Alibaba Founder Jack Ma Retires To ‘Start A New Life’; Has A Farewell Rock Star Show

Whoever said that farewells were easy?

They’re often painful and frankly traumatising.

Jack Ma Leaves Alibaba

So when Alibaba Boss Jack Ma left the e-commerce giant, the world wept for him. Or rather, he did, for himself.

After all, the Ma has gone, but the Ba stays. (Okay, horrible parental pun).

Alibaba, founded by Ma and 17 others in a small apartment in 1999, is now the world’s largest e-commerce group. Beating perhaps, E-bay.

Except, he didn’t leave without a bang.

That’s right. Donning a rock star wig and outfit, replete with sunglasses, the great Ma doubled his already rock star stature by being a rock star.

Ma was a rock star at a four-hour celebration in an 80,000-strong stadium with thousands of his employees. There, the billionaire executive chairman fulfilled his promise and handed over his position to CEO Daniel Zhang.

Costumed performers dressed in traditional dress and other singers paid tribute to Ma.

At one point, Ma cried. After all, he’s huMAn.

Ma was joined by his contemporaries, co-founder Lucy Peng and CEO of Alibaba’s technology committee Wang Jian, and co-founder Joe Tsai.

They too were all dressed up.

The Significance Of Ma’s Legacy

• A giant e-commerce company, Alibaba, worth US$460 billion.
• 100,000 jobs and more for people over, with expansions in financial services, cloud computing and artificial intelligence.
• Six new core values, one of which is to “respect the work-life balance of every individual” – a possible countermeasure against his earlier controversy of asking tech workers to work long hours and weekends.
• To us Singaporeans, another time-honoured platform to indulge our favourite pastime of shopping in!

Mr Ma expresses his hopes to see his company shoulder more responsibility to improve society in light of the massive changes brought about by technology.

His calls for his company to retain and grow on its route of kindness and compassion certainly sits well with me.

You can read 10 facts about Jack Ma here.