He taught English before any of it. Jack Ma co-founded Alibaba in 1999 and turned it into one of the largest e-commerce and technology companies on earth, which made him the face the world recognised when it thought about China's internet boom.

The platforms did something specific: they put enormous numbers of small sellers in front of enormous numbers of buyers, and Chinese commerce rearranged itself around that. Singles' Day shopping volumes reached a scale nothing outside China has matched. The record-breaking listing made him globally famous.

He sold not technology but belief — that small businesses could reach the world through a screen.

As a communicator he was unconventional and very good — evangelising the idea that the internet would let small businesses reach the world, and getting quoted endlessly on ambition and resilience along the way.

Then he stepped back, and largely disappeared from public life. The regulatory climate had shifted, the listing of affiliated fintech firm Ant Group was halted, and the retreat followed. It is a career that shows both what building a technology empire in China can achieve and what it can cost.

Ma grew up in Hangzhou and taught himself English by guiding foreign tourists around the city's West Lake. He failed the university entrance exam twice before getting into Hangzhou Teachers College, and was turned down for a string of jobs. A 1995 trip to the United States introduced him to the internet, and his first venture, China Pages, was an early online business directory.

Alibaba was founded in his flat with seventeen co-founders. SoftBank invested in 2000 and Yahoo bought a large stake in 2005. Taobao, launched in 2003, beat eBay in China partly by charging sellers no fees, and Alipay grew out of the need to build trust between buyers and sellers who had never met. Alibaba's 2014 listing in New York raised 25 billion dollars, then the largest IPO in history.

Ma stepped down as chairman in 2019. In October 2020 he publicly criticised China's financial regulators, and weeks later Ant Group's planned listing, set to be the world's largest, was suspended. Alibaba was fined 18.2 billion yuan in an antitrust case in 2021 and split itself into six business groups in 2023. Ma has since kept a low profile, and in 2025 attended a meeting of private entrepreneurs with President Xi Jinping.