Jack Ma’s net worth has seen a rapid decline in the last few years because of China’s policies against billionaires. How are things looking now?
If anyone ever opened a history book, they should know that billionaires are pretty much the antithesis of Communism, right? And yet, one of the richest people in the world, Jack Ma, comes precisely from Communist China. And that’s why Ma’s home country never looked favorably on his rise in wealth and power.
Jack Ma was an average student who did not have high ambitions at the start. He struggled a lot with China’s university entrance exams, failing them twice, and originally wanted to be an English teacher.
But Jack Ma also showed incredible resilience: the first time he attempted the university entrance exam he scored only 1 point in math, which became 89 points the third time he tried.
In 1995, Ma visited the United States with some friends and discovered the internet for the first time in his life. He was fascinated by this invention, but was disappointed when he found out that China was pretty much cut off the net entirely.
Ma understood the potential of the internet, especially for a massive and fast growing market like China was in the 1990s. He founded his first website and immediately got offered financial support by many Chinese investors.
Jack Ma would later invent Alibaba, an ecommerce site that already gathered $25 million in venture capital by 2000. Alibaba would go on to become the biggest ecommerce site in the world, being worth more than Amazon and Ebay combined.
However, Jack Ma fall would be as fast as his rise.
A Communist paria
The Chinese Communist Party never had much respect for billionaires. As a communist country, China always put the community before the individual, though they didn’t get many chances to do so in the late 1900s.
In the decades after World War II, China was an extremely underdeveloped country, but things started to change fast at the end of the 1990s.
Since then, China managed to pull up hundreds of millions of its citizens from poverty, becoming the world’s second biggest economy after the United States.
Despite such immense growth could be attributed to Capitalist policies as well, China never lost its grip on Communist ideology. And Jack Ma, the richest man in Asia with its net worth of $34 billion, was enemy number one.
In 2020, Chinese regulators forced Jack Ma to sell off some of his and Alibaba’s companies. The billionaire disappeared from public life for several months, complying with Chinese laws after his sudden reappearance.
Now, Jack Ma pretty much never shows up in public, and is always seen outside of China’s borders. He has been seen in Australia, Japan and Thailand, and his empire has shrinked after the Chinese crackdown.
Currently, his net worth is $23 billion, with a loss of $9 billion in just two years. However, if he is actually safe from the Chinese government’s hands, his empire could maybe avoid complete dissolution.
