Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.

Jack Ma graduated from Hangzhou Teacher's Institute in 1988 after failing China's university entrance exam twice. He applied for 30 jobs and was rejected from all of them. When KFC opened in Hangzhou, 24 people applied. 23 were hired. Ma was the only one turned down. He applied to Harvard ten times and was rejected every time. He became an English teacher earning $12 a month.

In 1995, Ma visited the United States as a translator for a trade delegation. A friend showed him the internet. Ma searched for "beer" — Chinese beer returned no results. He searched for "China" — no results. He spent the next hour on the computer and made a decision: China needed an internet company. He returned home with no money, no technical skills, and no business experience. He started building anyway.

Jack Ma founded Alibaba in his apartment in Hangzhou in February 1999 with 17 friends and colleagues. He gave a speech — later called the "Crazy Jack Ma Speech" — telling them they were starting a company that would compete with American internet giants. He warned them it would be hard, that they might fail, and that they should not expect to get rich quickly. Several people in the room were crying.

Yahoo invested $1 billion in Alibaba in 2005 in exchange for a 40% stake — one of the most profitable technology investments ever made. By 2012, Yahoo's Alibaba stake was worth more than Yahoo itself. Yahoo's CEO tried to sell the stake back to Alibaba at what turned out to be a significant undervaluation. When Alibaba went public in 2014, Yahoo's remaining stake was worth over $30 billion.

Alibaba went public on the New York Stock Exchange on September 19, 2014, raising $25 billion — the largest IPO in history at the time. Jack Ma, the English teacher who had been rejected from KFC, became the richest person in China. The stock rose 38% on the first day. SoftBank, which had invested $20 million in Alibaba in 2000, saw that investment become worth $60 billion.

In October 2020, Jack Ma gave a speech at a financial conference in Shanghai criticising Chinese financial regulators, comparing state-owned banks to "pawnshops" and suggesting that regulators were stifling innovation. Two days before Ant Group — Alibaba's financial affiliate — was set to complete what would have been the world's largest IPO at $37 billion, Chinese regulators suspended it. Ma disappeared from public view for three months. When he reappeared, he had given up effective control of both Alibaba and Ant Group.