Alibaba Is Now Worth $231 Billion, More Than Facebook, Or How Simple Chinese Teacher Became Multimillionaire

School teacher from China named Jack Ma visited the United States for the first time in 1995 - he established small translation company in China and visited the U.S. as part of his translation business. A friend of him showed him the internet and told that just about everything was on the internet.

Ma decided to search for beer. The results didn't turn up a single Chinese option - he could hardly find anything about China on the Internet at all.

He returned home and decided to establish his second company. He called his second company Alibaba. The image above is the picture of the team from early in Alibaba's history.

For now - Alibaba’s IPO ranks as the largest offering ever in the U.S. Shares closed at $93.89, up 38% from its initial public offering price. Alibaba is one of the largest e-commerce companies in the world - at a bit more than $231 billion. And Jack Ma became the richest man in China as a result of the IPO, not only bigger than internet companies like Facebook, eBay, and Amazon, but also iconic U.S. such as Pfizer, Coke, and AT&T.

“There is more excitement with this than Twitter, and this is a bigger deal,” Peter Costa, a floor governor and NYSE trader. “In my 33 years on the floor, this is by far the biggest IPO extravaganza since I’ve been down here.”

“You could see they’ve been so deliberate and it showed today,” said Scott Cutler, the NYSE’s head of global listings.

“Before I turned 50 years old my job was making money,” Jack Ma said. “But now that I’ve turned 50 years old, it’s helping people in China make money.”

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Are you a teacher? Go to the U.S and search for a beer ...