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.
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."
I'm not judging either of them based on 1 interview; just saying language is not the reason his is good or bad.
On the other hand, Jack Ma seemed to very confidently say and dismiss a lot of things without evidence.
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.
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.
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?)
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.
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.