Jack Ma is one of China’s richest men, with a fortune valued at nearly $30 billion. As executive chairman of Alibaba Group, he leads the dominant force in Chinese e-commerce, a company with a market value of $264 billion and some 450 million customers. A global ambassador for Chinese business, he spent 800 hours aloft last year—visiting princes, Presidents, and Prime Ministers and lots of mere businesspeople too. “A professional pilot cannot travel that much, or so I’m told,” he boasts.
Even so, the rich and powerful people who meet with Ma tend to come away from the experience with a fresh nugget of information, either about him or about the still poorly understood digital conglomerate he started with a bunch of friends 18 years ago in the provincial coastal city of Hangzhou. Jim Kim, a physician who is the president of the World Bank, met Ma four years ago over a dinner lasting more than three hours and was startled to find the billionaire wearing sandals, holding Buddhist prayer beads, and sitting cross-legged on his chair. Kim was so taken with Ma’s passion for facilitating global trade by focusing on small-business people that he’s rethinking his international development organization’s approach.
Others are moved by Ma’s humanity. Jean Liu, president of Chinese ride-hailing startup Didi Chuxing, has known Ma for years and considers him a mentor. (Alibaba is a Didi shareholder.) She recently learned, through family connections rather than from Ma, about how he repeatedly visited a seamstress he had met after learning she was ill. Says Liu: “He genuinely cares about the people around him.”
Then there’s the President of the United States, who met Ma for the first time a few weeks before his Inauguration. “Trump didn’t know that much about Alibaba,” reports company president Michael Evans, a former Goldman Sachs banker and Asia hand who helped set up the powwow. “He was fascinated to hear that Chinese consumers are interested in buying from U.S. small businesses. I don’t think that had occurred to him.” Ma used the sit-down to make a bold promise—that Alibaba would help create 1 million jobs in the U.S. over five years. The pronouncement was music to the President-elect’s ears. “It was a great meeting,” he declared before the cameras in the lobby of Trump Tower, a beaming Ma beside him. “Jack and I are going to do some great things.”
President Trump isn’t the only one who could stand to learn more about Alibaba. Despite its heft in China and the blockbuster 2014 public offering that raised $25 billion on the New York Stock Exchange and introduced Alibaba to Western investors, Ma’s company remains a mystery to most non-Chinese. There’s a simple reason for that: Few outside the world’s second-largest economy are Alibaba customers. Ma is aware of this knowledge gap. It’s part of what drives him to keep logging frequent-flier miles to educate people about his company and his plans.
To realize his vision—which relies on technology to buy, sell, finance, and deliver goods on Alibaba’s digital platforms around the world—Ma has been busily recasting himself of late as a global leader. Already he is the first Chinese business executive who can claim to have transcended his homeland for the world stage. In his travels, Ma promotes the lowering of trade barriers, touts his own brand of philanthropy, and supports causes such as primary-school education. His version of globalization is carefully calibrated and expansive enough to be consistent with the goals of his own President, Xi Jinping, as well as with Trump’s America-first positioning.
As with so many effective leaders, Ma’s motives are complex. China is already a huge consumer market and one that’s still growing fast, but Ma knows that eventually he will need to conquer new territories for Alibaba to continue on its current trajectory. Like other Chinese champions, Alibaba has thrived at home while foreign competitors have thus far been stymied from entering his turf. If that changes, foreign markets will be even more crucial. Ma also needs for Alibaba—plagued by criticism over the profusion of counterfeit wares for sale on its sites—to develop a reputation as trusted around the world as Jack Ma is cherished by his fellow bold-faced names.
Ma’s opportunity is unique. After centuries of stagnation, his country has recently reassumed its position as a world leader—just as Alibaba, one of its marquee corporate names, has joined the ranks of world-beating companies. With characteristic intuition, Ma, 52, seems to realize that this is his moment to go beyond merely being famous and take his place among the globe’s revered business leaders.
-Fortune