Jack Ma Buys $76.5 Million of Alibaba Stock After $10.2 Billion AI Share Sale Spooks Investors

Alibaba just watched three of its most powerful men put personal cash behind a bet the market didn't like.

Co-founder Jack Ma bought more than HK$600 million, roughly $76.5 million, of Alibaba's Hong Kong-listed shares in recent days, according to Bloomberg, which cited a person familiar with the matter. He joined Chairman Joe Tsai and CEO Eddie Wu, who together bought at least HK$202 million, about $25 million, worth of stock.

According to VnExpress, which cited a Hong Kong exchange filing, Tsai bought 720,000 shares at an average price of HK$113.47 for roughly HK$82 million, adding to an earlier HK$80 million purchase. Wu invested about HK$40 million, VnExpress reported. Ma's purchase was first reported by the South China Morning Post, citing an unnamed source, and amplified by the Chinese state-backed outlet STAR Market Daily.

Why the buying happened

Alibaba triggered the selloff itself. The company launched a discounted HK$80 billion ($10.2 billion) share placement, selling 710 million new shares at HK$112.70 each, according to VnExpress and StockTwits. Institutional demand reportedly ran nearly three times the offering size, but the deal still diluted existing shareholders by about 3.6%, according to Forbes contributor Jim Osman.

Investors focused on the dilution and Alibaba's ballooning AI spending. Barchart reported the stock fell as much as 10% in Hong Kong on the news, and Alibaba's June-quarter profit declined even as capital expenditure surged. The company has pledged to spend more than 380 billion yuan, about $56.5 billion, over three years on chips, data centers, and large-language model development, according to Moneycontrol.

Ma's purchase, along with Tsai and Wu's, gave the stock a lift. Bloomberg and Moneycontrol both reported the shares climbed as much as 3.2% following the executive buying, recovering part of that week's losses.

Where the stock sits now

Alibaba currently carries a market cap of $287.2 billion, according to Barchart and Yahoo Finance. The stock trades about 37.8% below its 52-week high of $192.67, hit on Oct. 2, 2025. It's down 21.1% year-to-date, though only 5.33% over the past 12 months, per those same reports. Shares trade at 19.79 times forward earnings, a premium Barchart calls "lofty" compared to industry peers.

On the fundamentals side, Alibaba's AI Cloud and Compute Services revenue rose 45% in the most recent quarter, and AI product revenue has posted triple-digit growth for 12 straight quarters, according to StockTwits. The company's Qwen model family has become, per Bloomberg's reporting, the world's most popular open model family, part of an effort to outspend domestic rivals Tencent and ByteDance and challenge Anthropic and OpenAI on the global stage.

The fair case against the buying

Skeptical investors have a reasonable point: insider purchases don't prove a strategy works, and Alibaba is asking shareholders to eat dilution now for AI returns that haven't materialized yet. Profit is already falling while spending climbs, and the company is betting tens of billions of dollars on a payback Forbes says Alibaba itself projects at 2.5 years, an internal estimate, not an audited result.

Jim Osman, the Forbes contributor who bought Alibaba stock after the selloff, argues the market fixated on the easy-to-measure number (dilution) while ignoring the harder question of what Alibaba will actually earn on the $10 billion raised. Skeptics counter that the company remains speculative about a return nobody can confirm yet.

What hasn't been confirmed

Tsai's purchase is backed by a Hong Kong Stock Exchange filing, cited directly by VnExpress. Ma's purchase is not. It rests entirely on an unnamed source cited by the South China Morning Post and repeated by state-backed STAR Market Daily, then relayed by Bloomberg through its own unnamed source.

That doesn't mean the report is wrong. Ma made a similar move in 2023, buying more than $50 million in Alibaba stock, according to StockTwits, and the company hasn't disputed the current figure. But until a filing surfaces confirming the size and timing of Ma's purchase, the exact numbers remain sourced to people who declined to be named, not to Alibaba's own disclosures.