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Comment by Traster | Hacker News Reader

I think it will be really interesting to see if Alibaba significantly changes after Ma. In silicon valley you absolutely have the cult of the founder - Apple would be nothing without Steve Jobs, Facebook would be nothing without Zuck, everything Bezos touches turns to gold.

People around here seem to have a very low impression of Ma (apparently based on one youtube video), but I can imagine running a huge e-commerce empire in China is non-trivial. I could imagine the personal management of relations with the senior Chinese politicians could be make or break for a Chinese company in a way that US companies simply don't face.

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To be fair, that one YouTube video (I’m assuming you’re talking about the one with Musk) demonstrated an astronomical and wide-reaching lack of critical thinking skills. Saying such ridiculous things with such confidence like he did in that video would ruin my opinion of anyone.

How do you compare this to the stream of ridiculous tweets coming from Musk? It seems Musk gets an almost infinite benefit of the doubt while his interview partner is judged on this one performance.

Also we have the issue of language barrier. Jack Ma was doing the interview in English, which for him is probably extremely difficult. I learned Chinese for 2-3 years and can barely order food. If you combine this language barrier with e.g. the cultural desire to save face, you may have someone saying something to say something, without being able to express themselves properly.

I'd say there are a lot of factors at play here and I would withhold judgment for now.

Re English.

According to Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Ma:

> "Ma attended Hangzhou Teacher's Institute (currently known as Hangzhou Normal University) and graduated in 1988 with a B.A. in English.[15][16] While at school, Ma was head of the student council.[17] After graduation, he became a lecturer in English and International Trade at Hangzhou Dianzi University."

Ok, that is a good point, I didn't know this in terms of his background. The way he expressed himself at least didn't feel like he had a BA in English.

I don't think he speaks very good English (verbally). But from past interviews, he seem to have quite a good command of it.

I'm not judging either of them based on 1 interview; just saying language is not the reason his is good or bad.

Elon Musk is either trolling (most of the time) or tweeting while upset (e.g. name-calling a British diver -- who initially randomly insulted Musk, telling him to shove his submarine when he was just trying to help), either way you can see some sense behind his actions, even if they're puerile or mistaken.

On the other hand, Jack Ma seemed to very confidently say and dismiss a lot of things without evidence.

Elon Musk makes stupid statements with confidence all the time. You cant just say "he's joking" in hindsight for everything he's wrong about.

There's a big difference between name-calling someone and accusing them of being a paedophile for doing scuba diving in Thailand.

I mean, watch it yourself and decide. I’d find it difficult to see how anyone could come away with anything other than the more-or-less self-evident notion that Ma is a moron, Musk is extremely intelligent, and they’re both egomaniacal, albeit expressed pretty differently.

I don’t see a reason to compare Ma’s complete lack of reasoning skills to Musk’s absurd tweets. That’s whataboutism. Sure, Musk is all sorts of fucked up in his own way, but he’s no idiot; besides, that isn’t what we’re talking about here — unless for whatever reason you’re trying to defend Ma (which, again, seems like a pretty pointless exercise if you watch even a few minutes of that video), Musk’s weird ass behavior (which wasn’t exhibited in the video in question) has no bearing on this discussion.

I don’t have a dog in this race and would really prefer to never meet either of them, as they both seem pretty insufferable. My point is simply that Ma is damn near indefensibly stupid and (unfortunately, a trait that seems on the rise amongst prominent people in the world today) a poster child of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

This is how i compare it.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5VMX1CznCg Ma is woefully over-rated, an imbecile, on the spectrum or all over the above. And the argument that he must have some 4D Chess abilities to make it to the top in China...do you guys think for a company like that, the CCCP would not groom one of their own for the position?

I think people who came away from that video thinking Elon won don't understand the Chinese sense of humour. Jack Ma was trolling the shit out of Elon ("Alibaba AI", "the future is not IQ or EQ, but Love Quotient"), and not only did Elon take the bait, he seemed like he was trying to one-up Ma's ridiculousness. "Protect the light of consciousness!". Musk even managed to mention aliens at one stage. To me it seemed like the kind of video someone might show their children: "Don't do drugs, or else you'll end up publically making a fool of yourself like Musk did!".

I highly doubt your point of view on this. Can you provide any evidence?

This is the man who paid to make a movie of himself beating up Jet Li (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfS9Uf5SKu8), the man who showed up to an annual company event dressed as Michael Jackson and dancing Thriller (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31pwCOSVS0g). If you really think he believes that the "love quotient" is the future of humanity, I've got a bridge to sell you.

In Mainland China to get ahead you need to learn to say a bunch of stuff that nobody believes in, e.g. Maozedong Thought in high school/uni exams. Like political correctness in the West, except few people take it seriously. Ma's points were an example of this: focus on education, focus on AI helping us understand ourselves, focus on growing creativity, focus on what we can do to help the Earth, focus on automation freeing up more time for leisure. Non-controversial platitudes that nobody can really disagree with (at least not in China). Musk completely misses this, and goes out saying all kind of stuff about aliens, superintelligent robots and "biological bootloaders" that sounds completely bonkers to somebody not caught up in the hype (or somebody who actually works with ML). Ma catches on to this and has a field day hamming up his presentation, realising that this game is something Musk is completely incapable of playing. Just imagine how absurd it would be if somebody stood up at Party Congress and started talking about aliens; that person certainly wouldn't be presenting at the next Congress to say the least.

i hate to do this but this sounds exactly like jack ma is the personification of the "i was only pretending to be stupid" meme that is rampant in online culture

Would someone who was only pretending to be stupid pay millions of dollars to produce a movie in which they beat up Jet Li? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfS9Uf5SKu8

If you've got tens of billions, it's goofy to spend millions on silly projects, not stupid.

If you've only got a couple million, it's probably stupid to pay most of it to make a silly project (unless you can sell the results?)

> everything Bezos touches turns to gold.

Just a reminder that Amazon fails all the time at ventures. Amazon Handmade went nowhere. Amazon Register which was set to compete with Square shut down in 2015. They try all kinds of things, many of them very half-heartedly, and fail. Not everything Bezos touches turns to gold.

Don’t forget Fire Phones!

and by non trivial you mean having and maintaining connections to people in power

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