Jack Ma has given up on the reins of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. After presiding over one of the most spectacular creations of wealth the world has ever seen.
The former English teacher resigned as the executive chairman ofChina's largest company on his 55th birthday after amassing a $41.8billion fortune- a trove surpassed only by India's Mukesh Ambani in Asia,according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
His record-breaking rise from a bootstrapped entrepreneurworking out of his apartment in 1999 to jet-setting e-commerce mogul is one forthe history books, mirroring China's own evolution from technological backwaterto world's No 2 economy.
Ma and his co-founders built a business-to-business marketplaceover two decades into a $460 billion titan that bested EBay Inc. and Amazon.comInc. which operates one of the world's largest cloud computing businesses andruns a logistics network that delivers millions of parcels every day.
On Tuesday, Ma hands the helm to finance maven Daniel Zhang- amomentous transition for Asia's largest corporation.