Alibaba executive chairman and co-founder Jack Ma will retire from the e-commerce giant he founded in 1999, and devote his time to philanthropy in education, according to the New York Times.
Alibaba did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Ma, whose career took him from teaching English to becoming China’s richest man, has often joked he was not a natural technology executive. But under his guidance, the Alibaba Group has become one of China’s largest technology conglomerates.
Often compared to Amazon.com, Alibaba’s parent company has e-commerce, online payment, banking, entertainment and cloud computing businesses. It also hold stakes in several Chinese media companies, including the microblogging site Weibo. (Amazon.com chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos is the owner of The Washington Post.)
Alibaba reported roughly $40 billion in revenue last year. In its most recent quarter, it reported about $10 million in e-commerce revenue. The company reported it’s annual active customer base hit 524 million.
Ma was Alibaba’s chief executive until 2013, when he stepped down to become chairman. He founded the Jack Ma Foundation, a philanthropic organization devoted to education, in 2014. But he’s remained very involved in the company he founded. When Alibaba debuted on the New York Stock Exchange in September 2014, Ma was on the podium to ring the opening bell.