Clara Wu Tsai watched the second game of the Liberty’s playoff run at the Barclays Center last week seated between her friends, the artist Rashid Johnson and the rapper Meek Mill. It was a triumphant night, just as she had confidently predicted it would be as she left the Crown Club, Barclays’ private dining space, before the start of the face-off. Dressed simply in black trousers and a sheer sweater, she led her dinner guests — Meek Mill, Johnson and the actress Lake Bell — to their seats courtside.
The New York Liberty, of which Wu Tsai is a co-owner and an ever-present energy force, crushed the No. 1-seeded Minnesota Lynx, 87-71. John Turturro, a devoted fan of the team, was also in the stadium that night — seated in a crowd that sustained a roar nearly without interruption.
The Liberty, who took the championship title two years ago, advanced to the semifinals, where the team is currently trailing the Atlanta Dream and could face elimination in Friday’s game.
Regardless of the outcome, Wu Tsai is one of the most celebrated stewards in the W.N.B.A. And at 60, she finds herself at a moment of creative transition, aspiring to leave a broad cultural imprint on Brooklyn that would extend beyond her basketball empire. In late July, she and Joe Tsai, the billionaire chairman of the tech giant Alibaba and her husband of 30 years, announced their split. (“While they have grown apart,” a spokesman for the couple said at the time, “their divorce is amicable.”)
In the intervening months, Wu Tsai has prepared for the openings of various public arts initiatives she has sponsored in and around Barclays; settled into a carriage house in Brooklyn Heights, where she is spending more and more time; and turned up at the Venice Film Festival for the premiere of Werner Herzog’s “Bucking Fastard,” a film she produced.
It is a story of two sisters who speak in unison, fall in love with the same man and together dig a tunnel through a mountain range. Wu Tsai read the script and was transfixed. “I thought, OK, a movie like this might not get made through conventional channels,” she told me. “And I just believed the film ought to exist.”
When Wu Tsai thinks that something should happen, she generally has the means to ensure that it does. Three years ago, for example, she flew to Istanbul to woo Breanna Stewart, then a coveted free agent in the Euroleague, to the Liberty. Wu Tsai rented an 80-foot touring boat and took Stewart, her wife and the couple’s daughter on a cruise.
Wu Tsai began overseeing the team seven years ago. In 2019, her husband, who held a minority stake in the Brooklyn Nets, bought the team outright, a purchase quickly followed by the couple’s acquisition of the Liberty. Soon after, they moved the team from Westchester County to Barclays Center, which, as majority shareholders in Brooklyn Sports & Entertainment, they effectively control. Wu Tsai ensured that female players would enjoy the same amenities — expanded training facilities, for example — that the men do.
Fans concerned that the Tsais’ divorce would result in a sale of the teams were relieved to learn that despite the dissolution of the marriage, the management and ownership structure would remain in place.
Wu Tsai fell in love with basketball growing up the daughter of an economist in Lawrence, Kan., where she obsessively rooted for the University of Kansas Jayhawks, she told me. We were seated at a long dining table on the loft like second floor of her carriage house, which is appointed in a dark, moody palette and outfitted with the sort of modernist bohemian furnishings that immediately remind you where you are not — an antiseptic, glass-tower fun house familiar to the upper Midtown Manhattan billionaire aesthetic. African beaded chairs stood in an entry space. A Lorna Simpson painting hung on one wall of the living room and a Rashid Johnson on another.
The Tsais met in New York in the early 1990s when Joe was a lawyer at Sullivan & Cromwell. He had played lacrosse at Yale, and the couple’s three children grew up as serious athletes. Before the Tsais took over the Nets and the Liberty, they had thought about buying the Houston Rockets, which were on the block at about the same time. They had been looking for a sports team both because they thought it would make a good asset, Wu Tsai said, and because it would bring the family, so besotted with sports, closer together.
“The kids were really interested in Houston because James Harden at that time was playing for Houston,” she said. “I was immediately focused on Brooklyn and on New York, which is where I worked out of business school.” Wu Tsai had gone to Stanford, where she is a trustee, then on to Harvard Business School before landing a job at American Express.
In the early phase of the pandemic, the Tsais created a $50 million fund concentrated on efforts to relieve economic inequality in Brooklyn. Two years earlier, Wu Tsai had co-founded the Reform Alliance along with Meek Mill, the Patriots owner Robert Kraft and others, aimed at measures that would allow formerly incarcerated people to more easily regain a hold on their lives. Brooklyn, she felt, would be an appropriate place to expand her philanthropic efforts.
Some of the money in her current fund is planned toward a guaranteed basic income initiative for new mothers in Brownsville, where the poverty rate has stood intractably higher than the New York City average for decades. Some goes to a program that brings incarcerated parents and their children together once a month at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum. Other money has been directed at expanding arts and music education in public schools — curricula based on the work of Max Roach and Jean-Michel Basquiat, both Brooklynites.
Some of the work covered by the fund is not as explicitly progressive in spirit — A.I. boot camps and pitch contests for budding entrepreneurs. The winner of a contest to be decided in the coming weeks will receive a $150,000 grant. Providing “access to capital” for small businesses, Wu Tsai said, is a chief interest.
And so too is art. Wu Tsai has commissioned Johnson and her friend, the conceptual artist Sarah Sze, to produce pieces for Barclays. Both Sze’s installation, “Wave,” and a painting of Johnson’s will be introduced this month. “Thousands of people go to the Barclays Center almost every night to experience something special, whether it’s a concert or a Liberty game or a Nets game, and they all go there to be uplifted,” Wu Tsai said. “They go there to cheer, to sing loudly at the top of their lungs with their favorite band, And so I just thought art should be part of that experience.”
Wu Tsai also lives in Southern California, in La Jolla, where she raised her children. When she is in Brooklyn, she spends a lot of her time at Barclays, where the players train. At one point when we met, she pulled out the Liberty’s 2024 championship ring, a combination of white diamonds, black diamonds and Brazilian Paraiba tourmalines, in aqua, a Liberty color. Too big to wear, the piece mostly lives in a safe.
I asked Wu Tsai what she did for fun when she was in Brooklyn. She goes to birthday dinners for Liberty players, she told me. She sees her friend Nicholas Ma, a documentary filmmaker and the son of Yo-Yo Ma. She likes to go to Meat Hook, a butcher in Williamsburg. She enjoys having meetings with people at Café Brume, an Alsatian restaurant on Montague Street. When I asked whether she was dating, she said that she was not.
Brooklyn philanthropy exists in its own cozy insular ecosystem, apart from Manhattan, where fortunes in the hundreds of millions or billions of dollars are in much more ample supply. Given the extent of her wealth, some people have grumbled about Wu Tsai’s true level of borough commitment, the suggestion being that she could be doing even more, just as so many other people who have come from Manhattan and settled into $10 million townhouses could.
Wu Tsai has not joined any of the leading local cultural boards — not the Brooklyn Museum, or the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, the Brooklyn Public Library or the Brooklyn Academy of Music (although she has funded an upcoming film festival, Playback, there). Instead, Tsai sits on the boards of NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, with its $22 billion in assets, and Lincoln Center. Four years ago, the Tsais donated $50 million toward the renovation of Geffen Hall.
Arts funding in New York has continued to suffer in the aftermath of the pandemic as audiences have shrunk and corporations and the federal government have pulled their giving back, and the effects have been felt most acutely outside Manhattan. Stephanie Ingrassia, the vice chair of the Brooklyn Museum board and a longtime Brooklyn philanthropist, said that great efforts had been made to engage Wu Tsai more deeply in the life of Brooklyn and that she hopes that as she entrenches herself in this new chapter, she will consider an increasing range of causes. “We really are stewards of this place, and we have to help these small organizations that make Brooklyn Brooklyn,” Ingrassia said.
Wu Tsai’s giving has been much chased, and she has created certain parameters. She does not contribute to political campaigns, for instance, or charter schools. “I think Brooklyn institutions in general punch above their weight,” she told me. “They do amazing things. The Brooklyn Museum, their exhibitions are world class.” She does what she can, she told me, but some problems, she said, are larger than any one person’s capacity to solve.
The post The Billionaire Who Wants Brooklyn to Win appeared first on New York Times.
