Jack Ma

Earth takes five of his ten planets, water four, a single one fire, and not one of the ten sits in air. The Sun, Mercury, Uranus and Pluto spread across thirteen degrees of Virgo, and five of the ten are mutable with only one cardinal. The record says Ma was an English teacher who founded Alibaba in his flat in 1999 and built China's largest online marketplace.

Five planets in earth with none at all in air is the balance to take from this chart, and the absence is the readable half of it. Air is what circulates, compares and gets talked over. Earth is what gets made and kept. A chart arranged this far into earth is about the thing rather than about the conversation around the thing, which sits oddly beside a record whose first fact is a teacher and whose last is a marketplace, both of them conversations by trade. The chart does not get to settle that. It is simply weighted the other way.

Mercury sits a fifth of a turn from Neptune at under nine tenths of a degree, and the reading is intuitive understanding: picking things up without being told, and an ear for what somebody means rather than for what they actually said. In a record that opens with an English teacher, an ear for what somebody means is the contact worth having, and Mercury itself was retrograde on the fourth degree of Virgo, the sign it rules. Mars sits sixty degrees from Jupiter at three quarters of a degree, effort that pays: well-timed action, enterprise, and the useful ability to commit fully without agonising, and the word enterprise is in that reading because the reading was written for anybody.

Mars also sits in mild friction with Uranus at just under a degree, action without warning: abrupt breaks, and a temper that arrives with no build-up at all. The Sun sits in mild friction with Venus at under half a degree, the hardest angle those two can ever make, since Venus never separates far enough from the Sun to square it, so the reading is a mild version of the fusion with taste and self-worth slightly out of step. His Moon sits on the sixth degree of Scorpio at noon with Libra still possible, so it is left out. Saturn sits on the first half degree of Pisces, a planet on a threshold, and Mercury and Saturn were the two retrograde planets. Jupiter came back to its Taurus birth degree on 9 May 2024, at fifty nine, and four laps precede it.