Jack Ma

"Xi hurled a series of regulatory thunderbolts at China’s high-flying tech companies, including Didi, the country’s largest ride-hailing company, and Ant Financial, the payments company owned by Jack Ma, China’s best-known entrepreneur. Chinese tech founders (and their investors) were astonished to discover that Xi Jinping could erase a trillion dollars from corporate valuations over the course of just a few months. The leadership thought it was straightforward to reorient the nation’s tech priorities away from consumer platforms and toward science-based industries, like semiconductors and aviation, that serve the nation’s strategic needs. Beijing took years to appreciate how its actions had scared the daylights out of entrepreneurs and investors."

"The point, however, isn’t to condemn Cook or Apple. It’s to convey the predicament they’re in. At the turn of the millennium, Washington made a bet on China—a bet that free trade would liberalize the country and perhaps catalyze the creation of the world’s biggest democracy. Instead, trade enriched China and empowered its rulers. Cook shouldn’t be blamed by politicians for enmeshing Apple’s operations in China two decades ago, but he has erred by doubling down over the past decade despite mounting evidence that Xi has been ramping up repression at home and taking a more combative stance in international affairs. “You can say that we read them wrong, that we misunderstood China. But Jack Ma read China wrong, too. Every entrepreneur read China wrong,” says a supply chain expert who has lived in the country. “You look at what Deng Xiaoping and Hu Jintao were promoting—the [business class] didn’t see this coming. Xi changed the game completely. He’s another Putin in the making.” This person adds, “Look, I’m not a Cook fan. But you have to be sympathetic. He didn’t know what he was dealing with. Nobody did.”"

"Tencent’s co-founder and CTO, Zhang Zhidong, believed that Wang Xing’s understanding of group buying surpassed that of Tencent and Groupon. “In doing group buying, Wang Xing must be better than Jack Ma and Pony Ma. In this competition, the core team’s understanding is decisive. Good execution, cost, pace, order, all well-executed. When everyone was burning money, Meituan pursued the most economical, efficient, and sustainable way.”"