In terms of institutional shareholding, Japan's SoftBank Group is Alibaba's largest shareholder, holding 34.4% of the shares. Yahoo! is second, holding 22.5%. The two together hold 57%.

In terms of individual shareholding, Alibaba's chairman Jack Ma holds only 8.9% of the shares. Alibaba co-founder Joseph Tsai holds 3.6% of the shares, while Alibaba CEO Daniel Zhang, COO Daniel Zhang and other senior executives hold less than 1% of the shares.

The process of a normal large company, such as Alibaba, growing and developing continuously is a process of constantly raising funds and using huge capital to defeat competitors one after another. When a company develops to a certain scale and continues to expand reproduction, it is usually difficult for the founder to complete such an investment with his personal ability, and it is inevitable that external funds will be needed at this time.

Therefore, in 2000, Alibaba completed its second round of financing of US$25 million, of which Softbank from Japan contributed 20 million; in the third round of investment, Softbank invested another 60 million US dollars.

In August 2005, Yahoo exchanged 1 billion US dollars and Chinese assets for 40% of Alibaba's equity. With this money, Taobao and Alipay grew rapidly. These capitals gradually laid the foundation for Alibaba's "status" in the Chinese Internet in the future.

But the money was not given for free. Through these transactions, Jack Ma and the founding team completely gave up their position as the largest shareholder of Alibaba. Before Alibaba's B2B business went public in 2007, Yahoo and Softbank held 39% and 29.3% of Alibaba's equity respectively.

Jack Ma tried to improve this situation. In 2012, Alibaba introduced a new shareholder with a national name, which invested 7.6 billion US dollars, but only redeemed about 20% of Yahoo's equity. As a result, Japan's Softbank became Alibaba's largest shareholder.