What Jack Ma’s book recommendations tell you about Alibaba’s founder
The founder of one of the largest technology companies in the world never wrote a line of code. He never made a single sale to a customer before starting Alibaba. He did not touch a computer until he was thirty-three. His degree is in English, earned from a teachers’ college he got into on his third try after failing the entrance exam twice. He was rejected from every job he applied for after graduation, including KFC, which hired twenty-three of twenty-four applicants from his group. He was the one they turned down.
Jack Ma’s reading list makes a lot more sense once you understand that his success came entirely from skills that most people in tech do not value highly enough: communication, philosophy, patience, and the ability to find and trust people smarter than him in every technical domain. His bookshelf is not a tech founder’s bookshelf. It is a teacher’s bookshelf, a philosopher’s bookshelf, a storyteller’s bookshelf. That is not a weakness. It is the reason Alibaba exists.
Jack Ma’s philosophy books and why the Tao Te Ching comes first
The Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu is at the top of this list, and it belongs there. Ma has referenced Taoist philosophy throughout his career, and he practices Tai Chi, which is rooted in the same tradition. The Tao Te Ching is a text about leading without force, about the power of yielding rather than pushing, about water wearing down rock not through strength but through persistence. Ma built Alibaba by helping small businesses in China connect with each other and with the world. He did not try to compete directly with eBay when they entered China. He built Taobao as a free alternative, let it grow organically while eBay charged fees, and waited. eBay eventually left the Chinese market. Water over rock.
Ma has said that Western business philosophy is about competition and winning. Eastern philosophy, the kind he grew up with, is about balance and patience. Whether that framing is oversimplified or not, it clearly shaped how he operated. He was not the fastest mover in Chinese tech. He was the one who lasted.
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius comes from a completely different tradition, Roman Stoicism, but lands in a similar place. Marcus wrote about controlling your response to events rather than trying to control the events themselves. Ma’s career is full of moments where that discipline was tested: the thirty job rejections before Alibaba, the competition with eBay, the complex relationship with the Chinese government that eventually led to Ant Group’s IPO being pulled in 2020, and his own disappearance from public life for months afterward. A man who has been knocked down that many times and keeps showing up has internalized something like what Marcus was writing about, whether he got it from the book or the book confirmed what he already knew.
The Courage to Be Disliked presents Alfred Adler’s psychology through a Socratic dialogue. Adler argues that seeking approval from others is the source of most unhappiness, and that freedom means accepting that some people will not like you. Ma has said publicly that his early failures gave him “thick skin.” Getting rejected from KFC, from the police force, from every job he applied for taught him to stop calibrating his choices around what other people thought. He has also said that he told his team in Alibaba’s early days that the highest they could reach was manager level, and that executives would be hired from outside, which he later called the biggest mistake of his career. A book about the courage to be disliked is also, by implication, a book about the courage to be wrong and to say so.
Jack Ma’s recommended books on business and strategy
Built to Last by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras studied companies that survived for decades and tried to identify what made them endure. The answer was not a single visionary leader. It was having a core ideology combined with a willingness to change everything else. Ma planned Alibaba’s leadership succession for ten years before stepping down in 2019. In his farewell letter to shareholders, he wrote that a sustainable company cannot rely solely on its founders. Collins and Porras would have approved.
Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb argues that some systems do not just survive stress, they get stronger from it. Alibaba’s early history is a case study in antifragility. Every crisis, the dot-com bust, eBay’s entry into China, the SARS epidemic that forced more Chinese businesses online, made the company more resilient. Ma has talked about how problems create opportunities, and that solving big problems is how you build big companies. Taleb gave that intuition a theoretical framework.
The Power Broker by Robert Caro is the biography of Robert Moses, the man who shaped modern New York through sheer institutional power without ever holding elected office. It is a 1,200-page study of how power actually works: how it is accumulated, how it is wielded, and how it corrupts. Ma built Alibaba inside a political system where the relationship between private enterprise and government is complicated, shifting, and occasionally dangerous. Understanding how power works at an institutional level is not optional for someone operating at that scale in China. Caro’s book is the most thorough examination of that subject ever written.
The Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant distills the authors’ eleven-volume Story of Civilization into a hundred pages of patterns. Wars repeat. Economies cycle. Inequality grows until it is corrected by legislation or revolution. Ma grew up during the tail end of China’s Cultural Revolution and built a company during the country’s fastest period of economic growth. A book about the patterns of history reads differently when your own lifetime contains that much range.
Books on technology and the internet Jack Ma recommends
Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky, published in 2008, is about what happens when the cost of organizing groups drops to near zero because of the internet. Shirky’s argument is that institutions exist partly because coordination is expensive. When technology makes coordination cheap, new forms of organization emerge that do not need traditional structures. Alibaba is exactly this kind of organization. It does not make products. It does not hold inventory. It provides the platform that lets millions of small businesses organize themselves. Shirky described the theory. Ma built the practice.
The Long Tail by Chris Anderson argues that the internet shifts economics from a focus on blockbuster hits to a much larger market of niche products. When distribution costs drop, the aggregate demand for millions of obscure items can exceed the demand for the few bestsellers. Alibaba and especially Taobao are long-tail platforms. They do not depend on a few big sellers. They depend on millions of small ones, each serving a narrow market. Anderson’s book explains why that model works economically.
Makers by Chris Anderson (same author) is about the democratization of manufacturing. When 3D printers, CNC machines, and online marketplaces make it possible for individuals to design and sell physical products without a factory, the entire structure of manufacturing changes. Ma’s later investments and Alibaba’s expansion into manufacturing services and supply chain tools follow this trajectory. The internet connected buyers and sellers. The next step, which Makers describes, is connecting designers and manufacturers.
The unexpected books on Jack Ma’s reading list
The Autobiography of Malcolm X is about a man who reinvented himself multiple times: from street hustler to prison inmate to religious leader to global advocate for human rights. Malcolm X educated himself in prison by reading the dictionary cover to cover. Ma educated himself by befriending foreign tourists in Hangzhou as a teenager so he could practice English, riding his bicycle to the hotel district every morning for years. Both men used education as the vehicle for transformation, and both came from backgrounds where that transformation was not expected or encouraged.
Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott is a book about writing that is really about the process of creating anything. Lamott’s advice is to stop thinking about the finished product and focus on the next small piece. The title comes from her father telling her brother, overwhelmed by a school report on birds, to take it bird by bird. Ma started Alibaba in his apartment with seventeen friends and no outside investment. The company grew not through a grand plan but through a series of small steps, each one solving the next immediate problem. Lamott’s philosophy of “just do the next small thing” maps directly onto how Ma actually built the business.
The Road by Cormac McCarthy is a novel about a father and son walking through a destroyed world, trying to survive and stay decent when everything around them has collapsed. It is the bleakest book on this list by far. Ma’s childhood during the Cultural Revolution, his years of rejection, and his more recent experience of being pulled back from public life by regulatory pressure in China have given him a relationship with uncertainty that most Western tech founders cannot imagine. A book about maintaining your humanity when the world turns hostile is not an abstract choice for someone who has lived through multiple versions of that scenario.
How Jack Ma’s reading list connects to his career at Alibaba
The pattern in these twenty-four books is clear once you see it. The philosophy books, Lao Tzu and Marcus Aurelius and Adler, are about patience, self-control, and freedom from other people’s opinions. The business books are about building organizations that outlast their founders. The technology books are about platforms that empower small actors rather than concentrating power at the top. And the personal narratives, Malcolm X and McCarthy and Lamott, are about surviving when the odds are against you and doing the next small thing anyway.
Ma is not a technologist. He has never pretended to be one. He is a teacher who learned to organize people and build systems of trust. His reading list reflects that identity. There are no books about algorithms or engineering on this list. There are books about human nature, historical patterns, and the slow accumulation of strength through persistence. That is the curriculum of a man who failed his way to the top and understood, better than most people who succeeded early, that the only advantage that matters in the long run is the willingness to keep going.
