Deals
China’s Loneliest Billionaire Ma Dabbles in Tai Chi, Poker
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It’s been a rough 18 months for Chinese Internet tycoon Jack Ma, founder and chairman of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. Early in 2011 a fraud scandal hit his business-to-business e-commerce site, Alibaba.com.
At about the same time, the U.S. government publicly shamed Alibaba-owned Taobao, a hybrid of Amazon.com and EBay, for enabling the sale of counterfeit merchandise. Last fall, thousands of small merchants protested online and outside Alibaba’s headquarters in Ma’s hometown, the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou, against an increase in Taobao’s listing fees.