Name: The Rise, Fall and Return of Jack Ma
Uploaded: 2025-11-21T18:05:05.000Z
Duration: 12 min 4 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Alibaba founder Jack Ma's career has been anything but ordinary.

Adverbs of manner

And you only need to watch these four clips to understand why.

Here he is in his apartment in 1999 pitching Alibaba to his co founders.

Fast forward a decade and a half and Jack Ma leads one of the world's largest Internet Internet companies and is widely considered China's most famous businessman.

We have more than 10, 20 million small business using our platform and 60% of them.

This business never exist before Alibaba jump to 2021 and his story takes a dramatic turn.

Nobody is ruling out the possibility that Jack Ma could either be on the run or that perhaps he has been detained.

And just when the world thought he had stepped away from the public eye for good.

Chinese President X meeting with some of the biggest names in the country's tech sector, including Alibaba's co founder, Jack Ma.

Jack Ma's journey spans over 25 years, from early triumphs to sudden silence and a surprising return.

Some called it Jack Magic that he was able to get people to rally to him.

Even though he didn't come from wealth or power or tech, he was basically just a guy who had a dream and the ability to mobilize a team.

The hallmark of Jack and his personality is that he never gave up.

But like Icarus, you start to think that he flew too close to the sun.

I'm Arjun Karpel and I've covered tech for more than a decade with three of those years in China, reporting on the country's most fascinating giants.

And over the course of this episode I I'll explore the company's most famous character, founder Jack Ma.

Jack Ma's journey is a quintessential rags to riches tale.

Born in 1964 to a modest family, his early life offered few hints of the global titan he would become.

Ma came to age just as China began to open its doors to the world, sparking teenage Ma's fascination with the West.

Our two peoples tonight hold the future of the world in our hands.

He actually learned his English on the street.

He would go up to foreign tourists and ask to show them his town for free so he could practice his English.

Jack Ma faced repeated rejection early on.

He failed China's college entrance exams twice before eventually being admitted to university and earning a degree in English.

When he graduated from university, he also applied to at least 14 different jobs and was rejected.

There are a number of other instances in which he tried to do things where he encountered resistance.

In 1994, Ma launched one of China's first translation agencies.

Just a year later, his English proficiency earned him a ticket to the United States, where he worked as a translator for a government project.

It was during this visit that he encountered the Internet, a discovery that changed his life.

He realized that platforms lacked information about China, and that got him thinking.

Jack Barr was early to discover the Internet, but

he was a bit late to get the right kind of company for him as a vehicle.

He created a company that had a lot of competition, this Yellow Pages company that the local government actually kind of quashed.

His early experience as an Internet entrepreneur was tough, but he came back strong with Alibaba.

In 1999, Jack Ma Co founded Alibaba with 17 other people, a diverse mix of former colleagues, university friends, students and entrepreneurs from across various industries.

I first met him just after he'd founded the company.

So I went to the small apartment and you would walk in, you could see all the shoes of all the founders outside.

You could tell that they were working around the clock.

Maybe half of those people had already worked with Jack in earlier companies.

So the people around Jack Ma are almost like disciples.

And because he's not a tech guy, he's had to bring in smart people.

Alibaba raised $25 million in venture seed capital from Goldman Sachs and SoftBank, whose founder Masayoshi Son invested $20 million alone.

I joined the company around the time that the Goldman Sachs investment happened, and

it was before the SoftBank investment, which was a few months later.

And then When Mahsa invested $20 million into Alibaba, someone who had already had a meaningful track record in investing in companies like Yahoo.

I think that added extra enthusiasm to us as a team.

Another game changing investment came in 2005 when Yahoo acquired a 40% stake in Alibaba for $1 billion.

What's important to understand that there's a triangular relationship between Jack Ma, Jerry Yang, the founder of Yahoo, and

So Masayoshi San of SoftBank basically made Yahoo a global success by a big investment early on in Japan.

So without Masayo Chisan, these three gentlemen wouldn't come together.

But at the time, Jerry Yang was criticized actually for handing over the keys of Yahoo China to Alibaba.

People thought this was a mistake, but it turned out to be an extremely savvy investment.

Under Jack Ma's leadership, Alibaba overcame early hurdles and rapidly expanded, transforming it from a scrappy startup to a formidable force in global tech, Alibaba really grew as a result of what were the perceived needs in the market.

China had entered the WTO a few years after we started Alibaba and suddenly there was this need to facilitate global trade.

Taobao and TMALL really fulfilled what was a growing consumer demand for products by creating Alipay.

They actually pioneered this whole financial inclusion and digital payments.

Beyond that, there were a number of other areas that Alibaba started to go into.

Everything they should control themselves, buy and sell.

And our philosophy is that we think using Internet technology, we can make every company become Amazon.

In 2014, Alibaba's record breaking public debut catapulted Ma onto the world stage.

Alibaba came into the New York Stock Exchange with this very large ipo, the biggest in history.

A lot of people suddenly started paying attention to, who is Jack Ma?

I'm 50 years old, my job is making money.

Jack Ma at this point became fated as regular speaker at Davos.

So we'd have the situation when presidents or prime ministers or princes and princesses would come to Hangzhou to meet Jack Ma.

Probably fair to say there's no more high profile entrepreneur who has US exposure than him to the Chines.

We had a great meeting and a great, great entrepreneur, one of the best in the world.

And he loves this country and he loves China.

This started to show actually some danger for the company that Jack Ma himself was perhaps getting a little bit too much attention.

So from 2013, we saw the arrival of Xi Jinping as president of China and head of the Communist Party.

Under Xi Jinping, we started to see more tensions, partly because of the sheer size of companies like Alibaba, particularly where they started moving from E commerce into areas like finance.

Jack Ma stepped down as CEO of Alibaba in 2013, but

remained chairman until 2019, when he formally ended his leadership position at the company.

The departure was framed as a move to focus on other ventures, including Ant Group, the owner of Alipay, one of the world's largest digital payments platforms.

Ma was deeply involved with preparing Ant's IPO, which in 2020 was projected to raise a staggering $35 billion.

That would have made it the world's biggest.

And because Jack Ma controlled over half of ANT shares, it would have made him an even wealthier man too.

I want to share Some very big news that has been developing this morning out of China.

The Shanghai stock market just tonight had said that it is delaying the ipo.

I'd arrived in Shanghai two days before the IPO to report on it for cnbc.

I didn't even checked into my hotel yet and my phone was blowing up with messages about the canceled ipo.

We were trying to work out what had happened.

Jack Ma gave a pretty hard hitting speech in Shanghai at something called the BUN Financial Summit in October 2020.

He'd been somewhat critical of regulation, but

he said it in a very forceful way directly to regulators and former regulators.

What happened during the ANT situation is that this company had really pioneered not just digital payments, but

also microloans, which were being given not just to urban consumers but also to rural farmers.

I think that there was a concern about enabling borrowing at that scale without the traditional collateralized system that would ensure that the risks were mitigated.

And it went straight, we understand, to Xi Jinping, who basically canceled the ipo.