded nearly $20 billion in sales in 24 hours.

Alibaba employees threw a big party at the company's Hangzhou headquarters to celebrate the IPO. One employee even took the party as the perfect opportunity to propose. Ma told employees at a press conference that he hopes they use their newfound wealth to become "a batch of genuinely noble people, a batch of people who are able to help others, and who are kind and happy."

Advertisement

Ma's fortune comes from his 7.8% stake in Alibaba and a nearly 50% stake in payment-processing service Alipay.

The company's $150 billion IPO was the largest offering for a US-listed company in the history of the New York Stock Exchange. It also made Ma the richest person in China, with an estimated worth of $25 billion at the time. His net worth has now grown to $43 billion, according to Forbes.

Advertisement

Alibaba went public on September 19, 2014. "Today what we got is not money. What we got is the trust from the people," Ma told CNBC at the time.

Ma stepped down from his post as CEO in 2013, staying on as executive chairman.

Advertisement

In 2014, Ma told Bloomberg he knew Alibaba had made it big when another customer offered to pay his restaurant bill. The customer, Ma said in the interview, had left Ma a note that read: "I'm your customer of Alibaba group, I made a lot of money and I know you don't make any money. I'll pay the bill for you."

In 2005, Yahoo invested $1 billion in Alibaba in exchange for about a 40% stake in the company. This was huge for Alibaba — at the time it was trying to beat eBay in China — and it would eventually be an enormous win for Yahoo too, netting it $10 billion in Alibaba's IPO alone.

Advertisement

When the company first became profitable, Ma gave each employee a can of Silly String to go wild with.

He was known for maintaining a sense of fun at Alibaba. In the early 2000s, when the company decided to start Taobao, its eBay competitor, he had his team do handstands during breaks to keep their energy levels up.

Advertisement

Soon, the service started to attract members from all over the world. By October 1999, the company had raised $5 million from Goldman Sachs and $20 million from SoftBank, a Japanese telecom company that also invests in technology companies. The team remained close-knit and scrappy. "We will make it because we are young and we never, never give up," Ma said to a gathering of employees.

Though his first two ventures failed, four years later he gathered 17 of his friends in his apartment and convinced them to invest in his vision for an online marketplace he called "Alibaba." The site allowed exporters to post product listings that customers could buy directly.

Advertisement

Ma had no experience with computers or coding, but he was captivated by the internet when he used it for the first time during a trip to the US in 1995. He had recently started a translation business and made the trip to help a Chinese firm recover a payment. Ma's first online search was "beer," but he was surprised to find that no Chinese beers turned up in the results. It was then that he decided to found an internet company for China.

At the World Economic Forum in 2016, Jack Ma revealed he has been rejected from Harvard — 10 times.

Advertisement

He received more than a dozen rejections — including from KFC — before being hired as an English teacher. Ma was a natural with his students and loved his job — though he only made $12 a month at a local university.

After high school, he applied to go to college — but failed the entrance exam twice. He finally passed on the third try, going on to attend Hangzhou Teachers Institute. He graduated in 1988 and started applying to as many jobs as he could.

Advertisement

After President Nixon visited Hangzhou in 1972, Ma's hometown became a tourist mecca. As a teenager, Ma started waking up early to visit the city's main hotel, offering visitors tours of the city in exchange for English lessons. The nickname "Jack" was given to him by a tourist he befriended.

As a kid, Ma liked collecting crickets and making them fight, and was able to distinguish the size and type of cricket just by the sound it made.

Advertisement

Ma was scrawny and often got into fights with classmates. "I was never afraid of opponents who were bigger than I," he recalls in "Alibaba," a book by Liu Shiying and Martha Avery.

He and his siblings grew up at a time when communist China was increasingly isolated from the West, and his family didn't have much money when they were young.

Advertisement

Jack Ma — born Ma Yun — was born on September 10, 1964, in Hangzhou, southeastern China. He has an older brother and a younger sister.