Earlier this month, Alibaba co-founder announced that he was leaving the Internet retail giant, stepping down as chairman in favour of retirement.
He is officially vacating the position on September 10, 2019 -- the day he turns 55 years old.
As part of his retirement plan, the former English teacher will be using his amassed fortune of over $41 billion to contribute to education. In the case of Alibaba, Ma will be leaving the multi-billion dollar e-commerce giant in the care of CEO Daniel Zhang and co-founder/Vice-Chairman Joseph Tsai.
There does seem to be some confusion here however. Though the immediate retirement plan was reported by the New York Times, an Alibaba spokesperson has since called it "factually wrong". Instead, they said, "Ma remains the company's executive chairman and will provide transition plans over a significant period of time."
Last year, Ma had announced he would eventually hand over the reigns of Alibaba to Zhang. He will however remain on the board of directors until 2020. Zhang, who is known around the company as Xiaoyaozi (free and unfettered one), is considered Ma's right hand man after 11 years at the organisation.
Though he started off as a near-broke entrepreneur, Ma is now the richest asian, and one of the richest men in the world. "He's succeeded at what Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and (Yahoo co-founder) Jerry Yang failed at, which is making themselves redundant," Peking University professor Jeffrey Towson told AFP. And a lot of that is thanks to his grit and sacrifice over the years.
By his own admission, he's in the past failed a key primary school test twice, and failed in middle school three times. He failed his university exams twice, got rejected from multiple universities before being accepted to the "worst" one in the area, and was even the only one of 24 applicants rejected for a job at KFC. And yet he's not just surviving, he's doing amazing for himself.?
"I don't think there are a lot of people in this world being rejected more than 30 times. The only thing is that we never get up, we [be] like Forrest Gump, we keep on fighting," he's said in the past. "I find that when people make a mistake or fail, if they only complain about others, this guy will never come back. But the one who only checks himself, he has hope."
It's part of that attitude that's helped Ma build a robust work culture at Alibaba, and has catapulted him to near the top of the list of the most admired men in the world. The company has over 750 million monthly active users of its services and, despite being largely based in China, has become a global rival for even the likes of Amazon Inc.