Jack Ma

Jack Ma (Ma Yun, born 1964) was the central figure among the founders who started Alibaba in Hangzhou, China, in 1999. Alibaba's own introduction describes the company as "established in 1999 by 18 people led by Jack Ma, a former English teacher from Hangzhou". A teacher, not an engineer, became the public face of the company that built much of China's online retail and payments infrastructure.

How the founder left the chair

For years his title was Executive Chairman. On 10 September 2018 Alibaba announced a succession plan: exactly a year later, on 10 September 2019 — the company's twentieth anniversary — chief executive Daniel Zhang would succeed him as chairman. Ma would stay on as executive chairman for the intervening twelve months and complete his term as a director at the 2020 annual general meeting.

The plan ran on schedule. A Form 6-K dated 11 September 2019 reports that Zhang became chairman effective 10 September.

In the letter attached to the announcement, Ma tied his departure to his first career. "Teachers always want their students to exceed them," he wrote, and of what came next: "I also want to return to education." The 2018 release adds that Ma is a lifetime partner in the Alibaba Partnership, which under the company's articles has the right to nominate a majority of the board. Leaving the chair did not mean leaving the company's governance structure.

November 2020 — Ant Group's listing is suspended

What changed the course of his career was not Alibaba itself but its affiliate Ant Group, the operator of the Alipay payment service. Ant was preparing a dual listing in Shanghai and Hong Kong that would have raised just under US$34.5 billion — the largest initial public offering on record had it gone ahead.

As CNBC reported it, the sequence was:

Any causal link between the speech and the suspension appears in CNBC's report only as the view of a consultant it interviewed; it was not the authorities' stated reason.

January 2023 — giving up control

On 7 January 2023 Ant Group announced changes to the voting structure of its major shareholders. According to the explanation Alibaba filed with the SEC, two partnerships that together hold more than half of Ant's equity and voting interests would end an agreement under which Ma controlled how their shareholder rights were exercised, and one of them would take a new general partner. Each of the two general partners is owned equally by five individuals — ten in all, Ma among them.

The filing states the outcome plainly. Ma no longer controls the majority voting interests, and no shareholder — Alibaba included — controls Ant Group. Economic interests were unchanged.

After stepping back

Reporting on Ma since 2020 tends to use the same phrase. Fortune wrote in February 2025 that he "has largely kept a low profile since 2020". The public appearances reported since then are few:

• 27 March 2023 — after nearly a year outside China, he visited the Yungu School in Hangzhou, which he helped found (Mothership, citing the South China Morning Post)
• 1 May 2023 — Tokyo College, a research institute of the University of Tokyo, announced him as a visiting professor working on sustainable agriculture and food production, through the end of October (Associated Press)
• 17 February 2025 — official media images showed him at a symposium of private-sector entrepreneurs held by President Xi Jinping in Beijing (Adnkronos)

He began as an English teacher, handed over the chair on his company's twentieth anniversary, and a year later saw the listing of its largest affiliate stopped. The twenty-one years from 1999 to 2020 trace, through a single career, how the relationship between China's internet companies and the state changed.