Jack Ma is back at Alibaba but can he keep regulators happy?

The chastened business leader could easily do what pleases Beijing

- JULIANA LIU

It would be smart of Jack Ma, now firmly back at the company he co-founded, to do more to improve the livelihoods of delivery riders powering Alibaba’s biggest business unit. Doing so would be a shrewd move in more ways than one.

Just months after publicly shaking hands with Chinese President Xi Jinping, heralding the revival of ‘animal spirits’ among China’s technology firms that has boosted the stock market, Ma has returned to Alibaba’s office and is more directly involved than he’s been in years, Bloomberg News reported. Though without an official title, the iconic businessman's reappearance has nevertheless fired up morale.

Once one of China’s most outspoken founders, Ma vanished from public view shortly after making sharply critical remarks in October 2020 about China’s financial regulators and its state-owned banks. That 20-minute speech was surely the most expensive in corporate history, eventually costing Alibaba and its affiliate Ant Group—which was on the cusp of going public in Shanghai—about $877 billion in lost market value. It also resulted in a nearly $1 billion fine for Ant and an unprecedented crackdown on other tech companies and the broader private sector.