Jack Ma, China's Richest Man, Says He Was Happier When He Wasn't a Billionaire

http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/247181

Jack Ma, the founder and executive chairman of Alibaba, became the richest man in China after Alibaba IPO'd for a record $25 billion last September.

But Ma was just as happy — perhaps even happier — when he was barely making any money right out of college.

After graduating in 1988, Ma worked as an English teacher at a local university in his hometown of Hangzhou, China. He only made $12 a month, according to the documentary about his life called "Crocodile in the Yangtze."

When speaking at a luncheon with the Economics Club of New York on Tuesday, Ma referred to this period as the "best life I had."

When you don't have much money, you know how to spend it, Ma explained. But once you become a billionaire, you have a lot of responsibility.


"If you have less than $1 million, you know how to spend the money," he said during Tuesday's speech. " [At] $1 billion, that's not your money...The money I have today is a responsibility. It's the trust of people on me."

Ma says he feels a need to spend his money "on behalf of the society."

"I spend it our way," he said. "It's a trust."

This isn't the first time Ma has spoken about the burden of being a billionaire. When speaking at a panel at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York, he referred to his days as an English teacher as "fantastic," according to CNN Money. He said anyone with $1 million is "lucky," but when you reach $10 million, "you've got troubles."

After Alibaba's IPO, he told CNBC that the pressure that comes with the responsibility gets to him, especially now that the world is focusing on Alibaba's stock price.


"IPO is great because ... I'm happy with the results," he said to CNBC. "But honestly, I think when people think too highly of you, you have the responsibility to calm down and be yourself."

I'd be happy to take a few hundred million off of Jack Ma's hands if he's trying to get back to that $12/month life.

Quote: (06-11-2015 06:20 AM)Dr. Howard Wrote:  

I'd be happy to take a few hundred million off of Jack Ma's hands if he's trying to get back to that $12/month life.

It's probably the only time in his life that he ever got laid.

I feel so sorry for Jack Ma, all those billions of dollars weighing him down like that.

I'm sure his countrymen feel sorry for him too. 'Poor Jack, I'd love to take that burden off him, but I don't want the responsibility of washing my Ferrari and servicing my many horny young mistresses in my lavish mansion. I'd much rather stick to struggling to survive thanks.'

I think he's saying that he was happier before all this responsibility and visibility was thrust upon him. Everyone needs a work-life balance. The downside of a high powered career (law, management, finance, entrepreneurship, consulting) is that your life gets eaten up by your work and you're always under pressure to perform. Especially if you don't like what you do and are in it purely for the money, it's easy to become burned out. A lot of the little things in life (eating a leisurely meal, socializing with friends and family, sleeping an in extra couple hours, etc.) get taken away from you too.

Of course the upside is that you have the money to do anything you want. He can have cars, girls, mansions, etc.

The people I feel truly sorry for are those who work super long hours doing something stressful, but never end up making much money. They're doubly fucked. They have the lifestyle of Jack Ma, but without the perks. Imagine being a fast food manager - hard work, stress, crap pay, long hours, zero prestige.

He has more than enough money to survive for several lifetimes. If he is so unhappy, just quit and retire! What the hell is the good of all that wealth if you can't enjoy it? If he likes what he does, well then he should just suck it up and take the good with the bad.

Sometimes I wonder if it's worth it go the management route.

Let's say you have two options in your company (these by the way are hypothetical examples):

1. Be an average white collar office work with a $75K/yr salary, 45 hour work week, and average stress.
2. Climb into management and get a $100K/yr salary (with a small chance of being further promoted into even more senior level management with even more money), but put in 55-60 hours per week and have to deal with tons of stress and politics.

I wonder who's better in the long-term. The average guy with the work-life balance or the higher-paid management?

A lot of people assume that if they put in the hard work, some day they'll be a tycoon CEO/entrepreneur like Jack Ma. Let's say you stay at junior level management until you retire (which most people do) and never attain that dream. Was all the hard work still worth it?

Quote: (06-11-2015 07:13 AM)BlueOcean Wrote:  

Sometimes I wonder if it's worth it go the management route.

Let's say you have two options in your company:

1. Be an average white collar office work with a $75K/yr salary, 45 hour work week, and average stress.
2. Climb into management and get a $100K/yr salary (with a small chance of being further promoted into even more senior level management with even more money), but put in 55-60 hours per week and have to deal with tons of stress and politics.

I wonder who's better in the long-term. The average guy with the work-life balance or the higher-paid management?

A lot of people assume that if they put in the hard work, some day they'll be a tycoon CEO/entrepreneur like Jack Ma. Let's say you stay at junior level management until you retire (which most people do) and never attain that dream. Was all the hard work still worth it?

I'd take whatever option would make me happiest. Wealth doesn't mean a damn thing if your health suffers or the rest of your life is a mess. I've met plenty of "successful failures." These are guys that are superstars in the business world and have a lot of money and property, but are in bad health, have drug or alcohol addictions, have plenty of false friends and plenty of real enemies, their families hate them, and just about every day they make allusions to offing themselves.

A lot of the superstars justify their sacrifice by saying "at least I'm successful and admired."

What happens if you don't even become a superstar? You're just a level 1 manager at XYZ Corp, making not that much more than the regular employees but hating your life. At least Jack Ma got to be a billionaire.

Quote:Quote:

Wealth doesn't mean a damn thing if your health suffers or the rest of your life is a mess.

Health is very important, for sure. I learn that more and more, the older I get.

Quote: (06-11-2015 07:38 AM)BlueOcean Wrote:  

A lot of the superstars justify their sacrifice by saying "at least I'm successful and admired."

What happens if you don't even become a superstar? You're just a level 1 manager at XYZ Corp, making not that much more than the regular employees but hating your life. At least Jack Ma got to be a billionaire.

Quote:Quote:

Wealth doesn't mean a damn thing if your health suffers or the rest of your life is a mess.

Health is very important, for sure. I learn that more and more, the older I get.

Hyman Roth said it best in Godfather II, "Good health is the most important thing. More than success, more than money, more than power."

What people don't always understand is the responsibility that comes with wealth. How do you help your family? How do you help your alcoholic second cousin? What about all of your employees that are depending on you to support their families? In a larger sense, how are you being a good steward for the money you control? After a certain amount of money, you won't ever be able to spend it in your lifetime. So you begin to focus on what kind of good you can affect with it. All of these responsibilities are on your mind all of the time. When anyone you know is running into trouble (financial, health, etc) you KNOW you can help but should you? Money is a very blunt instrument and often creates more problems than it solves.

Richest man in China? More like richest man in China the public is allowed to know about.

Besides that, I tend to believe him. I doubt young Jack Ma spent all day musing about how much nicer his life would be if he was super rich. Of course he had his dreams and aspirations, like everyone else. But he probably made the best out of the little he had, and enjoyed his life as much as he could. Just like most other people on this planet (have to). A happiness derived from friends, family, a relatively carefree live without responsibilities, a young and healthy body, and knowing where you belong.

Add to that the usual nostalgia humans get when they get older and that´s it. Maybe he fell in love for the first time back then? Maybe he remembers his excitement talking to his first foreigners when he was a tourist guide, hearing stories about all those unknown far away countries, new ideas, fantastic technologies? Becoming a father? Daring to start his first small business? All things money can´t buy.

It´s not that he´s unhappy nowadays, it´s just a different kind of happiness now, derived from success, accomplishment and fame, and all the things money can buy in this world. But with it comes a lot of responsibility, lack of truely free time, constant worrying about your legacy and how to ensure it, in the best case a feeling of duty to all the people who depend on you and who´s life you influence with your decisions, in the worst case greed, compulsory work and a neverending craving for more, etc.
The best thing about money is that it can buy you freedom, but it doesn´t help when the person enslaving you sits inside your head.

Of course he could always say fuck this shit, buy an island in the Pacific and live there in luxury with a gigantic harem until the end of his life. But with a mindset like that he wouldn´t be where he is today. He can´t buy a new personality and attitude, he is who he is.
But yes, in theory he has one thing that most others don´t (think they) have. The power to walk away.

In the end, I think what he meant was that happiness doesn´t necessarily correspond to the amount of money you have, and is certainly not proportional to it.

I can't find a small enough violin.

Quote: (06-11-2015 07:13 AM)BlueOcean Wrote:  

Sometimes I wonder if it's worth it go the management route.

Let's say you have two options in your company (these by the way are hypothetical examples):

1. Be an average white collar office work with a $75K/yr salary, 45 hour work week, and average stress.
2. Climb into management and get a $100K/yr salary (with a small chance of being further promoted into even more senior level management with even more money), but put in 55-60 hours per week and have to deal with tons of stress and politics.

I wonder who's better in the long-term. The average guy with the work-life balance or the higher-paid management?

Supposedly your "happiness improvement" index caps out at 75k, but I also think it depends on what you want. Some people just love having a large bank account and then there's people like me who enjoy expensive past times like Skiing and European tourism.

Personally I lean towards the latter(which is fairly typical of MBA students at brand name schools), but I've also got a bit of a chip on my shoulder from my military service. In that job I'd typically work over 75+ hours a week......and that was during the approximately HALF of the time that I wasn't in the field or deployed. Factor that in and the average work obligations per week jumped to about 90.

And I was doing all of that for a shitty 60-70k a year depending on rank and the fluctuating value of my housing/healthcare benefits. Exactly why the fuck would I do that for 70 when I can go into finance and earn north of 200k total compensation(post-MBA hires) for the same workload?

As bad as that sounds the truth is that it really depends on who you are working with. When I was surrounded by assholes I hated my life, and at times when I had an awesome and motivated team to work with times were good.

That leads me to one major advantage of the civilian world over military. In the military world you're stuck with your team and it's generally difficult to be reassigned. If the person who is responsible for doing your assigning is an asshole or doesn't like you then you have no recourse whatsoever. On the upside you learn how to work with a variety of different personalities but on the downside you can get stuck in a toxic team with no way out.

If you're a civilian then there's nothing stopping you from (discretely) doing a job search while in your current employment. In finance it's kind of expected that people will jump ship quickly for a better offer or if they find a work environment they like better. That's good because it forces companies to compensate competitively in order to keep employees, bad because it tends to foster a mindset where employees are "human resources" rather than people.

His statements make more sense when you take into consideration Chinese culture. Much of the enjoyment in his life was probably derived from starting a business, growing it, and seeing his ideas come into fruition. The problem is that he probably never considered the end game when he actually succeed beyond his wildest dreams and now has god-like wealth.

Unfortunately, men like this are usually Chinese ambition-bots. They can excel but they can't really enjoy their life. They are probably too rigid and dogmatic in their Confucian upbringing and neurotic pragmatism.

Feisbook Control made a comment here once that Chinese suck at enjoying life and I have to agree. Guys like this derive their enjoyment from success and productivity. Now that he's on top of the world what is there? It's lonely at the top of that mountain if your responsibilities and interests don't give you some sense of satisfaction like the beginning.

I don't claim to know what a guy like this is thinking though he's 19th century industrial baron type rich. I'm not going to give too much sympathy for a dude like this who can't sort out his own emotional/personal baggage.

Quote: (06-11-2015 07:13 AM)BlueOcean Wrote:  

Sometimes I wonder if it's worth it go the management route.

Let's say you have two options in your company (these by the way are hypothetical examples):

1. Be an average white collar office work with a $75K/yr salary, 45 hour work week, and average stress.
2. Climb into management and get a $100K/yr salary (with a small chance of being further promoted into even more senior level management with even more money), but put in 55-60 hours per week and have to deal with tons of stress and politics.

I wonder who's better in the long-term. The average guy with the work-life balance or the higher-paid management?

A lot of people assume that if they put in the hard work, some day they'll be a tycoon CEO/entrepreneur like Jack Ma. Let's say you stay at junior level management until you retire (which most people do) and never attain that dream. Was all the hard work still worth it?

I've done both, #1 is the best option, especially if you are a government worker. I made the mistake and climbed the ladder to high. A buddy of mine that in his own words "formatted hard drives and pressed ctrl alt del for old people" in the same department continually refused promotions because he enjoyed easy work, low responsibility, plenty of vacation time and being able to not think about work when he wasn't there. He was a king of game on girls and was never lacking for pussy either so the 'status' and 'cash' didn't hurt him one bit in that dept.

While I understand that wealth that is stored in a company creates a certain responsibility and it's own sets of challenges, it is up to him to grow with it. I've dealt with a few self-made millionaires who went into the 100 mio. $ levels. Some of them were still stuck in the frame of barely having made it. They had a massive hands-on approach, some tried to control all fields, filled their offices with ass-kissers who never told them the truth and they were even strangely frugal in matters that did not count or have proven to be destructive.

Very few learned from the old-style older families of money who delegated and became more detached about their original business by investing elsewhere as well. Those families create family trust funds that give almost all family members a bare minimum financial support, an education and a certain safe harbor. They take the view that some of the sons and nephews will be bringing the family fortune forward. In a way they detach their wealth from their own mental worry-chamber and leave it to people they trust completely. This is a big step forward and some of those self-made individuals never make the transition and work themselves to death. Only their sons and grandsons learn a better life-work balance with great wealth (if they don't fall pray to drugs and party-lifestyle).

Whether Ma is one of those individuals or is just spouting propaganda to placate the masses is another matter. Fact is that above a certain income level (it's much higher than 75k - probably some 250-500k minimum for families now) happiness does not improve. That is likely true, but in our times it is better to be rich than poor and I would rather be rich and work on my happiness than poor and work on my happiness.

Quote: (06-11-2015 08:40 AM)Celtic_Austrian Wrote:  

Richest man in China? More like richest man in China the public is allowed to know about.

Besides that, I tend to believe him. I doubt young Jack Ma spent all day musing about how much nicer his life would be if he was super rich. Of course he had his dreams and aspirations, like everyone else. But he probably made the best out of the little he had, and enjoyed his life as much as he could. Just like most other people on this planet (have to). A happiness derived from friends, family, a relatively carefree live without responsibilities, a young and healthy body, and knowing where you belong.

Add to that the usual nostalgia humans get when they get older and that´s it. Maybe he fell in love for the first time back then? Maybe he remembers his excitement talking to his first foreigners when he was a tourist guide, hearing stories about all those unknown far away countries, new ideas, fantastic technologies? Becoming a father? Daring to start his first small business? All things money can´t buy.

It´s not that he´s unhappy nowadays, it´s just a different kind of happiness now, derived from success, accomplishment and fame, and all the things money can buy in this world. But with it comes a lot of responsibility, lack of truely free time, constant worrying about your legacy and how to ensure it, in the best case a feeling of duty to all the people who depend on you and who´s life you influence with your decisions, in the worst case greed, compulsory work and a neverending craving for more, etc.
The best thing about money is that it can buy you freedom, but it doesn´t help when the person enslaving you sits inside your head.

Of course he could always say fuck this shit, buy an island in the Pacific and live there in luxury with a gigantic harem until the end of his life. But with a mindset like that he wouldn´t be where he is today. He can´t buy a new personality and attitude, he is who he is.
But yes, in theory he has one thing that most others don´t (think they) have. The power to walk away.

In the end, I think what he meant was that happiness doesn´t necessarily correspond to the amount of money you have, and is certainly not proportional to it.

People are misunderstanding what Jack Ma is saying here.

He's not saying "Woe is me. I'm so miserable with all of my billions. Everybody should feel sorry for me."

He's saying two things:
1. He was just as happy making $12 a month as he is now being billionaire. Read Stumbling Upon Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. Humans are wired to be 'fairly happy' regardless of whether they are dirt poor or billionaires.

2. Things in excess become their opposites.
Wealth up to a certain point brings happiness and freedom. After that point it becomes a burden.

I think there is some truth to this. But let's get real. I've heard this from many rich people and none of them have any interest in letting go of there social standing or wealth.

Quote: (06-11-2015 08:28 AM)Gringuito Wrote:  

What people don't always understand is the responsibility that comes with wealth. How do you help your family? How do you help your alcoholic second cousin? What about all of your employees that are depending on you to support their families? In a larger sense, how are you being a good steward for the money you control? After a certain amount of money, you won't ever be able to spend it in your lifetime. So you begin to focus on what kind of good you can affect with it. All of these responsibilities are on your mind all of the time. When anyone you know is running into trouble (financial, health, etc) you KNOW you can help but should you? Money is a very blunt instrument and often creates more problems than it solves.

What you said rings true. However, if you take into account Chinese culture and what the country/politicians want him to say, I think that what Jack Ma said (and likely what he lives) has to be heavily tinged with that influence.

What you said also reminds me of this statement I was told by the wisest/wealthiest man I know and has since been reinforced by multiple other people I know who are more successful than I:

"You can't solve a money problem with money."

Essentially, if you have a brother or a cousin or someone who is coming to you for help with money, if the problem they have is the ability to manage money, you will never solve the problem by giving them money. It will only delay the inevitable or actually make their related problems worse.

Jack Ma speaks the truth and I like him a lot, a real rags to riches story.

Quote: (06-11-2015 06:34 AM)Phoenix Wrote:  

I feel so sorry for Jack Ma, all those billions of dollars weighing him down like that.

Quote: (06-11-2015 08:46 AM)Sir Vigorous Wrote:  

I can't find a small enough violin.

This kind of thinking rubs me the wrong way.

Why do you feel that Jack Ma is underserving of empathy?

He went from rags to riches, and he is telling the world that high wealth isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Are you contemptuous of successful people?

Quote: (06-11-2015 06:20 AM)Dr. Howard Wrote:  

I'd be happy to take a few hundred million off of Jack Ma's hands if he's trying to get back to that $12/month life.

Jack Ma said that money hasn't made him happier. Why would you want to take on his burden?

Do you enjoy pain? Or do you think he's lying?

I think it's akin to very intelligent people who have developed inventions, and then questioned whether their inventions have wrought harm onto others.

Also, half the fun of acquiring money is the time it takes to do so, and the small steps of material purchases. After you can own everything, you've run out of rope on chasing wealth.

At some point the money becomes your master.

I also suspect being wealthy at this point in Chinese history with there being a massive explosion of wealthy in Chinese society and a lot of changes adds some discomfort