Jack Ma, Chairman of Alibaba, is attending the Jack Ma Rural Teacher Awards event on January 13, 2019 in Sanya, Hainan Province in China.
VCG | Visual China Group | Getty Images
The absence of Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, has not been made public in the past two months, including the miss of the last episode of a TV show about which he would appear as a judge, has fueled speculation on social media about the place where he was in the midst of a Chinese regulatory restriction on his expansive business. rich.
China’s top profile entrepreneur has not appeared in a public environment in Shanghai since the end of October, where he exploded China’s regulatory system in a speech that put him on a collision with officials, which led to the suspension of a $ 37 billion IPO from Alibaba’s Ant Group fintech arm.
The Financial Times reported on Friday that Ma was replaced as a judge in the last installment in November of a game show for entrepreneurs called Africa’s Business Heroes.
An Alibaba spokesman told Reuters on Monday that the change was due to a scheduling conflict, which diminished further comments.
While news coverage of Ma’s absence from public opinion caused speculation on Twitter, which was blocked in China, it was not a major trend on social media in mainland China, where sensitive topics were subject to censorship.
Chinese regulators have lifted Ma’s business since his speech in October, including ordering the start of an antitrust investigation into Alibaba and Ant to shake up its lending and other consumer finance ventures, including the creation of a separate holding company to meet capital requirements.
“I think he was told to be too low,” said Duncan Clark, chairman of Beijing-based technology consulting firm BDA China. “This is a fairly unique situation, more linked to the large scale of Ant and the sensitivity about financial regulation,” he said.
Alibaba’s listed shares in Hong Kong fell 2.15% on Monday.