All this stretches back to November 2020, when Alibaba's financial technology affiliate, Ant Group, was forced to cancel its IPO. This IPO was set to be the world's largest. In addition to Alibaba, Jack Ma founded Ant Group as well. Because of this, Alibaba was slammed with a $2.8 billion antitrust fine in 2021. In the meantime, China's IT industry has had to comply with a plethora of new rules covering everything from competition to data privacy. Then, Jack Ma went completely missing in action for a few months, and this gave rise to speculations about Ma being missing.