Alright! Ma time to meet that shag quota! Alibaba chairman steps down at 55 with $38.6bn fortune At 55 years old, Jack Ma, boss of Chinese tech giant Alibaba, is stepping down from day-to-day management of the company he founded – with a $38.6bn fortune in his pocket. The move was announced a year ago in a letter to customers and shareholders. Ma has been "consciously edging himself out" ever since, according to the Beeb …
Good on him for building such a career and such a company. Working 9 to 9 ? Less good for the workers but hey, he's a billionaire, not a philanthropist.
I wonder how long it will take him to launch himself into another project. He does not seem to be the type to just up and retire to taking care of his garden.
I'm not sure how he correlates his statement about having sex 6 times in 6 days, with one of his previous comment
"I personally think that being able to work 996 is a huge blessing" (https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/04/23/microsoft_github_china/)
I doubt I'd be able to get up the energy to have sex even once a week if I was working a 72 hour week...
China hasn't been properly communist for decades now. They have retained some aspects of the central planning, but outsourced most of it to a combination of capitalism and local control. Which really isn't all that different than how things work in the US and UK (just look at all the tax breaks offered to businesses to "encourage" them to do what the government wants)
While communism has always required a strong degree of authoritarianism to function on the scale of a nation (I think pure communism without coercion would probably not work on a scale larger than a town, everyone has to know everyone else) China basically dropped most of the communism and has been ramping up the authoritarianism. They keep their fingers in the businesses (i.e. required investments by the government, control over business decisions in some cases) too so it is much more fascist than communist at this point.
In 1994, Ma heard about the Internet and also started his first company [19]Hangzhou Haibo Translation Agency. In early 1995, he went to the US with his friends, who helped introduce him to the Internet. Although he found information related to beer from many countries, he was surprised to find none from China. He also tried to search for general information about China and again was surprised to find none. So he and his friend created an "ugly" website related to China.[20] He launched the website at 9:40 AM, and by 12:30 PM he had received emails from some Chinese investors wishing to know about him. This was when Ma realized that the Internet had something great to offer. In April 1995, Ma and He Yibing (a computer teacher) opened the first office for China Pages and Ma started their second company. On May 10, 1995, they registered the domain chinapages.com in the United States. Within three years, the company had made 5,000,000 Chinese Yuan which at the time was equivalent to US$800,000.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Ma#Business_career
So he's built the company to a value of $460 billion in twenty years. That's around $63 million a day. That's got to have taken luck, judgement, skill and hard work. Those who think to scoff should perhaps explain why they weren't achieving this.
Let's just hope Ma now follows Bill Gates' lead and applies himself equally hard to the intelligent spending of the cash.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
