He is a man worth 36,5 billion dollars: Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce giant that is worth over 400 billion dollars on Wall Street, leaves the guide of his jewel. He has chosen philanthropy and announced it in an interview with the New York Times. Like others before him, first of all Bill Gates, next Monday, September 10, the day of his 54th birthday, he will leave the operational presidency of the group even if, he specified, he will continue to follow him. In just 19 years Alibaba has become a giant valued at 420 billion on the New York Stock Exchange.
This exit is not the end of an era, "but the beginning of a new one" declared to the American newspaper the richest man in China who, in 1999, co-founded the Alibaba group, a technological giant, active only in online commerce, but also in information technology and now also in entertainment and media. According to a recent calculation by Forbes magazine, the fortune of Jack Ma, an English professor and example of a "self made man", is estimated at 36,5 billion dollars, in 21st place worldwide.
Jack Ma said he wants to devote himself to philanthropic projects related to education, but will continue to follow Alibaba. But what character is the man who failed to get into Harvard and who created an empire out of thin air?
For some time Ma had been thinking about his exit from the Chinese giant. "I don't want to die in my office, I want to die on the beach": he said more than a year ago in Davos, on the sidelines of the world economy summits, recounting how Alibaba was born looking for a beer and how it had been his pen pal of Tennessee to name him Jack, tired of writing an unpronounceable name. Again in Davos, in 2015, he praised Forrest Gump, calling it his favorite film, "because he never gives up", but also because he saw something of Winston Groom's anti-hero in the story of his 'creature': "Nobody makes money hunting whales – he said – people make them by fishing for prawns”, observed Forrest Gump and “this is how we make money for Alibaba”, concluded Jack Ma. In a long interview at the time with ANSA he said that as a young man he had found it difficult to find a teacher of English in China and expressed a wish that then seemed farther from reality than it does today: "sooner or later I'll go back to teaching in a school".
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Updated at 18:08 on Saturday 8 September 2018
