Curling Up With a Good Billionaire
by Dominic Hilton
November 2021
Who is Jack Ma? And how can I too own an e-commerce company with total assets of US$257.978 billion?
There are 603 channels on the TV in my Buenos Aires apartment, but only a handful of them show gauchos castrating randy bulls or venerable nuns chanting the Rosary. Surf past those, and it’s just a bottomless list of lowbrow American TV fare, dubbed into Spanish, rolling 24/7.
Sprawled in a favourite leather chair, I recently caught an episode from season 6 of the hit US crime show Hawaii Five-0, in which Officer Kono Kalakaua and her new husband, Adam, were kidnapped by a violent gang of fugitives on day one of their honeymoon. I’d not seen the episode before, but it was pretty obvious the good-looking pair were going to find a way to escape their torturers, so my attention started to drift, and I found myself gazing blankly at the towering bookshelves that surround my TV. My eye landed on a pocketsize paperback tucked between unopened copies of American Psycho and The Handmaid’s Tale. I’d never seen it before, and it didn’t belong to me.
Hawaii Five-0 is one of those TV shows in which whenever a character touches a computer key the machine makes a noise like “whoosh bleep bleep-bleep bleep-bleep-bleep biiiing”. In real life, this is the kind of thing that would turn even the most mild-mannered office worker into Patrick Bateman after thirty seconds. It was starting to bug me, too, so I hit the mute button and reached for the book, which was titled, Never Give Up: Jack Ma In His Own Words. I’d never heard of Jack Ma, who on the front cover was described by Forbes as “Alibaba’s visionary-in-chief”. I’d never heard of Alibaba, either.
The back cover promised “Essential reading”, so with nothing better to do, I cracked it open, quickly learning that Jack Ma is one of the wealthiest people on the planet.
That can’t be right, I thought, so I pulled out my phone to google his name. The first thing I discovered was that Jack Ma hadn’t been seen in nine months. Some reporters said he’d been “disappeared” by the Chinese government, others that he was “focussing on hobbies”. Either way, his lockdown was clearly more productive than mine. As of April 2021, he’d somehow amassed a personal net worth of $51.5 billion.
“You never listen to anything I say!” my mother is always protesting. It’s her excuse for giving me zero advice or guidance, and she’s right, I don’t listen to her, but it’s because she’s not worth $51.5 billion. If she was, I’d waste an entire evening reading a collection of her “most thought-provoking insights”. I’d maybe even underline a few of them, such as “When you have 100 million U.S. dollars, I think that’s more than enough for you and your children.”
Never Give Up is billed as “a true rags-to-riches story”. In the book’s introduction, we learn that despite one or two “obstacles” (such as the fact that “he knew nothing about coding or computers”) Jack Ma was “determined” to start a multibillion-dollar internet business, so he did what all know-nothing, hyper-ambitious street urchins do and “borrowed money from relatives [to] set up an office with 17 partners”. Turns out Ma’s so-called “rags” were mostly mental. “He flunked his university exams twice,” crow the book’s editors, Suk Lee and Bob Song, before bragging that Ma was the only person in China to be denied a job by Kentucky Fried Chicken.
While I’m not the type to hanker after my own superyacht or private space mission, I do often wonder what it is that gazillionaires know that I so evidently don’t. According to Jack Ma, “Spending money is more difficult than making money,” but not in my experience, it isn’t.
“Essential reading”
Never Give Up is a collection of verbatim quotes from shareholders meetings and internal emails organised under headings and subheadings, such as ‘Life Lessons’, ‘Not Stupid’ and ‘Laughing’. We’re promised pearls of wisdom, but instead we get a whole lot of stuff like, “It’s difficult for an elephant to step on all the ants because the ants won’t allow it.” Practical advice about how to make billions of your own dollars comes in the form of “No dogs or rabbits as employers, please; they must excel at both” and “To fight with a shark in the sea is to lose.”
We learn that “rabbits naturally eat the grass by their own burrows first” and “it is better to be the head of a dog than the tail of a lion.” There’s stuff about attracting shrimps to feed whales, too, but I didn’t really understand it. Happiness is defined as “digital products”, and the key to successful business, “smiling.”
“A company’s identity is somewhat similar to a zoo’s,” we’re told authoritatively. Also, “In battle, soldiers should not have binoculars. Otherwise, when the commander orders an assault, the soldiers might think, “Oh, crap, we can see they have three machine guns, maybe we should retreat.””
Never Give Up is 152 pages long, but pages 115 to 152 are lists of ‘Milestones, Citations and Acknowledgements’. Ma’s “Milestones” include being born in 1964 and visiting a friend in Australia in 1985, “where he realizes that the world is much different than what he was taught in school.”
“Dream your dream. Believe in your dream. You must have a dream.” This is Ma’s big takeaway message. But I too “know nothing about computers” and the world is much different than what I was taught in school. So why don’t I own an e-commerce company with total assets of US$257.978 billion?
Because I don’t smile enough?
