Image At a 2009 stadium rally to celebrate the anniversary of Alibaba, Jack Ma ripped into a stilted rendition of “Can You Feel the Love Tonight?,” eliciting cheers from the crowd of 16,000 employees. Credit... Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

He was putting the country’s state banks on notice. Publication of the article coincided with the start of Yu’e Bao, a high-interest money market product that Alibaba initiated to attract investment from its customers’ online payment accounts. As of February, 81 million people had signed up for the product, which had $40 billion in assets under management.

“The finance industry needs a disrupter, it needs an outsider to come in and carry out a transformation,” Mr. Ma wrote in the article.

He brings his own flair to the role.

At a 2009 stadium rally to celebrate the anniversary of Alibaba, he emerged on stage wearing a waist-length blond wig, a black leather jacket with red flame and metal stud accents, sunglasses and lipstick. Raising a microphone, he ripped into a stilted rendition of “Can You Feel the Love Tonight?,” eliciting cheers from the crowd of 16,000 employees.

Since the beginning, Mr. Ma has shown a knack for thinking differently.

At a time when few Chinese households had their own computers, Mr. Ma in 1995 made the decision to leave teaching to set up an online business. In his hometown, Hangzhou, an eastern city about 100 miles from Shanghai, Mr. Ma established one of the country’s first officially registered Internet companies, a business index site called China Pages. Cui Luhai, who was then running a computer animation business, met with Mr. Ma at the China Pages office to learn more about his plans for the website.

Image Mr. Ma dressed as a pop star. Credit... Peter Parks/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

“I can still remember the first scene I saw when I walked into his office,” said Mr. Cui, today a lecturer in new media at the China Academy of Art. “It was a pretty empty space with only one desk set up in the middle of the room. There was only one very old PC desktop surrounded by a lot of people,” he said. Mr. Ma, it turned out, had spent much of his money on registering the business and appeared to have little money left for hardware.