The article seems to favor a telling of the story where Jack Ma started everything with his speech and the subsequent regulatory crackdown was to personally pun

The article seems to favor a telling of the story where Jack Ma started everything with his speech and the subsequent regulatory crackdown was to personally punish him for his insolence. But it sounds implausible to me that Ma would speak out against strict financial regulations for no particular reason and then exactly the regulations he was against would be announced within a short time. After all, this kind of thing usually takes a while to prepare. I think it's more likely that regulators had been worrying about bad loans starting a new financial crisis for some time and Ma got advance notice that new regulations to reduce financial risk were in the works. So he tried to get the Ant IPO done as soon as possible (Ant getting regulated like any other bank and consequently growing at the same speed as any other bank, making its high valuation unjustifiable, doesn't concern him as long as he can sell off his shares first) and held his speech as a last-ditch effort to rally support for a more laissez-faire approach. The funny thing is that Alibaba-the-company is doing basically fine while BABA-the-stock fell dramatically. A "third consecutive quarter of single-digit revenue growth" is bad news for an investor who bought at an inflated price assuming double-digit growth, but not exactly the end of the world for the company's day-to-day business.