The NY Post on "Why Alibaba’s Joe Tsai gets to party but Jack Ma is punished by China" (better on "office politics"); missing: the heft of his Nets investment and Brooklyn philanthropy

Brooklyn Nets (and Barclays Center operating company, and New York Liberty, and San Diego Seals) owner Joe Tsai got the New York Post treatment yesterday, Why Alibaba’s Joe Tsai gets to party but Jack Ma is punished by China, which suggests why Tsai has remained unscathed while his partner in the tech conglomerate has not.

Note that, though the Post is noted for sometimes slanted coverage in its news section, I find much of this convincing:

Nobody knew until last month that ­Joseph Chung-Hsin Tsai — better known as Joe Tsai — was the “mystery buyer” who dropped $157 million this spring on two massive condos at 220 Central Park South, the most expensive apartment building in the country.

So far, keeping a relatively low profile and understanding international office politics has worked out well for Tsai, said to be worth at least $12 billion. The 57-year-old is the co-founder of Alibaba (China’s version of Amazon), the owner of the Brooklyn Nets and a friend of the Chinese Communist Party.

The same can’t be said for Jack Ma, his flamboyant onetime partner and the creative genius behind Alibaba. Ma has barely been seen in public for the past 10 months. His wings have been clipped, possibly permanently, by officials after Ma publicly dissed his country’s banking system last fall. 

...“Tsai is reducing his China risk when he buys the Nets and Central Park South. It’s a smart thing to do,” Gordon Chang, author of “The Coming Collapse of China,” told The Post. “Xi is going after Chinese tech companies like never before and no one knows how it’s going to end up.”

That statement is not fully ventilated because, on its face, it suggests that both a $2.35 billion investment purchase (estimate for Nets and operating company, minus rebate reducing it to $2 billion) and a $157 million residential purchase similarly reduce risk.

That doesn't make complete sense, but it points out that Tsai is making investments, and making his name beyond China.

Beyond Chang--who contributes to right-wing (and other) publications and is not exactly beloved by China--and Peter Navarro (once described as "Trump's China hawk"), the article also quotes Craig Singleton of the hawkish Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

That said, I suspect it would've been possible to find more left-leaning observers to make some of the same criticisms of, say, Tsai's illiberal posture toward China's grip on Hong Kong.

About Hong Kong, and the Nets

From the article:

It hasn’t hurt that he seems to know which masters to bow to. Last October, Tsai responded to a tweet from Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey supporting protesters in Hong Kong fighting the increasing overreach of the ­mainland.

While flying private from New York to Shanghai for a Nets game, Tsai wrote an astonishing “letter to NBA fans” that he posted on Facebook. In it, he referred to the Hong Kong protests as a “separatist movement.”

...From a business perspective, Tsai was correct in trying to do damage control. 

The article notes the irony that Tsai's family fled China in 1948.

Barclays Center exterior, 8/9/21;
Photos by Norman Oder

I think it also misses how much Tsai's investment in contracts for three Brooklyn Nets superstars--Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving, and James Harden--win him friends and fans, and continued positive press coverage as the owner of an NBA title contender. After all, the sports pages are not the place for much political analysis.

About philanthropy

The article notes how Tsai and his wife have a much broader profile in the Unite States:

Clara [Wu Tsai] has worked on her pet cause, prison reform, with Kim Kardashian. She and Tsai have donated hundreds of millions of dollars to charities and universities in recent years. They made gifts to Stanford ($250 million) and Yale (reportedly $800 million) under the rubric of “neuroscience” — which involves futuristic brain technology and is a favored investment of billionaires including Elon Musk and Google’s Ray Kurzweil.

Barclays Center atrium, 8/9/21

What's missing from this article is not just the full range of their philanthropy but its recent specific focus on Brooklyn, notably Black Brooklyn, with the Tsai Foundation's ten-year, $50 million commitment via a Social Justice Fund.

That helped the Tsais notch a ranking of #37 in City & State's recent listing of the Brooklyn Power 100, as did his hiring of Gregg Bishop to run the Social Justice Fund.

Every grant--and $5 million a year goes a long way--and every sponsorship of a Jean-Michel Basquiat educational arts program developed in partnership with the NYC Department of Education (as shown in the photos taken this past Monday) all help position the Tsais as "progressive" in the eyes of local political officials and many in Brooklyn.

And articles about the fund, fed to sports (!) reporters, inevitable portray the Tsais in a rosy fashion.