Earlier in October 2018, on his 54th birthday, China’s richest man, Jack Ma, announced that he would step down as executive chairman of e-commerce giant Alibaba.
Jack Ma, the rags-to-riches entrepreneur behind China’s biggest tech company isn’t going to retire. He wants to be a teacher again.
With a net worth of $40.5 billion, Ma is one of the richest people on the planet and a prominent figure. He is well-known for speaking at conferences, advocating globalization, and rubbing shoulders with world leaders.
Ma most recently made headlines for his warnings about the escalating US-China trade war, insisting that “it’s going to be a mess” which could last for decades.
His plan to create 1 million jobs in the US, a pledge he made after meeting Trump in January 2017, has been “completely destroyed” as a result.
Ma’s decision to step down from the top job at Alibaba will usher in a new era for the $420 billion company, which he grew from a website run out of his apartment to one of the biggest tech companies in the world.
His rise to fame as one of China’s biggest tycoons is a “Hollywood story,” he told The New York Times in a 2005 interview.
Ma’s story starts in Hangzhou, a city in the eastern part of the country with close to 10 million people, where he was born in 1964 to a family with little money.
As a kid, he was scrawny and often got into fights with classmates who teased him for his size. “I was never afraid of opponents who were bigger,” he recalls in the book Alibaba.
Ma learned English from foreign tourists by offering them tours of the city in exchange for lessons, and bought a radio so that he could listen to the English broadcast every day.
One of the tourists he befriended during this time gave him the nickname ‘Jack’ which stuck. After high school, Ma applied to go to college. Low marks on the math portion of China’s college entrance exam, however, caused him to fail twice.
On his third try he finally passed, and eventually graduated from the Hangzhou Teacher’s Institute in 1988.
Ma then applied to as many jobs as he could, but was rejected from all of them, including one at KFC, a position on the police force, and another as a waiter at local restaurant.
The experience taught him a valuable lesson that prepared him for his entrepreneurial future: “to get used to failure” and learn from it.
Ma was eventually hired as an English teacher at a local university, a job that he loved, even though he only made $12 a month.
After visiting the US in 1995, and discovering the Internet, he quit teaching and borrowed a couple thousand dollars to launch China Pages.
It was his first attempt at an internet business not to mention one of the country’s first commercial websites, but he ultimately ceded control to the government after he was pressured into a joint venture with Hangzhou Telecom, according to The New York Times.
Title : China’s richest man Jack Ma quits his N15trn company to become a teacher
Description : Earlier in October 2018, on his 54th birthday, China’s richest man, Jack Ma, announced that he would step down as executive chairman of e-co...
