City & State ranks Joe and Clara Wu Tsai #43 in the Brooklyn Power 100, but that ignores the Brooklyn "ecosystem" and recent power moves

City & State NY on June 30 announced the 2025 Brooklyn Power 100, and missed something important about the owners of BSE Global, as I explain below.

43. Joseph Tsai & Clara Wu Tsai

Co-Owners, Brooklyn Nets and New York Liberty:

A Brooklyn basketball power couple, the Tsais got game. Joseph Tsai, the billionaire co-founder of Alibaba Group, chairs BSE Global and owns the Brooklyn Nets and New York Liberty. He recently sold a minority stake at a $6 billion valuation while backing a franchise rebuild he calls a “labor of love.” He’s also a founding board member of The Asian American Foundation. Clara Wu Tsai, governor of the New York Liberty and BSE Global vice chair, brought the Liberty back to Brooklyn, recruited Breanna Stewart and helped lead the team to its first WNBA title. As founder of the Social Justice Fund, she’s also directing a $50 million, decadelong investment in racial equity and economic mobility across Brooklyn, including capital access for Black-owned businesses. She’s also a founding partner of the Reform Alliance, which focuses on criminal justice reform. Their Joe and Clara Tsai Foundation supports initiatives in education, research, social justice, economic mobility, the arts and humanitarian relief.

That squib said a lot more than the one in 2024 (which I didn't write about), when they were #41:

Even though the Brooklyn Nets fired their coach midseason and missed the playoffs this year, Joe Tsai and Clara Wu Tsai say they’re still having fun owning the team. Joe Tsai insisted the Nets need to rebuild the franchise through the draft and develop players while he stays in the background, unlike New York’s other professional sports owners. In the meantime, the Tsais can enjoy the winning culture of their other superteam, the New York Liberty, which came a few possessions short of winning a WNBA championship last fall.

In the 2023 list, as I wrote, the Tsais had been ranked at #42, down from #33 in 2022 and #37 in 2021

What's missing

These lists are of course arbitrary and self-serving. (Five members of the publication's Advisory Board, which helps advise on such lists. make this list, four of them lobbyists.)

But the Tsais deserve a higher rank, in my opinion, because BSE Global has been on more of a roll than acknowledged. That "minority stake" was sold to the Koch family of right-wing fame, and caused barely a ripple of concern.

Unmentioned, they sold a stake in the New York Liberty at an astonishing $450 million valuation and, also unmentioned, announced plans for a new Liberty practice facility in Greenpoint.

More importantly, and also unmentioned, the Tsais have begun to build a Brooklyn "ecosystem" of media and entertainment: 

• the purchase of Brooklyn Magazine and its transformation into the less impressive (but slick) BKMAG 
• the purchase of the commercial condo in the base of the Williamsburgh Bank tower (we'll see)
• the establishment of a new global media brand, Type.Set.Brooklyn (so far, meh)
• a share in the renovation of the Brooklyn Paramount (synergy, already)
• a new music festival, Planet Brooklyn, at the Paramount, BAM, and Barclays, plus street fairs (getting hype)

Add the temporary renovation of the former Modell's building into a home for their youth basketball program and the plans for a hotel--perhaps at Site 5, the parcel including Modell's and P.C. Richard.

 

All that was before City & State's deadline. 

After that, they unveiled The Liberty Portraits, an installation on Ticketmaster Plaza that serves as both art and promotion. It was, I wrote, a stone cold power move, claiming to provide the public art while also promoting the New York Liberty, their sports entertainment corporation.