Jack Ma: tycoon who soared on China's tech dreams grounded by regulators
Jack Ma, the unconventional billionaire founder of tech giant Alibaba and the totem of China's entrepreneurial brilliance, has stepped out of the limelight since a Communist Party crackdown that chopped back his empire.
The most recognisable face in Asian business, Ma has seen his fortune fall by around half to an estimated $25 billion after authorities pulled what would then have been the world's biggest-ever IPO in 2020.
Chinese regulators torched the planned listing of Ma's Ant Group in Hong Kong and Shanghai, and the following year hit Alibaba with a record $2.75 billion fine for alleged unfair practices.
A reshuffle of Ant's shareholding structure will now see Ma cede control of the fintech giant he founded in 2014.
He will hold just 6.2 percent of the voting rights as the company moves to ensure "no shareholder, alone or jointly with other parties, will have control over Ant Group", the firm said in a statement Saturday.
It is the latest humbling of China's former poster boy for enterprise, who in recent years has retreated from the public eye he once so relished.
A Communist Party member, Ma's rags-to-riches backstory came to embody a self-confident generation of Chinese entrepreneurs ready to shake up the world.
Charismatic, diminutive and fast-talking, Ma was cash-strapped and working as an English teacher when someone showed him the internet on a 1990s trip to the United States -- and he was hooked.
He toyed with several internet-related projects, before convincing a group of friends to give him $60,000 to start a new business in 1999 in China, then still emerging as an economic giant.
Alibaba was the result, an e-commerce behemoth founded from his bedroom in the eastern city of Hangzhou that started
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