Jack Ma, co-founder of Alibaba Group, is ranked No. 83 on the Forbes 2026 World’s Billionaires list with a net worth of $29.1 billion. He was one of the best-known faces of Chinese business until the regulators halted Ant Group’s IPO in 2020.
Ma Yun, known as Jack Ma, was born on September 10, 1964, in Hangzhou, Zhejiang. He became interested in English as a boy, and for nine years rode his bicycle 27 km every day to work as a tour guide for foreigners to practise it. One of them gave him the name “Jack” because he found his Chinese name hard to pronounce.
Net Worth and Rank
- Forbes 2026 list: No. 83, with $29.1 billion
- Source of wealth: his shares in Alibaba and Ant Group, among other holdings; Wikipedia gives an approximate figure of $27.5 billion
Early Career
After taking the gaokao college entrance exam three times, Ma earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Hangzhou Normal University in 1988 and became an English and international trade lecturer at Hangzhou Dianzi University. He says he applied to Harvard Business School ten times and was rejected each time. In 1994 he founded a translation agency, and in 1995 launched its website. He left his lectureship to run an online yellow-pages service, which China Telecom acquired in 1996, and left in 1997 to build websites for the government’s trade ministry.
Alibaba
- 1999: he co-founded Alibaba Group, first as a business-to-business e-commerce marketplace; it received a total of $25 million of seed capital from Goldman Sachs and SoftBank in October 1999 and January 2000
- Growth: it expanded into Taobao, Tmall, Alibaba Cloud and other businesses
- May 10, 2013: he stepped down as CEO but stayed as executive chairman
- September 10, 2018: he announced that he would step down as executive chairman the following year to focus on philanthropy through his foundation; he denied reports that the government forced him out
Ant Group and the Regulators
Ma’s influence declined after Chinese authorities halted the planned IPO of his financial technology company, Ant Group, in 2020, following his public criticism of regulators for prioritising risk aversion over innovation. News outlets noted that he made no public appearances between October 2020 and January 2021, a period that coincided with a regulatory crackdown on his businesses.
Why It Matters
Ma showed that a Chinese teacher without a technology background could build one of the world’s largest e-commerce groups, and his story is also a case study of the limits that Chinese regulators set for private tycoons.
Net worth figures change daily with share prices. Rankings here follow the Forbes 2026 World’s Billionaires list, with wealth measured on March 1, 2026.
Image: Jack Ma (right) at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, January 2018. Photo: World Economic Forum / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)
