Jack Ma set to be one of the world's 20 richest?

Jack Ma -  If you don’t know his name already, you’ll likely know it before the week is out. That’s because Ma is the man behind Alibaba… set to become the biggest IPO in U.S. history on Friday when it makes its debut on the New York Stock Exchange.

[Disclosure: Yahoo Finance's parent company, Yahoo, has a 22.6% ownership stake in Alibaba and stands to profit from the IPO.]

Ma is the richest man in China, and stands to add billions to his net worth before the end of the week. By this weekend, he could be one of the 20 richest people in the world.

It’s a far cry from his humble beginnings. In fact, Ma’s success story looks like something out of a classic American fable.

In the early 90s, Jack Ma was a schoolteacher in China. He taught English and made just $14/hour. In the mid 90s he travelled to the United States where a friend introduced him to the ins-and-outs of the Internet. Almost immediately, he had a dream.

When he returned home he started a company called China Pages. It did not succeed. But a few years later he tried again with Alibaba. The original web site allowed global companies to buy products from China. But it grew into much more.

“He basically is able to come up with the idea of creating what basically is Amazon.com for China and so if Alibaba’s stock continues to surge after the IPO you could see him really challenging people like Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and the Google guys,” said Matt Miller, managing editor of the Bloomberg Billionaires index.

In fact, the company is more like eBay, Amazon, Google, PayPal, and more all rolled into one. Alibaba is almost synonymous with the Internet in China.

It’s no surprise, then, that Ma’s current net worth is already about $21.9 billion. It comes from two major sources – Alibaba, which he owns a 7.3% stake of, and Alipay, a former Alibaba company which has since spun off. Ma controls 48.5% of Alipay, which is valued at $25 billion.

With Alibaba set to go public for between $66 and $68 a share, Ma’s 7.3% stake of Alibaba could surge in value.

For Ma to crack the top 20, he'd have to be worth $30.3 billion, according to Miller, which means he'd have to add some $8 billion to his net worth. Numbers about Alibabas financials are somewhat murky, but based on what is known about shares outstanding and Ma's stake, the stock would have to reach roughly $110 for that to happen. 

Ma is already richer than Tesla’s Elon Musk, Google’s Eric Schmidt, and designer Giorgio Armani.

That’s good news for Ma, especially since the entrepreneur once joked, “If I’m not a millionaire by the time I’m 35, please kill me.”

Ma hasn’t lost any of that eccentricity since he made it big. Alibaba has an annual ceremony that weds hundreds of employees. Ma blesses the crowd. The five-foot-tall Ma has also been known to sing on stage at corporate events.

We should also note that according to Bloomberg's Miller, Ma owes a great deal of his success to the founder of our parent company, former Yahoo (YHOO) boss Jerry Yang. The pair met while Yang was travelling in China and became friends while hiking the Great Wall. While Yang was at the helm of Yahoo, the company invested $1 billion in Alibaba. At the time, it was considered a large investment; Yahoo’s gross annual revenue that year was $5.3 billion.

According to Miller, “Alibaba is really just a small retail site, until it gets an infusion from Yahoo, and Yahoo Is able to give it the capital it needs to thrive and grown in China.”

While Yang stepped down from his roles Yahoo and Alibaba in 2012, Alibaba’s recent F-1 filing shows he’s back on the board of the Chinese company.