Jack Ma's Libertarian Talk Approaches Red Line

Corporate executives sometime like to talk about how their companies are overtaking nation states. In China, they tend to be careful not to outshine the government and avoid such analogies. Yet that's just what Jack Ma did last week.

At Alibaba's annual investor day, China's richest man outlined a vision where the company he founded could become the world's fifth-biggest economy by 2036, trailing only the U.S., China, Europe and Japan. Let's just say most entrepreneurs in China wouldn't make that comparison.