China's richest man recently said that he doesn't shop online, despite founding an e-commerce giant. But his stance is not so ironic as it first appears.

When you are as rich as Croesus, why would you do your own shopping for anything other than the most luxurious purchases?

That thought occurred when I read a report of how Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba and now China’s richest man - $19.5 billion according to Forbes – doesn’t shop online. In a recent interview with CNN, Ma is quoted saying: "I don't shop online, but my wife buys everything at home. We buy sea crabs, fresh crabs, all kinds of things.” He was, by the way, speaking at a technology conference in California, the land of Silicon Valley.

Once the initial supposed irony of his comments passes, the idea of Ma not bothering to use a computer or smartphone and buy his groceries or hardware in this way is not so odd when one thinks about it. In the wealth management industry itself, while it is often said at conferences and in print that people increasingly want to conduct their business online, there remains a large need for people to have face-to-face interaction, and for some, they delegate the gruntwork to others, be they family members or outside professionals. (Butlers, anyone?)

As we have known ever since Adam Smith explained the division of labour in his Wealth of Nations, if a wealth creation titan such as Jack Ma can get on with the business of making a business larger and more successful, the last thing such a person wants to do is conduct all those other chores of life if he can outsource them or, to put it in more human terms, ask a loved one to take care of such things. This may grate for the rest of us mortals, but it is a fact of life. I actually benefit if an entrepreneur such as Ma, Peter Thiel or Elon Musk can focus on their ideas and not have to worry about the other stuff.

There is no doubt, of course, that the move towards transactions online is happening at speed and this is clearly germaine to the wealth management industry. As noted recently with what has been dubbed the rise of the “robo-advisor”, online platforms for conducting wealth management represent a real threat to existing business models. Ma, of course, has made money beyond the dreams of avarice by tapping into the world of e-commerce. It represents a change in how we shop and transact every big as the advent of the Sears catalogue in 19th Century America or Amazon in the past two decades.

Whatever happens, it is probably a fair bet that not every business titan will want to spend hours in front of a computer screen if he or she can possibly avoid it and so don't be surprised to read similar stories in future of how such people, even if they make their billions in e-commerce, don't always resort to it in their personal life.