Hundreds of millions of people in China use the products Ma created every day. Something else happened, too: the globetrotting, limelight-addicted Ma simply vanished. With the much-hyped flotation suddenly called off, Ma’s personal fortune shed about $10bn in value, while shares in publicly traded Alibaba fell as much as 10 per cent. His speech had reverberated to the very top of the ruling Chinese Communist party, angering the autocratic Xi. In the days that followed, the authorities summoned him to Beijing for a terse dressing-down and unveiled regulations designed to damage a pillar of Ant’s business. “Furthermore, for the first time ever, it was set in a city other than New York . . . A miracle is happening.”īut it was what Ma said next, setting private enterprise’s interests above those of the Chinese state and challenging financial regulators, that dramatically changed the course of events. The price was set “for the biggest IPO in human history”, he said. Then Ma took the stage in Shanghai, China’s financial capital, to speak to a group that included senior officials and former regulators such as the previous central bank governor. In a letter to clients, Morgan Stanley’s top tech banker Michael Grimes hailed a “truly landmark and historic transaction”. Western bankers were salivating at the prospect of the $37bn initial public offering of Ant Group, which Ma had split off from Alibaba. A few months earlier he had been at the pinnacle of global business. Ma’s video appearance in January - the only glimpse the world has seen of him since October last year © Bloombergīut the fact that he had to drive hours into the Chinese countryside to shoot a brief reappearance video is a sign of how quick and brutal Ma’s fall from grace has been. Alibaba, the ecommerce behemoth he founded in 1999, regained $47bn in market value and the group’s plan to sell billions of dollars of bonds to foreign investors was put back on track. Shortly after his trip, the visit was cut into a video clip that made global headlines: Ma had reappeared. In fact, friends say Ma is quite a talented calligrapher, so the scribble may have been a sign that he was in a hurry. “We can only say Teacher Ma does not have very good handwriting,” comments vice-principal Wu Bin. The one visible sign Ma left after his hour-long visit was a scribbled signature on a dormitory wall. “Things have not been so smooth for him lately, so he doesn’t want to appear publicly,” says Chen. Ma promised he’d return for a second visit some day when the children were present. “Mostly he just listened to us talk about education,” recalls principal Chen Jianqiang. Only his camera crew was allowed to film. He was at the school to shoot a short, politically safe clip highlighting his charitable activities - and, more importantly, to let the world know he was still free. But the appearance was being carefully stage-managed and teachers vying for selfies with Ma were turned down.
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