The Financial Times revealed on Wednesday that Jack Ma, the formerly flamboyant billionaire founder of Internet giant Alibaba, has been living in apparently self-imposed exile in Japan for at least the past six months.
Ma, once a ubiquitous celebrity presence in China, vanished from the public eye after criticizing hidebound Chinese Communist regulators at a Shanghai forum in October 2020, and a subsequent crackdown on high-flying tech entrepreneurs wiped out much of his vast wealth.
Ma’s troubles began in 2020 after he critiqued the Chinese government as too heavy-handed in its regulatory approach to the fast-moving tech industry. The regime decided to prove him right by launching the heaviest-handed regulatory crackdown since the dawn of the Information Age.
Ma memorably slammed the Chinese banking industry for having a “pawnshop mentality” by proceeding slowly, cautiously, and clumsily when the tech industry needed loans. The price of his irreverent quotability was watching his planned $37 billion stock offering vanish in a cloud of regulatory smoke, as ordered by dictator Xi Jinping. Alibaba was later slapped with a record-breaking $2.8 billion in antitrust fines................ To Read More...
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