Anders Corr shares an article he wrote for Epoch Times that explains why China’s billionaires are fake.
Alibaba’s Jack Ma and Joseph Tsai apparently can’t afford their own private jets. They had to borrow money from Credit Suisse to get them, despite each having cashed out over $5 billion in stock since 2017. Where’s all that cash gone? Is it even real? Do they keep it in banks for which they have to get Chinese Communist Party (CCP) permission for withdrawals? That is to say, is it really their money, or not?
According to Kyle Bass, chief investment officer of Hayman Capital Management, “Tsai and Ma are only billionaires because the CCP says they are. As the world has already witnessed, it can and will change in an instant.”
Bass stated that Ma and Tsai’s “need to borrow from western banks to fund their luxurious lifestyle” is a mystery. “It’s entirely possible that any US dollars they harvest through share sales must [be] paid to CCP party members,” he wrote.
A request for comment sent to Ma and Tsai via Alibaba only yielded a link to Alibaba’s prior comments. A spokesperson for Alibaba Group there characterized Chinese billionaires who do things like hock stock as collateral for jet loans as “ordinary.” They pointed out that Ma is no longer an executive at Alibaba.
Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange while the price of Alibaba Group’s initial price offering (IPO) is decided, in New York City on Sept. 19, 2014. (Andrew Burton/Getty Images)
“Share pledges by senior executives of US companies, including Elon Musk of Tesla and Larry Ellison of Oracle, are well-documented in the news, and based on even a cursory survey of public filings of other US companies, including Amazon, Bank of America, Bristol Myers Squibb, General Electric, Netflix and Walmart, it is clear that many companies do not prohibit share pledges by executives,” the Alibaba spokesperson wrote.
But according to Ryan McMorrow at the Financial Times, “Share pledging, whereby banks accept stock as collateral for loans while the borrower retains ownership of the shares, is risky and most US companies limit its use by executives. Any forced selling of pledged stock can exacerbate the fall of a company’s share price.
Key points include:
- Banks risking their client money for the CCP
- Borrowing against Alibaba stock
- Stock pledges as a common method to raise cash
Read the full article, “China’s Billionaires Are Fake”, in the Epoch Times.
