In the final analysis, it was because Jack Ma wanted to protect himself. Initially, the Alibaba board of directors was composed of the management represented by Jack Ma, Masayoshi Son of Softbank, and Jerry Yang of Yahoo. The largest shareholder was Yahoo, and the second largest shareholder was Softbank. Jerry Yang and Masayoshi Son were both extremely supportive of Jack Ma, so there was nothing wrong with such an equity structure and board power structure. But later, the American directors on the board of directors of Yahoo wanted to kick Jack Ma out and control Alibaba. So they first kicked Jerry Yang, who supported Jack Ma, out of Yahoo, and then chose a white man to deal with Jack Ma. There was a time when Jack Ma was outside the core of Alibaba's power and had already shown signs of being marginalized.

At this time, in order to ensure that Alibaba was not controlled by Americans, Jack Ma immediately separated the core business of Alipay on the grounds of government supervision and repurchased Yahoo's 21% stake in US dollars.

Through this incident, Jack Ma found that the board of directors being controlled by others was always a hidden danger, and began to vigorously promote the Alibaba partnership system.