 All right, let's talk about Jack Ma. So Jack Ma was office of October, the richest man in China. He is the man behind Alibaba Group. Alibaba is one of the largest companies in the world. It is a technology giant. It is the equivalent of Amazon, but bigger. Does more things than Amazon. Ma, just to give you a quick rundown on his life. Jack Ma was born in 1964 in Huangzhou, China, which is a city, beautiful city, by the way, beautiful city. Just southwest of Shanghai. That's the headquarters today of Alibaba. It's skyscrapers, the buildings, the architecture. Just amazing. There's also this massive lake in the middle of the city. You can go on boats on the lake. There are all these pathways. Just, I spoke at a university in Huangzhou, and it's just beautiful. Just truly a beautiful city. And I think a lot of that is a consequence of the fact that Alibaba is there, and there's a lot of wealth there. But in 1964, so he was 14 when Deng Xiaoping took over and started opening up the Chinese economy. He's kind of always worked, always hustled, he's a hustler. He's always found jobs here and there, done things here and there. He had a hard time getting into university because of the exams in China. I guess he flunked them several times. He couldn't get into Harvard Business School. Harvard Business School, he says, turned him down 20 times. But he was always dabbling. He was always starting companies in the 90s, in the early 90s. He started a whole string of companies. And in 1994, he was introduced to the web, to the internet. And he went, he actually visited the United States. And in the visit to the United States, they showed the web and how it works. And these early, the early worldwide web, just 1994, it's hard to believe how far we've come from those days. And he did some searches on China. And there was no information on China. And there was no, there was nothing. There was no web in China. There was no websites on China. And he actually started the first website about China. He then went on to start a number of different kind of web related businesses. And in October 1999, together with 17 friends, he started a business out of his apartment, out of his little apartment, that basically did business to business exchanges in China. So this is 1999, at the peak of the dot com bubble in the United States, internet was basically non-existent or almost non-existent in China, very limited. He started a business to business online exchange with Alibaba. And he called it Alibaba. Since then, since then, by the way, he raised money in October 1999. And then in January 2000, he raised money from Goldman Sachs and from SoftBank, $25 million to build out this new platform, new internet platform. It became a huge success, spun out of Alibaba, not spun out, but expanded from business to business. They created a business to consumer platform, which is basically eBay in China, called Taobao, Taobao, yeah, Taobao is eBay. They started a finance company called Alipay, which is basically China's PayPal. And they started a business that basically became a business to consumer, and a consumer to consumer to consumer is Baotao, which is the eBay. And then a business to consumer, which is basically Amazon. So in terms of online commerce, Alibaba is the largest online commerce platform in the world. It's bigger than Amazon, it's bigger than eBay. And it is, it's global. They have investments in companies all over the world. And Jack Ma basically started in his garage, well, not garage, in his apartment. That's, you know, that's the origins of his wealth. In addition, he started a company called, what was the company called? Well, Ant, A-N-T, Ant. And Ant is a company that does lending in China. It does lending particularly to the middle class and the poor. It does lending to people who do not have collateral. A lot of it can be categorized as micro loans, small loans, uncollateralized. It aggregates capital from a variety of sources, private entrepreneurs, others, and has been incredibly successful and incredibly successful, not only in making money for itself, but of course in financing loans to small businesses, for medium-sized businesses in China, for small entrepreneurs, for startups, and has done phenomenally well. Anyway, Ant was scheduled to be IPO'd in November. Initial public offering, become a public company. Alibaba, Alibaba actually went public in, which year did Alibaba will go public in 20? Yeah, I'm not sure. But it's been public for a long time and is one of the largest companies in the world. So Ant was gonna go public in November of last year. Let me just see if I can find Alibaba going public. Yeah, in September 2014, Alibaba raised $25 billion in initial public offering, which gave it a, it stock has done phenomenally well since then. It has changed the way Chinese consumers, the way Chinese business do business and consumers buy stuff. So it very advanced. The PayPal features completely integrated into the shopping mechanism and it's a massive company. Anyway, in November, this new company Ant was gonna go public. It was supposed to be massive, potentially the largest IPO, initial public offering in history. It was going to list on the Shanghai and Hong Kong stock exchanges, not in New York, which for the largest IPO is quite shocking. And it was gonna be this amazing event and probably make Jack Ma one of the, one of the probably top 10 richest people in the world. A few days before the IPO, Jack Ma gave a speech. A speech where a number of officials from the government were present, including representatives from the Bank of China and representatives from the kind of regulatory agencies, primarily regulatory agencies involved in financial institutions. In the speech, Jack Ma goes on to criticize banking financial regulation in China claiming that it is primitive, accusing banks in China, banks in China, banks in China, almost all state-run, state-owned enterprises as being run like pawn shops and being super conservative. And of course, these banks are backed by the government, supported by the government, kept afloat by the government. And it was one of those speeches that in China was very, very critical of the government. And in China, you gotta be careful with. Now, Jack Ma has been critical of the government in the past. There's speculation that he joined the Communist Party in order to try to appease them, right? I mean, in order to be successful in China, you have to join the party, even though it's joining the party is meaningless other than to give them the sanction. But what's interesting is the day after the speech, Ma and the chief executives of Ant Group were invited to the regulatory agencies. They were accused and accused of running their business in an irregular and overly risky way. Of course, these are the same regulatory agencies that approved the Ant IPO, that approved that it would go public, that had no problem with the business until Jack Ma threatened and criticized the government. And so he appeared in front of the regulators in Beijing and what's interesting is that since then, since then, nobody's seen Jack Ma. At least nobody publicly has seen Jack Ma. Jack Ma has disappeared. Nobody knows if he's been arrested and he's in some cell in some dungeon somewhere. Nobody knows if he's laying low in a home somewhere. But all his public appearances were canceled. He was supposed to host a, he does one of these game shows in Africa where entrepreneurs present business plans and he funds the business that wins. His name disappeared from that show. He did not make it to the show. Somebody else filled in for him. Basically he's gone for two months now. He's just disappeared. In the meantime, regulators in China canceled the IPO of Ant. They are now talking about the fact that Ant has to follow all these regulations that are basically are going to destroy its business model. In addition, Alibaba Group is now being accused of violation of drum roll please, anti-trust laws. So anti-trust laws being used against Alibaba Group in order to try to kill Alibaba. It's unlikely they killed him. He's probably they or probably show up in six months and who knows exactly what's gonna happen. But he has disappeared. One of the great entrepreneurs of the last 50 years, one of the people responsible for the great increase in standard of living, quality of life in China. One of the people who have brought China out of the dark ages of communism and brought them into the world of technology and into the world of the internet and provided the Chinese people with their ability to connect with the internet is just gone. This is not unusual in China. Other billionaires have disappeared before always after criticizing the government, always after getting in trouble with the Communist Central Party. Often they are later accused of fraud and fined and maybe jailed or whatever. Sometimes they just show up again but now they're quiet and they behave nicer and so on. By the way, about two, three years ago, Jack Ma did something very unusual for Chinese. He retired from Alibaba and devoted himself to philanthropy. Now philanthropy is not common in China. Philanthropy is quite unusual in China. Jack Ma became the first high visibility, CEO, high visibility billionaire to start doing extensive charity in China, in Africa, in Latin America, but most of it in China. So an interesting guy, a critic of the CCP, an advocate generally for free markets, confused, confused. But overall, given his productive nature, I would say a good guy. And it's kind of sad to see him just gone. The media around the world, people like the Financial Times, the Economists, the Wall Street Journal of all run articles about where is Jack Ma? And nobody knows. Hopefully he's alive and well, hiding out in some luxury condo or some beautiful house somewhere in the world. Hopefully he's unscathed. Hopefully he comes out of this fine. But who knows? Who knows? What I find striking about all this is one is the turn that China is making. The turn that China is making away from freedom and free markets. Jack Ma developed his business in an era where there was much more freedom. There was much more liberty for entrepreneurs, for businessmen, for businesses to create wealth, to build businesses, and to express themselves. He grew up in China that was moving systematically and steadily towards greater freedom, towards great economic freedom, certainly, towards an embrace of a market system. I remember in 2008, when the Las Vegas entrepreneur, Steve Nguyen, when Steve Nguyen went on national television and said, it's less regulated in China now than the United States. The United States is so regulated. This is 2008, nine, 10. The United States is so regulated. It's easier to do business in China. Well, that China is changing, becoming more regulated, more controlled, greater authoritarianism, greater involvement in the government in every aspect of the life, and it's sad. It's unbelievably sad to see the steady, systematic decline of freedom and liberty, freedom and liberty in China. There are other Jack Ma's in China. Just like the United States, China has a number of companies that are big tech. The richest man in China right now is the CEO of Tencent, which is another of the Chinese big tech companies. These companies are developed in a relatively speaking free market. They are a result of entrepreneurial activity. They are companies to be celebrated and admired, but this new environment in China is gonna destroy all that. And it's gonna be interesting to see how wealth is going to be destroyed in China over the next few decades, how economic growth is gonna be stilted in China over the next few decades. When you stop speech, when you don't allow people to communicate, when you don't allow people to think for themselves and act for themselves, economic growth suffers. Economic growth cannot sustain itself under conditions of lack of freedom. The Chinese, I guess, have to learn this over again. Now, it's still true that sections of the Chinese economy are relatively free, but it's heading in the wrong direction and therefore without any question, the Chinese economy is heading in the wrong direction. Now, the other thing that this kind of reminds me is the attitude we have in the United States towards big tech. If Jack Ma was an American, maybe he wouldn't disappear, but take Jeff Bezos. He's got leftist building guillotines outside his home and he's got the president of the United States condemning him and threatening him with antitrust and with all kind of other regulatory legislation. It's truly stunning, I've said this before, that instead of China becoming more like the United States, the United States is in a phase right now where we are becoming more like China. Our attitude towards big tech is straight out of the book in China. Our attitude towards successful entrepreneurs sounds like the Chinese attitude. Everything today goes through Congress. If you listen to Ted Cruz or to Bernie Sanders or to AOC, you would think that technology in Silicon Valley were the devil and that Silicon Valley entrepreneurs should disappear, all of them, just like they do in China. So it saddens me that I think the greatest benefactors of mankind over the last 50 years, the entrepreneurs in the realm of technology whether in the US or elsewhere in the world are today across the board from China to Europe to the United States viewed as villains. These are people who've opened up the world to all of us. Think of what massive benefits all of us get from being able to be connected to the rest of the world, to be connected to the knowledge base of humanity, to be connected right now by video, anywhere in the world. We who claim to value freedom, claim to value liberty, claim more importantly to value the human mind should be the defenders of the Jack Ma's all the way to the Bill Gates's, the Jeff Bezos, the entrepreneurs, Silicon Valley of Austin, Texas of Boston of anywhere who were built, changed the world, Seattle, I forgot Seattle, changed the world and provided us with immense values. Yet instead, instead, what dominates our life is not the values that these entrepreneurs have created for us. What dominates our lives is politics, politics, politics, politics, politics. The sickening sound of politics. We are heading down the path of China and to the extent that we head down the path of China of denouncing entrepreneurs, of denouncing our big tech companies, of stifling entrepreneurship, stifling innovation and the world is gonna end up with low economic growth, low standard of living, slow down in everything, everything that we take for granted today. What we need today, what I call the new intellectual would be any man or woman who is willing to think, meaning any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason, by the intellect, not by feelings, wishes, wins or mystic revelations. Any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's cult of despair, cynicism and impotence and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist, broods. All right, before we go on, reminder, please like the show. We've got 163 live listeners right now, 30 likes, that should be at least 100. I figure at least 100 of you actually like the show. Maybe they're like 60 of the Matthews out there who hate it, but at least the people who are liking it, you know, I wanna see a thumbs up, there you go. Start liking it, I wanna see that go to 100. All it takes is a click of a thing, whether you're looking at this, and you know the likes matter. 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