Jack Ma's libertarian talk approaches red line

Alibaba's $23.5 bn in revenue last year was still dwarfed by Amazon's $136 bn

Corporate executives sometimes like to talk about how their companies are overtaking nation states. In China, they tend to be careful not to outshine the government and avoid such analogies. Yet, that’s just what Jack Ma did last week.

At Alibaba’s annual investor day, China’s richest man outlined a vision where the company he founded could become the world’s fifth-biggest economy by 2036, trailing only the US, China, Europe and Japan. Let’s just say most entrepreneurs in China wouldn’t make that comparison. “Well, people say, this is too big,” Ma said of the scale of Alibaba’s ambition. “It costs nothing to