Jack Ma: China's ecommerce CEO

**Simon Jack** (0:08)
Welcome to Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service. Each episode, we pick a billionaire and find out how they made their money.

**Zing Tsjeng** (0:15)
And then we judge them. Are they good, bad or just another billionaire?

**Simon Jack** (0:18)
I'm Simon Jack, the BBC's business editor.

**Zing Tsjeng** (0:20)
And I'm Zing Tsjeng. I'm a journalist, author and podcaster.

**Simon Jack** (0:23)
And before we introduce this episode's billionaire, I think it would be churlish to not dwell on the fact that Good Bad Billionaire is a winner.

**Zing Tsjeng** (0:32)
Yes, we have won a British Podcast Award for Best business Podcast. It just happened recently. It's very exciting.

**Simon Jack** (0:39)
We are still basking the afterglow of that victory. And we would just like to thank all the listeners, all the judges, everyone involved and our super production team for a real team effort to win the gold award.

**Zing Tsjeng** (0:51)
However, I will also point out that we have no idea where our trophy has gone. And I think a producer has made off with it. So if that's you and you're listening, please at least let me touch it one more time.

**Simon Jack** (1:00)
You know who you are. Where is it? Anyway, let's dive in.

**Zing Tsjeng** (1:04)
In this episode, we've got one of the richest men in the world.

**Simon Jack** (1:07)
Open sesame, it is Alibaba founder Jack Ma.

**Zing Tsjeng** (1:12)
Now, Jack Ma is worth a very cool $25 billion, which makes him right now at least 80th richest person in the world and in the top 10 richest Chinese billionaires.

**Simon Jack** (1:23)
But just a few years ago, he was the richest person in Asia with over $60 billion. So where did half his fortune disappear? It's a fascinating story involving the Chinese government, well worth listening to.

**Zing Tsjeng** (1:35)
So his wealth came from, as we mentioned, Alibaba, which is an e-commerce company he founded in 1999

**Simon Jack** (1:41)
It's been called the Chinese Amazon. It does a lot of the things that Amazon does.

**Zing Tsjeng** (1:45)
And if you go to China, Alibaba is everywhere. In fact, his online payment system, Alipay, has more than 1.2 billion users. There are more transactions in China done with Alipay than with actual cash.

**Simon Jack** (1:59)
Jack is a beloved national celebrity in his homeland.

**Zing Tsjeng** (2:03)
That's right, he's actually been nicknamed Daddy Ma and has even appeared in a short Kung Fu movie fighting martial arts superstars like Jet Li. You can actually watch it on YouTube.

**Simon Jack** (2:12)
Yeah, he's got the full set of billionaire toys that we come across, like a $50 million Gulfstream jet, a $200 million super yacht.

**Zing Tsjeng** (2:20)
And he's also bought two historic French vineyards for around $13.5 million. So he makes his own wine.

**Simon Jack** (2:26)
plus, he spent $23 million on a 28,000-acre property in the Adirondacks in upstate New York, which has its own trout stream, of course, woodlands, its own maple syrup operation.

**Zing Tsjeng** (2:37)
So wine, trout, maple syrup, I mean, he's living the life. Let's hear from Jack himself, speaking to Tim Sebastian for the BBC in the year 2000

**Simon Jack** (2:45)
You're ambitious.

**Jack Ma** (2:46)
Yeah. ambitious for what? ambitious that, well, changed the world, changed the way people work. When we started Alibaba, I mean, the company, well, we thought that we're going to build a business that can last for 80 years. It's not for 80 miles. So we're very ambitious, but people, my parents also laugh at me. So what are you talking about? You want to set up a business for 80 years? We said, yeah, let's go ahead. But I never thought about 80 years later, what the company will look like.

**Zing Tsjeng** (3:19)
He actually sounds quite serious in that clip, but you've actually met him and he seems quite a different kind of character, right?

**Simon Jack** (3:24)
It was the weirdest thing. And one that I kind of shudder about to this day, because I was asked to moderate this rather boring panel of business people at the British Library in Central London. And there were all these people, there's a person from a big trade body, a person from one of the big accounting firms. And then there was this other guy called Jack, who I'd never heard of. And we started this debate and he keeps butting in, he's full of beans, he's quite flamboyant, he's very noisy, he's very energetic, and he's kind of dominating a little bit. So I'm just going, thank you very much, Mr. Ma, if you could just shut up now and let the other people speak, because I think we've heard quite enough from you, because I honestly never heard of him, never heard of Alibaba, this must have been about 2007 or eight or something like that. And of course, to this day, I think I could have made best friends with one, we don't have a useful contact with the richest man in China.