China’s best-known Internet guru is Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba.com, an e-commerce auction site that pitches made-in-China goods to a global market.
Earlier this year, Yahoo paid $1 billion and handed over its China unit to Jack for a 40 percent stake in his company, turning Jack into a dotcom millionaire a few times over — and Alibaba into the biggest Internet operation in China.
The deal was met with a collective intake of breath from the business world.
Such confidence in a Chinese Internet entrepreneur was unprecedented, leading to Jack being hailed China’s “Internet King.”
Here, he talks to Spark host Kristie Lu Stout about how he feels about bearing that title.