Jack Stinking Ma has not been seen for 2 months.
(Aside: If you don't know who Jack Ma is, he is the Chinese co-founder and former executive chairman of multinational tech giant Alibaba Group. He is an outspoken proponent of an open and market-driven economy. He is also worth $58 BILLI and is, according to Forbes, the 21st most powerful person in the world. Also you need to read the news more often than you watch people dancing around on TikTok like drunken monkeys.)
Moving on: If Ma's been missing for 2 months, then why are we only hearing about it now? Because Western media just figured it out, that's why.
This is so, so shady. Read on...
The Financial Times reported that Ma was just suddenly replaced on the popular show "Africa's Business Heroes" by some Alibaba executive ... at the end of the season ... and he was scrubbed from the show's site:
Mr Ma was replaced as a judge in the final of Africa's Business Heroes, a television contest for budding entrepreneurs, his photograph was removed from the judging webpage, and he was conspicuously left out of a promotional video.
Oh THAT'S not shady!
Now Yahoo Finance picks it up:
Ma's business empire, Ant Group, has been under scrutiny by Beijing ever since Ma delivered a controversial speech in Shanghai on 24 October that criticised China's regulation system for stifling innovation and likened global banking rules to an "old people's club".
"Today's financial system is the legacy of the Industrial Age," Ma said in the speech.
"We must set up a new one for the next generation and young people. We must reform the current system."
Little over a week later, Ant's IPO (valued at a record-setting US $37 billion or AU $48 billion), which had already received the green light from China's securities watchdog, was suspended, with the Shanghai Stock Exchange saying Ant had reported "significant issues such as the changes in financial technology regulatory environment".
What happened next? Oh the commies in Beijing started muscling in on Ma's businesses. The Wall Street Journal explains:
Beijing is seeking to shrink Jack Ma's technology and financial empire and potentially take a larger stake in his businesses, according to Chinese officials and government advisers familiar with the matter, as regulators zero in on the billionaire in a campaign to strengthen oversight of an increasingly influential tech sphere.
Under a restructuring road map that China's financial regulators laid out this week, financial technology giant Ant Group Co. would return to its roots as an online-payment provider akin to PayPal Holdings Inc., while its more profitable investment and loan businesses would be curtailed.
The regulators, led by the central bank, also ordered Ant to form a separate financial holding company that would be subject to the kind of capital requirements applied to banks. That could open a door for big state banks or other types of government-controlled entities to buy into the firm to help beef up its capital base, the officials and advisers say.
I can't stress enough how high-profile a leader Ma is. He is China's equivalent of Jeff Bezos. In fact, they are competitors.
So Ma, a former teacher, is a genius who rose to become one of the most important people in the world, and created companies that print money, on his way to a $58 billion net worth, and the CCP got irked that he said something slightly critical of them, so they decided to disappear him in order to take over his companies?
Well, do you have a more logical explanation?
Do you think it would be abnormal for the CCP to disappear one of the most visible people on the planet for wrongthink? If you do, you are wrong. Consider the almost-unbelievable saga of Fan Bingbing:
Yeah, that really happened. And it just happened.
Finally, I will leave you with a video clip from an exiled Chinese billionaire. WATCH THIS:
DUDE!
