Chinese tech billionaire Jack Ma has vanished from his own reality TV show as his Alibaba Group is at the centre of an anti-monopoly investigation in his home country.
Ma has vanished from his own TV talent show and there has been no sign of him since late October after he criticised the Chinese government. The Daily Mail reports:
The 56-year-old is said to have made around £35billion from creating Alibaba, the Asian version of Amazon, and was a poster boy for the communist regime.
But China’s rulers seemed to turn against him after he criticised regulators and state-owned banks at a financial technology conference in October 2020.
His profile has gone from the judging webpage of Africa’s Business Heroes – a Dragons’ Den-style TV programme for budding entrepreneurs.
The final took place without him and he is also absent from promotional videos.
Weeks before the final in November, Mr Ma had tweeted that he ‘couldn’t wait’ to meet the contestants.
There has been no activity since then on the father-of-three’s Twitter account, one that had regularly seen several tweets a day.
China is infamous for clamping down on critics and in March, Ren Zhiqiang, a property tycoon, disappeared after he called President Xi Jinping a ‘clown’ for his handling of the coronavirus crisis.
His friends said they could not contact him and six months later he was sentenced to 18 years in prison after he ‘voluntarily and truthfully confessed’ to various crimes of corruption.