Brian Nichols is the co-founder of Angel Squad, a community where you’ll learn how to angel invest and get a chance to invest as little as $1k into Hustle Fund's top performing early-stage startups

Jack Ma's story is one of the most dramatic in the history of business. He co-founded Alibaba in 1999 in a Hangzhou apartment with 18 friends and $60,000 in pooled capital. By 2014, Alibaba's IPO on the New York Stock Exchange raised $25 billion, the largest IPO in history at the time. By 2020, Ma was worth roughly $60 billion and Ant Group, Alibaba's fintech arm, was preparing a $34 billion IPO that would have been the largest ever. Then he gave a speech criticizing Chinese financial regulators in October 2020, describing their approach as having a "pawnshop mentality." The regulators suspended the Ant IPO, launched an antitrust investigation into Alibaba, and Ma largely disappeared from public view for the better part of a year. Jack Ma investments are inseparable from that arc, because the story of how he built, lost access to, and partially recovered from his position is the most concentrated case study available on what happens when business and political risk intersect at the highest level.

The Alibaba Engine and What It Built

Ma's primary investment vehicle is his stake in Alibaba, where he owns approximately 4% of the company's shares through a combination of direct holdings and entities including APN, a Cayman Islands holding company in which he has a 70% interest. At current valuations, that stake represents a significant portion of his estimated $29.6 billion net worth as of December 2025.

The more interesting investment story is Blue Pool Capital, the family office Ma co-founded with Alibaba chairman Joe Tsai. Blue Pool has backed companies ranging from Rent the Runway, which received $20 million from Blue Pool in 2018, to Golden Goose, the Italian luxury sneaker brand, where Blue Pool acquired a 12% minority stake in January 2025. In May 2025, Ma became the lead investor in a group acquiring a mid-teens ownership stake in the New York Liberty WNBA franchise at a valuation of $450 million, the highest ever for a women's professional sports team. The investment came shortly after Ma's attendance at President Xi Jinping's meeting with Chinese entrepreneurs in February 2025, an appearance widely interpreted as a signal of political rehabilitation.

Yunfeng Capital and the Long Game

Beyond Alibaba and Blue Pool, Ma co-founded Yunfeng Capital in 2010, a private equity and venture fund focused on Chinese technology and consumer companies. Yunfeng's portfolio spans healthcare, media, entertainment, and financial services, making it one of the most active domestic investment vehicles associated with a tech founder of Ma's profile. The strategy has consistently focused on businesses with strong consumer network effects in the Chinese market, a thesis directly informed by Alibaba's own growth trajectory.

In early 2024, Ma quietly purchased approximately $50 million of Alibaba stock. The kind of patient conviction that move reflects is something Angel Squad members work to build in their own portfolios., signaling personal conviction in the company's recovery before it became widely discussed. Alibaba subsequently announced a $50 billion investment in AI infrastructure over three years, partnered with Nvidia to accelerate AI and robotics development, and staged a significant stock rally driven by cloud computing optimism and the company's positioning in China's AI buildout.

Shiyan Koh, Hustle Fund managing partner, has discussed how political and regulatory risk in emerging markets is often underpriced by investors who focus only on business fundamentals. Jack Ma's experience is the clearest possible illustration of what that risk looks like when it materializes at scale, and what resilience looks like in response.

What Angel Squad Members Can Take From This

Ma's story is ultimately about what happens when you build something genuinely valuable and then have to demonstrate, over a sustained period, that you can operate patiently through external constraints beyond your control. Elizabeth Yin, Hustle Fund GP, has talked about how the most resilient investors are the ones who can distinguish between a business problem and a timing problem and stay patient when conditions are temporarily against them. Ma held that position for four difficult years.

Angel Squad brings together 2,500 investors across 50 countries who are building portfolios with that kind of long-horizon orientation. Members invest alongside Hustle Fund in early-stage companies and learn to think about structural forces, market timing, and founder resilience in ways that compound over time. The parallels to Ma's story are instructive even at much smaller scales. Visit hustlefund.vc/squad to join.

The Takeaway

Jack Ma investments reflect a consistent belief in consumer-driven growth in large markets, paired with a hard-earned understanding of the limits of business power when it runs into political power. The comeback, quiet stock purchases, a $450 million sports franchise bet, an AI infrastructure pivot at Alibaba, shows that the underlying investor instincts remain sharp. The lesson for early-stage investors extends well beyond portfolio strategy. It's about building the resilience to stay rational when the environment gets irrational, and the patience to wait for conditions to shift back in your favor.