The founder of Alibaba found himself in Tokyo. Jack Ma is hiding from the Chinese regime. He has reasons

For years, Jack Ma was not only the richest man in China, but also a real star of the technology industry in this country. He was compared to Bill Gates, Steve Jobs or even Elon Musk. Suffice it to say that he was the first entrepreneur from the People’s Republic of China to appear on the cover of Forbes magazine.

Not without reason. In 1999, an IT teacher from Hangzhou founded the company Alibabawhich over the next two decades became one of the most important technology concerns not only in China but also in the world. In October 2020, Bloomberg estimated the Chinese businessman’s fortune at $ 61 billion.

In 2019, Jack Ma resigned as CEO of Alibaba, but continued a number of other business ventures. And it was one of them that drew the ire of the Chinese regime against him.

Forbes cover photo: Forbes

From billionaire to fugitive

At the end of 2020 Ant, whose Jack Ma was the largest shareholder. Ant is a fintech company operating at the intersection of finance and technology. It is the operator of Alipay, the main online payment system in China.

Ant’s debut, which was supposed to be the largest IPO in history at that time (the company wanted to raise approx. USD 37 billion from the market) however, it was abruptly canceled and Jack Ma himself – almost literally – vanished into thin air.

A Chinese billionaire had to leave the country because of his statements regarding the financial market, which directed the wrath of the communist regime against him. Ma has been critical of traditional banks, comparing them to pawnshops and touting the benefits of digital banking, saying that credit decisions in the future should be based on data, not customer collateral.

This all coincided with Beijing’s announced “shared prosperity” policy – the idea that the rich should share their wealth with the poor – and with the Alibaba stock crash. The stock market value of the concern fell at an express pace by USD 76 billion.

“The Communist Party showed who’s in charge here. Jack Ma could be the richest man in the world, but that doesn’t mean anything. It turned from the deal of the century into the shock of the century,” Francis Lun, director general of GEO, assessed in November 2020 in an interview with the agency. Securities.

Jack Ma is hiding in Tokyo. He still fears retribution from the regime

For the next two years, Jack Ma did not appear in public, and almost no one knew where he really was. There were even speculations suggesting that perhaps the entrepreneur was just another victim of the Chinese regime.

when he attended an online conference related to the presentation of awards for teachers. Later, he was seen on the superyacht Zen, which in the summer of 2021 docked in the port of Mallorca. Now the journalists of the “Financial Times” have found his trail.

that Jack Ma and his family have been in Tokyo for six months. The billionaire is also expected to make regular business trips to the United States and Israel. However, he cannot return to China.

Currently, Bloomberg estimates Jack Ma’s fortune at $30.7 billionmaking him the 36th richest person in the world.