An ardent promoter of conservation, 51-year-old Ma sits on the board of The Nature Conservancy. Fittingly, he paid $23 million to buy himself his own private Walden -- a 28,100-acre estate in upstate New York that boasts a maple-syrup operation, a 1940s log camp and streams teeming with trout.

Ma made far bigger headlines in December when Alibaba disclosed it was paying $266 million to acquire the South China Morning Post newspaper in Hong Kong, following in the footsteps of another e-commerce giant, Jeff Bezos, who bought the Washington Post in 2013.

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