Alibaba raised $25 billion when it went public, the most any company had ever raised in an IPO. Fifteen years earlier, Jack Ma had started it in his apartment in Hangzhou with a small group of friends. By 2014 its sites Taobao and Tmall were where much of China shopped online. China's middle class was growing fast. American investors had no simple way to own that growth, and Alibaba offered them one on the New York Stock Exchange.

An English Teacher's Marketplace

Jack Ma was a former English teacher who had seen the internet on a trip to the United States. In 1999 he and 17 co-founders, including the lawyer Joe Tsai, launched Alibaba.com to connect Chinese factories with buyers abroad. Taobao came next, a consumer marketplace that charged sellers nothing to list. Alibaba made its money from ads and services sold to merchants. Alipay, its payment service, gave strangers a reason to trust each other with money.

Ninety-Three Dollars by Close

Alibaba priced its shares at $68 on September 18, 2014. They opened the next day at $92.70 and closed at $93.89, up 38 percent. Bankers then sold extra shares, lifting the total to $25 billion. Years of growth followed. In 2020 Chinese regulators halted the IPO of Ant Group, Alibaba's payments affiliate, and Jack Ma stepped back from public life. Alibaba added a Hong Kong listing in 2019 and still trades in New York as BABA.

Cover: Sagami Province: Entrance to the Caves at Enoshima (Sagami, Enoshima iwaya no guchi), Utagawa Hiroshige. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a cave mouth (open sesame).