Jack Ma

Year 2008 wiped out $19.2 trillion in US income... What if the money was spent on the Midwest of the United States?

IBM, Microsoft, the profit they made was larger than the top four banks in China put together... But where did the money go?

I call Alibaba '1,001 mistakes.' We expanded too fast, and then in the dot-com bubble, we had to have layoffs. By 2002, we had only enough cash to survive for 18 months. We had a lot of free members using our site, and we didn't know how we'd make money. So we developed a product for China exporters to meet U.S. buyers online. This model saved us.

Spending money is much more difficult than making money.

In the beginning I just wanted to survive. For the first three years, we made zero revenue. I remember many times when I was trying to pay up, the restaurant owner would say, 'Your bill was paid.' And there would be a note saying, 'Mr. Ma, I'm your customer on the Alibaba platform. I made a lot of money, and I know you don't, so I paid the bill.'

On privacy issues, it's just like hundreds of years ago when people said, 'I would rather put my money under my pillow than in a bank.' But today, banks know how to protect money much better than you do. Today, we may not have the answers to privacy issues, but I believe our young people will come up with the solutions.

Today the financial market is no good, but the money is there.

We should keep on going along the path of globalization. Globalization is good... when trade stops, war comes.

When I am myself, I am happy and have a good result.

I try to make myself happy, no, because I know that if I'm not happy, my colleagues are not happy and my shareholders are not happy and my customers are not happy.

I don't want to be liked. I want to be respected.

People say, 'Well you know the economy's bad, so China consumption will be low. No, totally different. You Americans love to spend tomorrow's money, and other people's money maybe... We Chinese love to save money.