Where Is Jack Ma, China's E-commerce Pioneer?

China’s best-known entrepreneur, e-commerce billionaire Jack Ma, made his fortune by taking big risks.

The former English teacher founded Alibaba Group in 1999, when China had few internet users. Online payments service Alipay launched five years later, before regulators said such businesses would be allowed. Both long shots grew to dominate their industries.

Ma’s latest gambit backfired after he called regulators too conservative in an Oct. 24 speech and urged them to be more innovative. They halted the impending stock market debut of Ant Group, an online finance platform that grew out of Alipay. Alibaba’s share price sank, possibly costing Ma his status as China’s richest tycoon.

Since then, the normally voluble Ma has stayed out of the public eye, canceled a TV appearance and avoided social media. That has prompted a flurry of speculation about what might happen to Ma, China’s biggest global business celebrity and a symbol of its tech boom.

“The Jack Ma Era is ended,” wrote a blogger under the name Yueyue Talks Technology. “It’s too late to say goodbye.”

Spokespeople for Alibaba and Ant didn’t respond to questions about why Ma hasn’t appeared in public.

Some see Ma’s travails as a warning from the ruling Communist Party that even a wildly successful entrepreneur can’t publicly defy regulators. But finance experts said President Xi Jinping’s government already was uneasy about Alibaba’s dominance in retailing. As for Ant, regulators worried it might add to financial risks seen by the ruling party as one of the biggest threats to China’s economic growth.