Free Republic

As the global economic intelligentsia debates how to “decouple” or “de-risk” from China, Elon Musk clearly didn’t get the memo. The Tesla founder was feted like a returning king in Beijing this week. From the moment his private jet arrived on Tuesday, Musk is reportedly being called “Brother Ma,” putting him in rarified league with Alibaba billionaire Jack Ma. There are many takeaways from Musk’s first China visit in three years. One is that not everyone is decoupling from China, least of all the globe’s most influential electric-vehicle (EV) evangelist and owner of Twitter. Another: the future of EV production...

Jack Ma, founder of Chinese tech giant Alibaba, has been made an honorary professor of business at a top Hong Kong university, the school announced Friday (Apr 21). The appointment comes weeks after the billionaire made a rare public appearance in China following his fall from grace during a government crackdown on the tech industry over two years ago. Ma has kept a low profile since late 2020, when a speech he made attacking Chinese regulators was followed by Beijing pulling the plug on a planned IPO by Alibaba affiliate Ant Group. A record fine of US$2.75 billion was later...

Alibaba founder Jack Ma has returned to China, the South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported on Monday (March 27), ending a more than year-long sojourn overseas that was viewed by industry as reflecting the sober mood of China's private businesses. Ma, one of China's best known entrepreneurs, left mainland China in late 2021 and has been seen in photographs in Japan, Australia and Thailand in the months since. Once one of the country's most outspoken businessmen, he retreated from the public limelight in late 2020 after criticising China's regulatory system that was later blamed for triggering a wide-ranging regulatory crackdown...

Billionaire has spent almost six months in Japan after largely disappearing from public viewJack Ma, the Alibaba founder and once the richest business leader in China, has been living in central Tokyo for almost six months, amid Beijing’s continuing crackdown on the country’s technology sector and its most powerful businessmen. Ma’s months-long stay in Japan with his family has included stints in hot spring and ski resorts in the countryside outside Tokyo and regular trips to the US and Israel, according to people with direct knowledge of his whereabouts. Ma has largely disappeared from public view since he criticised Chinese...

It looks like the CCP is again beating the bushes and shaking the trees to find more incriminating evidence of corruption and illegality - and other 'dirt' - involving Ant Group and its founder, Jack Ma. About a month ago, Ma and Ant Group were implicated in one of China's biggest corruption scandals in recent memory: it involved a former top CCP official in Hangzhou, the city where Ant got its start. Now, the CPP has ordered the country's banks and other firms to scour their records for any more 'evidence' of any potentially corrupt dealings involving Ant. Beijing has...

Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai has denied she ever accused anyone of sexual assault, adding that she herself had deleted her social media post in November that had appeared to make such a claim. The well-being of Peng, a three-time Olympian, became a matter of global concern when she appeared to allege on social media that a former Chinese vice premier, Zhang Gaoli, had sexually assaulted her in the past. In an interview with French newspaper L'Equipe at a hotel in Beijing, Peng denied she had made such allegations.

Way back in 2019, long before Alibaba founder Jack Ma's falling out with the CCP (or, we should say, when the strains in their relationship were far less visible in the business press), we reported the following prediction from Hayman Capital's Kyle Bass: That Jack Ma would be "jailed, or disappeared" shortly after stepping down as Alibaba's chairman.When Ma abruptly disappeared after the CCP sabotaged the (Ma-led) IPO for Ant Group, Alibaba's financial arm that had become widely used within the Chinese market, we feared the worst.And even though Ma eventually resurfaced, things have never been the same for a...

This was supposed to be Jack Ma's finest hour: A year ago to the day, his Ant Group was meant to go public in a US$37 billion blaze of glory. Instead Beijing reined in his empire, abruptly clipping the wings of corporate China's biggest star. Now, to the cautious cheer of investors, the billionaire Alibaba e-commerce tycoon is taking his first tentative steps back on to the global stage with a low-key trip to Europe where he's cultivating hobbies like horticulture. It's a far cry from the height of Ma's statesman-like powers in 2017 when he travelled to New York...

It has been exactly a year since Chinese businessman Jack Ma publicly criticised his communist government and since then he’s lost hundreds of billions of dollars of his vast fortune. Over the last 12 months, his business, Alibaba — pegged as China’s version of eBay, Amazon and PayPal all rolled into one — has lost around US$373 billion (A$497 billion). According to Bloomberg, Alibaba’s fall from grace is the single biggest financial loss a business has ever endured. On October 24 last year, Mr Ma made a now-infamous speech at a business summit where he went viral for condemning the...

Alibaba shares surged more than six percent on Wednesday after billionaire founder Jack Ma was reported to be in Europe, fuelling investor hopes that the worst of China's regulatory crackdown for the internet giant might be over. Ma has kept a low profile ever since mainland officials spiked what would have been a world record $37 billion initial public offering for Alibaba's financial group Ant last November. That shock decision kicked off what became a cascading series of crackdowns by Chinese authorities on a host of tech and other industries deemed to have become too powerful, unregulated or monopolistic. Ma's...

Largely out of public view since a regulatory clampdown on his empire late last year - Chinese billionaire and Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma has recently been spotted meeting with business associates in Hong Kong, two sources tell Reuters. Ma's recent visit to the Asian financial hub was his first in a year, a source revealed. Ma has been keeping a low profile ever since Chinese regulators pulled the plug on what was to be the record setting $37 billion IPO for his Ant Financial group, seen by many as retaliation for a speech he gave last October, in which he...

Given the recent decimation in U.S. listed China based stocks, it is becoming abundantly clear who is running the show in China.And no one person is coming to that realization quicker than Jack Ma. Once revered as a beacon of success and entrepreneurship out of China, Ma's outspoken nature and boisterous antics saw him fall out of favor with the Chinese Communist Party - quickly.Such was the topic of a new, comprehensive Wall Street Journal report, which detailed the lesson Ma is now learning first hand: there is only one most powerful man in China. How did Ma - who...

According to Alibaba Group’s 2021 annual report, Jack Ma, founder of the Chinese e-commerce giant, appears to no longer be a shareholder. Ma held more than 1 billion Alibaba shares in 2020.On July 27, the company announced it filed its annual report, on Form 20-F, for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2021, to the United States Securities and Exchange Commission.The 2021 annual report shows that the company’s founder, Jack Ma, is no longer listed as a shareholder. While Joseph Tsai, the executive vice-chairman, currently holds 306,883,064 common shares, accounting for 1.4 percent of shares, all directors and executives as...

“To get rich is glorious.” - Deng Xiaoping “Among the richest men in China, few have good endings.” - Jack Ma No good endings? Indeed. Start with this: We know more about the whereabouts and the condition of Alexei Navalny, Vladimir Putin’s prize prisoner, than we do about Jack Ma. Last Fall Jack Ma was rich, and famous, and we knew all about him, followed his every move. He was in fact the richest man in China, and the most famous living Chinese person (according to polls). He was poised to crown his career with a triumphant public offering for...

June 30 (Reuters) - Berkshire Hathaway Inc (BRKa.N) Vice Chairman Charlie Munger praised China's move to impose a sweeping restructuring on Jack Ma’s Ant Group, the fintech giant whose record $37 billion IPO was derailed by regulators in November. The 97-year-old told CNBC in an interview alongside Berkshire CEO and billionaire investor Warren Buffett that the United States should take a leaf out of China's book and "step in preemptively to stop speculation". "I don't want the, all of the Chinese system, but I certainly would like to have the financial part of it in my own country," he said...

Jack Ma, now China’s fourth-richest man and the former CEO of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, criticized China’s financial system policies at the Bund Summit 2020 in October. Since then, his enterprises have become the target of Xi Jinping.At first, the listing plan for Ant Group, an affiliate company of Alibaba, was halted on Nov. 3. On April 10 this year, the Alibaba Group was fined $2.8 billion on the grounds that it violated an antitrust law, and Ma’s elite business school, Hupan University, was forced to halt enrolments.I don’t think Ma’s troubles are over.But why did Xi Jinping purge Ma?...

China's unprecedented crackdown on billionaire businessman and Alibaba founder Jack Ma had raised quite a few eyebrows last year and made headlines all over the globe. Now, a news report suggests that the Chinese government may not be done with its crackdown on major tech firms in the country. It has come to light that another Chinese businessman is facing scrutiny for not complying with the country's anti-trust rules. Ma Huateng (also known as Pony Ma), the founder of Tencent Holdings, met with China's anti-trust watchdog officials earlier this month to discuss compliance at his group. Two people with direct...

Alibaba and Ant Group founder Jack Ma has lost the title of China’s richest man, a list published on Tuesday showed, as his peers prospered while his empire was put under heavy scrutiny by Chinese regulators. Ma and his family had held the top spot for China’s richest in the Hurun Global Rich List in 2020 and 2019 but now trail in fourth place behind bottled water maker Nongfu Spring’s Zhong Shanshan, Tencent Holding’s Pony Ma and e-commerce upstart Pinduoduo’s Collin Huang, the latest list showed.His fall out of the top three comes “after China’s regulators reined in Ant Group...

Voice of America News (VOA) reported Monday that a theory about the curious disappearance of Chinese billionaire Jack Ma is growing in credibility among foreign observers: the true goal of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is pressuring Ma into handing over the vast trove of consumer credit data accumulated by his Alibaba e-commerce company and its titanic financial services offshoot, the Ant Group. The flamboyant Ma, a multimedia celebrity in addition to once being China’s richest man, vanished from the public eye after criticizing the CCP’s heavy-handed financial regulators at a public forum in October. When speculation about his disappearance...

Globalist magazine The Economist has shockingly referred to the targeting and disappearance of a Chinese businessman as “regulation” and “boosting competition.”Jack Ma – who has previously prostrate himself before the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) – has been reported as missing, with a multitude of news outlets reporting on his disappearance.Now, The Economist – which like most globalist outfits is long on China – appears to be making excuses on behalf of the modern Nazi Party – the CCP – for disappearing Ma.Published on January 2nd, a magazine-wide editorial shockingly states:“China is also at the frontier of regulation, with the news...