Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built

The iron triangle -- Jack magic -- From student to teacher -- Hope and coming to America -- China is coming on -- Bubble and birth -- Backers : Goldman and SoftBank -- Burst and back to China -- Born again : Taobao and the humiliation of eBay -- Yahoo's billion-dollar bet -- Growing pains -- Icon or Icarus?;In just a decade and half Jack Ma, a man from modest beginnings who started out as an English teacher, founded and built Alibaba into one of the world's largest companies, an e-commerce empire on which hundreds of millions of Chinese consumers depend. Alibaba's $25 billion IPO in 2014 was the largest global IPO ever. A Rockefeller of his age who is courted by CEOs and Presidents around the world, Jack is an icon for China's booming private sector and the gatekeeper to hundreds of millions of middle class consumers. Duncan Clark first met Jack in 1999 in the small apartment where Jack founded Alibaba. Granted unprecedented access to a wealth of new material including exclusive interviews, Clark draws on his own experience as an early advisor to Alibaba and two decades in China chronicling the Internet's impact on the country