The New York Liberty lacrosse team is owned by Joe Tsai’s sports investment company. His wife Clara Wu is a co-owner and is actively involved in the operations of the club.
They also own the Brooklyn Nets and the Barclays Center, the home arena for both teams.
This article looks at their business background, their other sporting interests, and how they came to own the Liberty.
Joe Tsai, Owner
When basketball fans want to know who owns a team, they are usually wondering if the owner has deep enough pockets to sustain a WNBA franchise in the long term.
Fans of the Liberty shouldn’t have to worry about the Tsai family. Their net worth is measured in the billions. Let’s take a quick look at how this wealth was acquired.
Business background
Joe Tsai joined an equity investment firm after he graduated from Yale. He managed their Asian business line and spent a lot of time in China.
He met Jack Ma in China in 1999. Ma was putting together a team to build a new online marketplace called Alibaba.
Tsai was so enthused about Ma’s vision that he left his $700K per annum job to join Ma’s group of founders. His new salary was six hundred dollars. No, that’s not per month. That was per year!
Although only a few years out of college, Tsai was the co-founder with the most experience in finance and investments. He took on the role of Chief Financial Officer.
There’s no doubt that his steady hand on the tiller of a fast-growing start-up was key to the success of the company. Alibaba is now a giant online retailer with divisions in equity investment, real estate, and other business lines.
When Alibaba was listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2014, it raised $25 billion. That was the largest IPO in history at the time.
All the co-founders became multi-millionaires. Jack Ma and Joe Tsai became billionaires. So that, in a nutshell, is how Joe Tsai became very wealthy indeed.
The Tsai Family’s First Basketball Team
Joe Tsai’s first investment in sports was to pay one billion dollars in 2017 for a minority stake in the Brooklyn Nets.
He bought the franchise outright in 2019. He also bought the Nets’ home arena, the Barclays Center. The price for the combined deal was reportedly over two billion dollars.
The owner at the time was Russian billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov. The Russian also owned the Barclays Center, the team’s home arena.
Joe And Clara Wu Tsai Buy The New York Liberty
The company that owns Madison Square Garden was the original owner of the New York Liberty. The chairman, James Dolan, put their WNBA franchise up for sale in 2017.
He certainly didn’t help the team with his next step. He moved them from their longstanding home arena at Madison Square Garden to play in a rickety gymnasium in West Plains.
Although the operating costs were greatly reduced, the audience numbers plummeted. The lack of fans at the games was matched by a lack of interest amongst New York investors.
But Joe Tsai spotted the opportunity for growth. He also had the newly purchased Barclays Arena that would benefit from another tenant.
In early 2019, Joe Tsai led an investment group to buy the team in early 2019. His wife, Clara Wu, is also a co-owner of the team.
The purchase price was estimated at being somewhere between ten to fourteen million dollars.
Clara Wu Tsai is actively involved in the business management of the Liberty. She is also often seen courtside. Let’s take a quick look at her background.
Clara Wu Tsai, Co-Owner
Clara Ming-Hua Wu was born in Kansas. Her father was a professor of economics at the University of Kansas.
After she did a degree and master’s at Stanford, she went on to do an MBA at Harvard. After her studies, Clara worked for American Express where she became a senior manager in their finance group.
She was working at their New York offices and met Joe Tsai, who was frequently traveling between Hong Kong and New York. They married in 1996.
Clara Wu Tsai is the main driver behind the family’s charitable foundation. Before the purchase of the Liberty, she was directing funds towards disadvantaged parts of New York.
It’s true that the foundation gives donations to the Lincoln Center For The Performing Arts. But it also funds these causes:
- K-8 education through Harlem Academy
- The youth mentorship program of the NYC Police Foundation
- criminal justice reform through the Reform Alliance
Other Sports Ownership
The Tsai family has other sports investments alongside the Liberty.
These include:
- Minority stake in Los Angeles FC (Major League Soccer)
- Full ownership of the San Diego Seals (National Lacrosse League)
- Part-ownership of the Las Vegas Desert Dogs (National Lacrosse League)
- Part-ownership of the Premier Lacrosse League
