China’s richest man continues to add to his fortune.
Jack Ma, founder and executive chairman of e-commerce giant Alibaba, got $1.3 billion richer in the day following his company’s latest quarterly earnings announcement, which was released on Thursday afternoon. During the first quarter, Alibaba posted huge growth numbers, including a 58% jump in revenue over the prior year.
The results beat analyst expectations, sending company shares up more than 5% after-hours on Thursday. The stock rose an additional 2% on Friday. For Ma, who holds over half of his fortune in Alibaba shares, that made for a tremendously lucrative twenty-four-hour stretch.
Ma is now worth an estimated $38.2 billion, according to Forbes’ real-time rankings of the world’s richest people. He is the wealthiest man in China—$1.5 billion ahead of Tencent Holdings chairman Ma “Pony Ma” Huateng—and the 17th richest person on the planet.
Alibaba, which has a market capitalization of about $425 billion as of Friday’s close of markets, has posted strong numbers in recent quarters, particularly in its cloud-computing and e-commerce divisions. Investors have been pleased with its results; company shares are up over 90% so far this year.
Ma, 52, launched Alibaba in 1999 alongside 17 other cofounders. He led the group from the start and received a larger equity stake than the others (he owns about 5% of Alibaba now). As the online retailer has grown, Ma’s net worth has swelled in turn. His fortune has soared five-fold in the last four years alone.
That trajectory mirrors that of another e-commerce czar, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, whose net worth has more than doubled since March 2015. Bezos, worth an estimated $81.7 billion, briefly became the world’s richest person last month.
Source: Forbes
