CLARA WU TSAI
Clara Wu Tsai is a businesswoman, investor, and philanthropist. Ms. Wu Tsai is the Governor and an owner of the WNBA’s New York Liberty and an owner of the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets. As Vice Chair of BSE Global, the teams’ parent company, she oversees all matters relating to fan development, civic and community engagement, and the role Barclays Center plays within Brooklyn.
As Founder of the Joe and Clara Tsai Foundation, Ms. Wu Tsai pursues philanthropic investments across the arts, sciences and social justice spaces. She established the Social Justice Fund in 2020 to work toward economic mobility and racial justice in Brooklyn, New York. She is a founding partner of the REFORM Alliance, which seeks to reform the criminal justice system.
In science and technology, the Foundation supports the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford University and the Wu Tsai Institute at Yale University for understanding human cognition. In 2020, Ms. Wu Tsai founded the Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance, which works across six universities to bring together world-class talent to advance the science of human performance.
Ms. Wu Tsai serves on the Boards of Trustees for Stanford University, New York Presbyterian Hospital and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. She serves on the Advisory Board for the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington. She was an executive producer of Into the Okavango, a 2018 conservation documentary, Blue Bayou, a 2021 drama, and Unfinished Business, a 2022 documentary about the WNBA.
Previously, Ms. Wu Tsai was General Manager of the Hong Kong operations of Taobao, China’s largest online shopping website, and a Vice President at American Express in New York and Hong Kong. Ms. Wu Tsai holds a B.A. in International Relations and a M.A. in International Policy Studies from Stanford University, and a M.B.A. from Harvard University.
JOSEPH C. TSAI
Joe Tsai is Governor of the NBA Brooklyn Nets and WNBA New York Liberty. He co-founded Alibaba Group, a global Internet technology company headquartered in China, in 1999, and serves as the company’s chairman. Tsai was born in Taiwan, of parents who originally came from Shanghai with ancestral lineage to Zhejiang Province in China.
Tsai and his wife Clara have taken on active roles supporting social justice and COVID-19 related humanitarian relief. In addition to Tsai’s commitment to The Asian American Foundation, the couple pledged $50 million to advocate for social justice and economic mobility in the Black community through their sports ownership platform, including supporting players to amplify their voice for equality, and addressing income, education and health gaps in communities of color. In April 2020, at the outset of the pandemic, the couple donated personal protective equipment and ventilators to hospitals and underserved institutions in New York, New Jersey, California and the city of Detroit.
Active philanthropists in education and research, the Tsais established the Wu Tsai Neuroscience Institute at Stanford University, dedicated to understanding how the brain gives rise to mental life and behavior, both in health and in disease. The couple also founded the Wu Tsai Institute at Yale University to focus on understanding human cognition and exploring human potential by sparking interdisciplinary inquiry among the psychological, biological, and computational sciences. With Tsai’s support, Yale launched the Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking at Yale (Tsai CITY) to inspire students from diverse backgrounds and disciplines to seek innovative ways to solve real-world problems from climate change to civic engagement. Tsai is a supporter of the Paul Tsai China Center at Yale Law School, a center named after his father dedicated to helping advance legal reforms in China and increasing understanding of China in the United States.
A graduate of the Lawrenceville School (’82), Yale College (BA ’86) and Yale Law School (JD ’90), Tsai played varsity lacrosse for Yale and, in 2017, received the George H.W. Bush ‘48 Lifetime of Leadership Award, which honors Yale alumni athletes who have made significant leadership contributions in their worlds of governance, commerce, science and technology, education, public service, and the arts and media.