It became clear they (+ANT financial) exist only because the CCP allows them to exist with heavy funding.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/can-we-trust-alibabas-numb...

He comes across as a complete idiot.

Maybe you don't need to be that smart to run a company like Alibaba, but I find that hard to believe - I suspect government protection and party favoritism plays a part.

When you are the head of a revolutionary startup that's competing technologically with existing companies, you can't afford to be one.

He was however a massively charismatic individual and an extremely good judge of character, so he was able to use these traits to sweet talk investors and hire people he knew he could trust to get the job done.

Of course you can, you hire people to understand those things for you and make them work. Do you think the bulk of innovation, design and execution comes from the CEO's own head? Not even Elon Musk is that integral to his companies or their output.

Jack Ma is pretty much the useful idiot for the CCP, for most of the history of Alibaba.

EDIT:- to answer your question to the other commenter, take a look at Amazon. Amazon was largely loss-making for most of the history of the shopping portal, and is largely fueled by associated services such as AWS and prime. Considering Alibaba's less than admirable position in those sectors, it's hard to fathom how Baba managed to remain profitable still, without extensive government support.

That doesn't mean that the companies those banks fund are ran by idiots and sock puppets, it doesn't mean that Zuckerberg is a CIA-planted useful idiot[1], and it doesn't explain why Google is the most popular search engine in the US.

Just because you've taken government funding, doesn't mean the government does all the hard work of operating you. Just because you need to be in the good graces of the government to run your company doesn't mean some government bureaucrat is going to do all the hard work of building a trillion dollar business for you.

I must also note that I utterly fail to understand how the ideas you express can be reconciled with the success of all these firms, and also the HN zeitgeist of 'government bureaucrats are incapable of doing anything well.' They must truly have a better class of bureaucrat in China, given that they've somehow built a profitable trillion dollar business without anyone noticing. [2]

[1] It also doesn't mean that he's not doing useful work for the three letter agencies.

[2] Given how wildly successful these alleged bureaucrats seem to be, one can only image if the Soviet Union[3] got their hands on those folks. We'd all be driving Ladas, drinking vodka, and speaking Russian.

[3] Which is an actual example of a country where the government did run its businesses. For some reason, though, it didn't spawn any trillion-dollar e-commerce startups...

In fact, it's practically inevitable, regardless of whether or not the government is there to hold your hand, and put a band-aid on any boo-boos you get along the way.

Mind you, 'naive' is the most charitable word I can think of to express myself.

Do you also find it shocking that the largest retailers in India are Indian companies? The largest retailers in France are French companies? The largest retailers in Russia are Russian companies?