Jack Ma
In 2021, Jack Ma Yun ranked 26th in the "Forbes Global Rich List" with a fortune of US$48.4 billion. He is a Chinese business magnate, investor, philanthropist, co-founder, and former executive chairman of the multinational technology conglomerate Alibaba Group.
According to Ma's autobiographical speech at the University of Nairobi, after graduating from Hangzhou Normal University in 1988, he got rejected from the 31 different jobs he applied to. He also claimed to have applied ten times to Harvard Business School and was denied each time.
In 1999, he founded Alibaba, a China-based business-to-business marketplace site in his apartment with 18 friends and 500,000 yuan. Currently, Alibaba Group is a holding company with nine principal subsidiaries: Alibaba.com, Taobao Marketplace, Tmall, eTao, Alibaba Cloud Computing, Juhuasuan, 1688.com, AliExpress.com, and Alipay.
The rags to riches story of Jack Ma will encourage you never to give up as he himself said, "Never give up. Today is hard, tomorrow will be worse, but the day after tomorrow will be sunshine."