Haute 100 SF: Jack Ma of Alibaba is Richer than Jeff Bezos (By a Little)

Jack Ma of Alibaba is rolling in the doe; Mashable reported that Alibaba’s founder is now richer than Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. How rich is that exactly? Wicked.

As chairman of the ecommerce site, Ma has accumulated a staggering net worth of $36.4 billion. The site itself is netted at $50 billion. Bezos is not far behind however, with a net worth estimated at $32.3 billion.

The net worth findings indicated that Bezos and Ma have switched places on the world’s richest list; Ma is the 13^th richest person in the world, and Bezos is at 16^th. Considering the similarity of the two sites, could Ma’s victory over Bezos be a larger indication of the fact that that the Chinese economy is healthier than the US’s? Considering that the sites serve very similar purposes, it might come down to Chinese buying more online than Americans.

George Lucas is bummed out on movies: “Movies are more and more circus without any substance behind it,” he said in a panel discussion with Robert Redord at Sundance.

Lucas is of course lamenting the fact that directors are more focused on delivering crazy effects than they are on telling a story. Star Wars was indeed a special effects extravaganza but that’s not why we watch it. We watch it to see Luke Skywalker come to terms with his true self and great power to free his people. And because, light sabers, duh.

That’s not all Lucas had to say and the icon continued to drop knowledge bombs on an adoring crowd of spectators. Even though he has achieved the highest levels of success in Hollywood, Lucas always saw himself as an outsider in mainstream movies and believes his ability to work outside the studio system was the key to his success: “All of us in film hated the establishment,” said Lucas, “It was the ‘60s.”

Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo, is the subject of a new book “Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahooo” written by reputed tech journalist Nicholas Carlson. There have been controversies surrounding the book, including Carlson’s reliance on unnamed sources. In a letter to Business Insider, he explained his decision to quote anonymous sources as being a result of Mayer and Yahoo’s efforts to silence his reporting. However Mayer looks within the book, one thing no one can deny about the woman is her unparalleled success. According to the book, becoming CEO of Yahoo amassed Mayer $500 million by the time she was 39.

The book also chronicles Mayer’s risky decision to join Google after graduating Stanford. She was one of the company’s first 25 employees and chose to stick with the startup recognizing how brilliant the people she was working with were. Now that, ladies and gentlemen, is foresight.

Haute 100 San Francisco updates consist of news items about members of our Haute 100 San Francisco; a list of San Francisco’s most powerful players