hISTORY eNDS EVERYWHERE:

Duncan Clark, an investor and adviser on China's tech sector who knows Ma's business empire, has some ideas.

Clark says that while Amazon and Alibaba have some similarities, Alibaba is in some ways more powerful because of its financial reach.

Alibaba created a service called Alipay, a system for making payments by phone, using QR codes. It's now used for billions of transactions and is making cash nearly obsolete in China.

"Imagine if half of the transactions you do in your day in the U.S. were also controlled by the same company," Clark says.

Alipay was spun off into a company called Ant Financial. Last fall, Ant Financial was on the verge of an initial public offering of stock -- potentially the largest in history.

And that's when things started to go wrong. Regulators abruptly suspended the IPO, the Chinese government opened an investigation into Alibaba, and Ma has been largely out of public view after he criticized regulators.

Clark, who wrote the book Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built, has known Ma for decades.

"Jack Ma is an unusual tech entrepreneur in that he's not a tech guy at all," Clark tells NPR's Morning Edition in an interview. A former English teacher who turned into a successful entrepreneur, Ma "doesn't come from wealth or connections," Clark says. "He's an amazing communicator, which is odd because the reason we're talking about him is that he gave a terrible speech ... much like a bit that didn't go well at all."

What did he say in October?

He was speaking at something called the Bund Finance Summit in Shanghai. He was not the most important person in the room, if you think in terms of the government regulators who were there. And he proceeded to basically tell them that they were, you know, anachronistic -- that you cannot, for example, run an airport like the way you run a train station.

And then he ... not only he initially launched into an attack on the global financial regulatory system of banking, but then he kind of moved his topic to China and said ... that he thought they were out of touch and that, you know, there was a new revolution coming. It was actually almost a call for revolution in terms of the finance sector.

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