Jack Ma is now worth is estimated $25 billion, which is included his 7.8% stake in Alibaba and about 50% of Alipay a payment processing service.
Jack Ma (aka Ma Yun) was born on October 15, 1964, in Hangzhou, in the southeastern part of China. He has an elder brother and a younger sister. He and his siblings grew up at a time when Communist China was becoming increasingly isolated from the West, and their families didn't have much money when they were young.
Jack Ma was rude and often got into fights with classmates. "I was never afraid of opponents who were bigger than me," he recalls in the book "Alibaba" by Liu Sheng and Martha Avery. Still, Ma was just as curious as any other child. He loved to collect and fight crickets and was able to distinguish the size and type of cricket just by its sound.
After then US President Richard Nixon visited Hangzhou in 1972, Ma's hometown became a tourist hot point. As a teenager, Ma began getting up early to visit the city's central hotels, offering guests tours of the city in exchange for English lessons. The nickname "Jack" was given to him by a tourist he befriended.
Without money or connections, Jack Ma's only way forward was through education. After high school, he applied to college—but failed the entrance exam twice. After a lot of studying, he finally passed on the third try, to attend the Hangzhou Teachers Institute. He graduated in 1988 and started applying for more and more jobs.
He received more than a dozen rejections - including from KFC - before being hired as an English teacher at a local University. Jack Ma was a natural with his students and loved his job — even though he only earned $12 per month at a local university.
Jack Ma had no experience with computers or coding but was fascinated by the Internet when he first used it during a trip to the United States in 1995. Ma's first online search was for "beer," but he was very much surprised to find that no Chinese beer came up in the results. It was then that he decided to found an Internet company for China.
Although his first two ventures failed, four years later he gathered 17 friends in his apartment and convinced them to invest in him and his vision for an online marketplace that would name "Alibaba". The site allowed exporters to post product listings that customers could buy directly.
Soon, the service began to attract members from all over the world. By October 1999, the company had raised $5 from Goldman Sachs and $20 from Softbank, a Japanese telecom that also invests in technology. The team is tight-knit and dysfunctional - "We'll make it and we never give up," I told an employee gathering.
In 2005, Yahoo invested $1 billion in Alibaba in exchange for a roughly 40% stake in the company. It was huge for Alibaba — trying to beat eBay in China at the time — and it would ultimately be a huge win for Yahoo, which raised $10 billion in Alibaba's IPO alone.
Jack Ma stepped down as CEO in 2013, remaining as executive chairman. Alibaba went public on September 19. "What we got today is not money. What we got is people's trust," Jack Ma told CNBC. The company's $150 billion IPO was the most extensive offering for a US-listed company in the history of the New York Stock Exchange. It also made Ma China's richest man with an estimated worth of $25 billion.
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