Category:Former Alibaba Employees
Alibaba Group was founded in Hangzhou in 1999 by Jack Ma and a group of eighteen co-founders, beginning as a business-to-business marketplace that connected Chinese manufacturers with overseas buyers. Unlike most technology company categories, this one is not built from an executive diaspora, because Alibaba's senior people have tended to stay inside the group for decades and then hand the job to another founder. The membership therefore splits cleanly in two: the founding cohort and the chief executive succession that came out of it, and the outside investors whose entries are dominated by what an Alibaba stake did to their own institutions.
The founders and the succession
Ma failed the national college entrance examination twice, took an English degree from Hangzhou Normal University in 1988, taught English, and co-founded Alibaba in 1999. He served as executive chairman until his retirement from that role in September 2019, and his public profile narrowed sharply after regulators halted the initial public offering of his payments company Ant Group in late 2020.
Joe Tsai was born in Taipei, trained as a corporate lawyer, was admitted to the New York bar, and joined the founding group from private equity, bringing the legal and financial side that the more technical founders did not have. He has served as chairman of the group.
The chief executive line runs through two more members. Daniel Zhang joined in 2007 after more than a decade in accounting and gaming, conceived the Singles' Day shopping event, succeeded Ma as chief executive in 2015 and as chairman in 2019, and left in 2023 for private equity. Eddie Wu was one of the original eighteen co-founders, spent more than two decades inside the group in technical and leadership roles, and became chief executive on 10 September 2023. His September 2025 announcement of more than 380 billion yuan of artificial intelligence infrastructure spending moved the company's share price.
The capital behind the company
Three of the outside members are here because of a single investment each. Masayoshi Son committed roughly 20 million dollars to Alibaba in 2000; by the 2014 initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange, SoftBank's stake was valued at approximately 50 billion dollars, and by 2018 the holding was reported at 132 billion dollars. Jerry Yang drove Yahoo's roughly 1 billion dollar investment for about 40 percent of the company, a decision that grew out of his personal relationship with Ma. Susan Decker managed that stake as Yahoo's chief financial officer and later as its president, during the period when the Alibaba holding was worth more than the rest of the business.
The remaining backlinked members are counterparties and contemporaries rather than employees. Daniel Loeb took a Third Point position in Alibaba as part of a pivot toward Chinese technology. Ding Lei, Lei Jun, Li Ka-shing, Robert Kuok, Zhong Shanshan and Marissa Mayer sit in the same commercial neighborhood without having worked there.
See also
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