Here’s a hot business tip: if you are an enterprising China expert with a book to sell, have you considered going on TV to explain what happened to Jack Ma? The Chinese billionaire tycoon who lived in the spotlight vanished more than two months ago, and all sorts of Beijing watchers have swanned onto the sets of financial TV shows to have a stab at locating the lost Ma and plug their latest work.

Turn on the news and you’ll see them saying he’s under house arrest; or he’s fled China and hiding in a secret bolthole; or that he’s in some nightmare prison camp getting Mao’s Little Red Book beamed into his eyeballs, Clockwork Orange-style. Alarm bells first rang when he didn’t appear on a TV talent show he judged, Africa’s Business Heroes, and was scrubbed out of its promotional material. Now it’s coming up to three months since he was last seen in public, prompting fears that he has suffered a similar fate to other Chinese celebrities who were temporarily vaporised under mysterious circumstances, like Guo Guangchang, the investor, and Ren Zhiqiang, the real estate mogul.

Tomohiro Ohsumi/Bloomberg via Getty Images


So where is he? It was certainly out of character for Ma to have gone missing – he is not a reclusive oddball billionaire in the mould of the Koch Brothers or Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman. He had relinquished day-to-day control of his empire, which included the e-commerce site Alibaba and the fintech giant Ant Group, but remained its public face and kept a busy schedule as a tech salonier, giving speeches about how to succeed in business.

As a former English teacher and university reject who rose to become one of the richest men on earth, Ma’s story resonates with everyone who has ever clicked on a YouTube video promising to reveal the secrets of billionaires. Ma played up to this in his frequent talks and Q&As, channelling the wisdom of Warren Buffett and the zaniness of Elon Musk.

You might best recognise him as the guy who hosted giant stadium concerts for his thousands of staff who watched as he sang and danced, his enthusiasm endearingly outpacing his talent. In one of his best performances in 2014, he rose up to the stage from a trap door to sing Can You Feel The Love Tonight? from The Lion King, clad in what can only be described as drunken fancy dress. He wore black lipstick and two wigs – a platinum blonde fringe and a giant mohawk – as wells a complicated leather jacket with lots of tassles, sequins, studs, straps and flames, suggesting the sartorial inspiration of a Hell’s Angel invited to a techno fetish club.

These cringey performances belie the impression of a businessman who does not mess around. Off-stage, Ma is a ball-busting empire-builder who made one of the biggest tech fortunes in the world out of his apartment. Crocodile In The Yangtze, an excellent documentary about Ma, has footage of a fiery speech that he gave to 17 friends, pitching them Alibaba back in 1999. He rallied his recruits to take on the titans of Silicon Valley with a chosen-people zeal and a ferocious 996 work ethic – 9am to 9pm, six days a week.

“One of us can defeat ten of them — the dream of the internet will not burst.”

“One of us can defeat ten of them,” he said, referring to American competition. “We can beat government agencies and big famous companies because of our innovative spirit… the dream of the internet will not burst.”

As memorable business speeches go, it’s up there with “Greed Is Good” from Wall Street. And perhaps the reason for Ma’s disappearance lies in this moment. Ma’s king-of-the-castle attitude built him a serious fortune, and when Alibaba went public in 2014 it raised $25 billion and achieved a market value of $231 billion, the largest IPO ever. But in recent years, his desire to “beat government agencies” started to cause trouble with Chinese authorities.

Part of Ant Group’s stable is Alipay, a mobile and online payment platform used by a billion people, as well as a wealth management platform and a number of funds. These funds proved so popular that one of them, Yu’E Bao, reached $260bn in 2017, an amount so large that state-owned banks became worried about their own liquidity. It led to a standoff between Ma and the authorities, in which he had to back down and accept caps on how much his customers could deposit into the fund.

This spat might have been what Ma had in mind when he gave a speech in Shanghai on October 24 last year, criticising China’s “pawnshop mentality” and its failure to move with the times. “We cannot manage an airport the way we manage a train station, nor can we manage the future the way we manage the past,” he told his audience, which consisted of Wang Qishan, China’s Vice President, as well as finance ministers and the governor of China’s central bank. They could not have been enthused as Ma lay into China’s outdated regulation, saying it stifles development.

Ma delivered these fateful remarks shortly before he was to take Ant Group public in what was to set another record for the largest IPO ever at an estimated $37 billion. But 48 hours before trading, Beijing shut down proceedings, accusing Ant Group of unsound corporate governance and ordering it to scale back its operations. President Xi Jinping personally took the decision to sabotage the IPO, according to the Wall Street Journal. Ma’s personal wealth fell by $12 billion during this period, making him China’s richest man no longer.

"We cannot manage an airport the way we manage a train station, nor can we manage the future the way we manage the past,” Ma had said...

That speech on October 24, it would appear, was Ma’s last appearance in public. Where he is now is anyone’s guess – Ant Group representatives did not respond to a request for comment – although there are whispers that Ma is keeping a low profile in Hangzhou, his home town, awaiting the future of Ant, which lies in the balance. Fan Bingbing, the actress, vanished in 2018 during a tax evasion case and reappeared to apologise and thank the Chinese government for pursuing her. “It has made me calm down and think seriously about what I want to do in my future life,” she said. Pundits suggest that a similar fate awaits Jack Ma. What a painful comedown that would be for the man who, standing in his living room, once pledged to take on the world.

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