Before his disappearance, Jack Ma was the richest Chinese. The founder and CEO of the e-commerce company Alibaba was worth more than 50 billion euros. The eccentric English teacher had developed that skill over ten years, turning his Chinese version of Amazon, eBay and other e-commerce companies into a global player.
At the same time, Jack Ma has been the most outspoken critic of Chinese government regulators who wanted to bend big tech companies to their will. According to him, they have held back innovation: “You can’t manage an airport the way you manage a train station,” he said at a summit in Shanghai in October 2020, “we can’t manage the future with the resources of the past.”
