What is Jack Ma’s net worth?

Jack Ma, the billionaire founder of Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba, is a wealthy man. That much was true even before Alibaba’s massive 2014 IPO pumped his company’s value into the stratosphere. But just how much is the man himself worth these days?

The simple answer to that is: $24.8 billion. That’s what Forbes pegs his net worth at as of June 15, 2015, based on the value of his Alibaba stock and his other investments. Other sources have different numbers, but most major media outlets agree that right now, Ma is worth more than US$20 billion. Yowza.

The more accurate answer is: it’s complicated. Obviously, the value of Ma’s stock in Alibaba, for example, changes from day to day, so his net worth could soar or sink overnight if the stock market has a very good or very bad day. But Ma also has a lot of investments in private companies that are difficult to put a precise number on. For example, Ma recently led a US$128M round of funding for LeTV spinoff LeTV Sports. But exactly how much Ma put into the company isn’t public knowledge. Through his personal VC fund Yunfeng Capital, Ma has many undisclosed investments like this, so it is difficult to accurately calculate his true net worth.

Way up from $10 billion

One thing that isn’t in dispute is that Ma’s worth is trending up. Around one year ago, in March of 2014, Ma was worth just US$10 billion, according to Forbes‘s billionaires list. Bloomberg had Ma pegged at US$12.5 billion around the same time – still quite a ways away from his current US$20 billion+ fortune. And if you wind the clock back further, to anytime before 2011, Ma’s fortune hadn’t even reached US$2 billion. In other words, Jack Ma’s net worth has increased by more than a factor of ten over the past four years.

For whatever it’s worth, if you’re feeling jealous, don’t bother: Ma himself says that being mega-rich is more of a burden than a pleasure, and he misses the early days of Alibaba when he was scraping by on US$12 a month.