Jack Ma, the founder and executive chairman of Alibaba, revealed his heart sound that he’s unhappy for being rich. According to Ma’s talk in the one-to-one interview he had with CNBC, Alibaba’s historic IPO valued at a record setting 25 billion brought a huge pressure on his shoulder. “People say, ‘Well Jack, rich people is good.’ Yeah it is good, but not the richest man in China. It’s a great pain because when you’re (the) richest person in the world, everybody (is) surrounding you for money,” he said. “Today when I walk on the street, people look at you in a different—I want people to see this is entrepreneur, this is a guy who is having fun of himself, and I want to be myself.” Well, indeed, there are people in the world who approach “rich people” on purpose because they think that there must be profit to gain eventually, such as money and connection. Being rich would bring to people like Jack Ma a set of pain that probably could never be understood by people who never get to experience the similar situation. Refer Jack Ma’s words to other billionaires, it suddenly made a lot of sense to their action of giving back huge proportion of their personal assets in many ways to the society, such as by donating money to build schools for children. Jack and his colleagues together founded Alibaba for innovation, entrepreneurship and fun, those are the original incentives of them to keep outreach his company’s business development. I think that what could make Jack Ma “happier” would be people throwing more attention to his personality, ideas, and the company’s future instead of the fact of himself being the richest guy in China.
