Is Clara Wu Tsai Founder of the Social Justice Fund? No, but Claim Diverts from Joe Tsai and Alibaba
Messaging, now revised for retroactive continuity, suggests that Wu Tsai not only founded the Social Justice Fund but even put up $50 million. Everyone plays along.
This is part of a series on the Joe and Clara Tsai Foundation’s Social Justice Fund, established in 2020 by the billionaire couple who own most of Brooklyn Sports & Entertainment, which includes the Brooklyn Nets, New York Liberty, and the Barclays Center operating company.1
“We believe things should be presented as they are,” Alibaba Executive Vice Chairman Joe Tsai said in a December 11, 2015, interview with the South China Morning Post, the English-language Hong Kong newspaper that Alibaba Group had just purchased to re-orient coverage of China. “Present facts, tell the truth, and that is the principle that we are going to operate on.”
Of course, the changes Tsai promised were seen by critics as a “steady erosion of the [paper’s] journalistic independence.”2
From a Brooklyn lens, presenting things “as they are” has not always been a tenet of the Joe and Clara Tsai Foundation’s Social Justice Fund, which has rewritten its history to claim Clara Wu Tsai was its founder.
The pivot likely relates to a desire to separate Tsai, who, as a leader of a giant Chinese e-commerce and technology firm, has forcefully defended the Chinese regime, from his American wife, who has a less fraught record and a history of social justice support.
The strategy also helps them present the SJF as a more personal initiative, divorced from any geopolitical strategy, or recognition that the Tsais’ fortune largely derives from Alibaba.
It’s striking how thoroughly and quietly this “retcon” has been achieved.
(“Retcon” is short for “retroactive continuity,” which Wikipedia calls “a literary device… whereby facts and events established through the narrative are adjusted, ignored, supplemented, or contradicted by a subsequently published work.”)
A smooth story
Consider the statement by Gregg Bishop, Executive Director of the Social Justice Fund, in the video below: “For those who are not familiar with the Social Justice Fund, it was founded by Clara Wu Tsai in 2020 to invest $50 million in Brooklyn over ten years.”
Bishop spoke, misleadingly, at the June 3, 2025, symposium on “Ideas for Creating a Stronger and More Equitable Brooklyn”, convened by the Center for an Urban Future and Brooklyn Org.
First, it’s a stretch to say they’re investing “$50 million in Brooklyn,” given that their reporting is murky and some spending, notably investments in minority-led start-ups, has a tenuous connection to Brooklyn.
More importantly, despite Bishop’s casually authoritative tone, Wu Tsai did not, as implied, solely found the Social Justice Fund.
After all, an August 25, 2020, press release from the Brooklyn Nets, Clara Wu Tsai and Joe Tsai Unveil Action Plan to Support Social Justice and Promote Equality, credited “the couple’s commitment” to the Social Justice Fund, funded by the Tsais’ “charitable foundation.”
The SJF’s first grant was announced in a December 17, 2020, Barclays Center press release, Joe and Clara Tsai Announce First Five Black Leaders to Receive Grants From Social Justice Fund. The text cited “the Joe and Clara Tsai Foundation’s Social Justice Fund.”
Retroactive continuity
Since then, sole credit for Wu Tsai has been repeated, for example, by the Vera Institute of Justice, the 2023 Aspen Ideas Festival, Bloomberg Businessweek, and the book The Power of Basketball: NBA Players, Coaches, and Team Governors on the Fight to Make a Better America, which includes a chapter by Wu Tsai.
In the clip below, from last September, the Barclays Center announcer stated, “As part of the ongoing commitment to the Brooklyn community, the Social Justice Fund, founded by New York Liberty Governor and owner Clara Wu Tsai, is proud to launch the 2025 Belong Brooklyn Initiative Violence Interruption Campaign.”
The website changes
Consider text from the Social Justice Fund’s website from 2021 and 2025 regarding the EXCELerate Loan Fund, which offered low-interest loans to Brooklyn businesses.
Though it originally credited a “ten-year, $50 million commitment by the Joe and Clara Tsai Foundation,” the page has been updated to claim a “ten-year, $50 million commitment by Clara Tsai.”
The claim is complicated by the logo below, which appears twice on the page; it reminds us that the Social Justice Fund is part of the Joe and Clara Tsai Foundation.
Similarly, while a December 1, 2022 version of the Social Justice Fund website, as shown at the bottom of the image below, credited the Basquiat in Brooklyn Schools initiative to “the Joe and Clara Tsai Foundation, who established a Social Justice Fund,” the website now says the “program was funded by Clara Wu Tsai.”
The official response
I queried the Social Justice Fund: “I noticed that, when the SJF was first announced, it was attributed to Joe and Clara Wu Tsai. Now it’s described as founded by Clara. Why the change?”
The response, from a spokesman at the public relations firm DKC: “The Social Justice Fund was founded by Joe Tsai and Clara Wu Tsai. Clara, in collaboration with the SJF team of professionals, is the driving force behind the direction and decision-making of the Fund.”
Let’s repeat that: “The Social Justice Fund was founded by Joe Tsai and Clara Wu Tsai.”
It makes sense for Wu Tsai to be “the driving force.” After all, she’s not trying to run Alibaba while also steering Brooklyn Sports & Entertainment. Plus, she’s an American citizen, without her husband’s baggage.
That, however, does not make her the founder or the funder.
We’re just supposed to forget about Joe Tsai’s extremely unusual ability to straddle China and the United States. In the United States, he’s a powerful sports team owner and, with his wife, a prominent philanthropist.
In China, the chief geopolitical rival of the United States, he now heads, as Alibaba Executive Chairman, a huge company, ranked 18 on the 2025 Fortune China 500 and 63 in the 2025 Fortune Global 500, that has expanded from e-commerce to tech, with a leading role in the development of artificial intelligence.
Beyond the Social Justice Fund
Wu Tsai gets credit within the couple’s suite of enterprises. Consider her biography, from the Brooklyn Sports and Entertainment website.
It calls her “Founder of the Joe and Clara Tsai Foundation,” says “[s]he established the Social Justice Fund,” and claims she “founded the Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance.”
The last credit is even more of a stretch: the couple themselves are pictured as “founding partners” on the Alliance’s website.
In June 2021, the Social Justice Fund announced “EXCELerate, New Loan Program to Help Brooklyn’s BIPOC Small Business Owners Get on their Feet Post-Pandemic,” saying it was “Made Possible by Joe & Clara Tsai Foundation.”
“We know that there is no social justice without economic opportunity,” said Wu Tsai, who in that case was described as Co-Founder of the Joe and Clara Tsai Foundation.
The page for the loan fund initially credited a “ten-year, $50 million commitment by the Joe and Clara Tsai Foundation.” Today, however, the page credits the “Social Justice Fund, made possible through a ten-year, $50 million commitment by Clara Tsai.”3
Why the change?
The strategy started as early as June 24, 2021, with a New York Daily News headline: Clara Wu Tsai’s EXCELerate is a ‘win-win-win-win’ for Brooklyn and Black business.
A November 7, 2022, press release, Clara Wu Tsai, the Social Justice Fund, and Visible Hands Launch “BK-XL,” the Largest Accelerator Focused on BIPOC Founders, credited the project to “Wu Tsai, founder of the Social Justice Fund.”
At the time, I noted that Wu Tsai, unlike her husband, didn’t have a giant company to run, so it made sense for her to step forward. Wu Tsai “leads the couple’s philanthropy,” the Chronicle of Philanthropy on July 21, 2021, had observed.
Positioning Wu Tsai as the lead philanthropist took the focus off her husband. At the time, Tsai had faced a significant amount of backlash for his management of star guard Kyrie Irving, for failing to apologize sufficiently for posting and implicitly endorsing an anti-Semitic film.
Distance from controversy
As The Nation‘s Dave Zirin put it, citing ESPN’s report that Alibaba financially supported the “cultural genocide” of Uyghur Muslims, “For some reason Tsai is ‘fit to associate’ with the Brooklyn Nets.”4
The erasure of Tsai helps deflect scrutiny of his power as Chairman of Alibaba and his notable backing—contradicting the philanthropy’s support for progressive causes and even Human Rights Day—of authoritarian China, notably his intemperate “open letter” on Facebook, October 26, 2019, in defense of China. That came after an NBA figure tweeted support of protesters in Hong Kong, infuriating many in China and endangering the NBA’s financial ties.
ESPN on April 14, 2022, published a tough article, Brooklyn Nets owner Joe Tsai is the face of NBA’s uneasy China relationship. Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru saw a contradiction:
In the United States, Tsai donates hundreds of millions of dollars to combat racism and discrimination. [Note: the Social Justice Fund is a $50 million pledge, while undisclosed sums, for example, have gone to the Reform Alliance and the Asian-American Foundation; far more spending goes to science.] In China, Alibaba, under Tsai’s leadership, partners with companies blacklisted by the U.S. government for supporting a “campaign of repression, mass arbitrary detention and high-tech surveillance” through state-of-the-art racial profiling.
Tsai has publicly defended some of China’s most controversial policies. He described the government’s brutal crackdown on dissent as necessary to promote economic growth; defended a law used to imprison scores of pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong as necessary to squelch separatism; and, when questioned about human rights, asserted that most of China’s 1.4 billion citizens are “happy about where they are.”
Notably, Tsai didn’t speak at the October 23, 2021, ceremony unveiling “Belong Brooklyn,” the neon signage (”You Belong Here” and “We Belong Here”) that serves as both art and advertising, purportedly an homage to the protests that took over the arena plaza after the police murder of George Floyd. If he had, perhaps that would’ve opened him up to charges of hypocrisy.
I’m not the only person to notice. As NetsDaily observed May 27, 2024:
So ... is it fair to suggest that there is some public relations strategy at work here? Are we so cynical to suggest that Clara is becoming more prominent while Joe, for a variety of reasons, has retreated, at least from the public eye.
Indeed, Wu Tsai has escaped a lot of the bad vibes husband Joe gets hammered for, whether it be U.S.-China relations or the team formerly known as the Big Three.
Now it’s a policy
Putting Wu Tsai front and center has become SJF policy. A Communications & Media Guidelines document, which apparently appeared on the SJF website within the past two years, offers guidance to grantees and other collaborators regarding “various communications matters.” (The document, since removed, is archived here.)5
When referring to SJF, collaborators were told to use “Social Justice Fund founded by Clara Wu Tsai” for the first reference and then “the Social Justice Fund” thereafter.
Indeed, the Social Justice Fund’s longtime collaborator, Brooklyn Org, formally the Brooklyn Community Foundation, last April 9 cited “our partners at the Social Justice Fund founded by Clara Wu Tsai.”
For recent galas held by the Prospect Park Alliance and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the list of donors includes the “Social Justice Fund Founded By Clara Wu Tsai,” as shown in the screenshots above.
The press complies
An October 7, 2024, interview on CNN credits Wu Tsai, as shown in the annotated screenshot, with several things she should share with her husband.
It calls her “New York Liberty owner,” claims “she launched” the Human Performance Alliance, and asserts that through “her foundation, We Tsai has donated over $200 million” for such research.
In reality, her husband is part of all of those.
History revised
The images below show how the Social Justice Fund has revised its website to promote Wu Tsai and omit her husband.
In the screenshot below left, the couple is pictured, quoted, and credited, along with the Joe and Clara Tsai Foundation, for the Social Justice Fund. That version persisted through at least August 17, 2024.
In the screenshot below right, the current website credits solely Wu Tsai.
As the pull quotes suggest, their rhetoric regarding race has changed, as I explain separately.
The Social Justice Fund’s leadership page, as shown below, shows similar changes, initially claiming the Joe and Clara Tsai Foundation established the SJF, but now crediting it to Wu Tsai.
The NBA, too
The 2024 book The Power of Basketball: NBA Players, Coaches, and Team Governors on the Fight to Make a Better America, produced by the National Basketball Social Justice Coalition, featured Wu Tsai on the cover, though she’s not an NBA Governor but rather the Governor of the WNBA’s New York Liberty.
Wu Tsai’s essay, “The Business of Doing Justice” (with thanks to communications aide Erin Trowbridge), responds to a question she often gets: “Why do you spend so much of your time and resources on social impact initiatives?”
Her response: after witnessing so many injustices and being surrounded by righteous advocates, she can’t stay on the sidelines. “But it’s very personal to me,” she writes. “Social justice and a commitment to democracy are essential themes of my upbringing. They are part of my DNA.”6
Joe Tsai’s DNA
Unmentioned: they can’t be part of Joe Tsai’s DNA, given his political stances. He has Canadian citizenship and was born in Taiwan, but, as Bloomberg reported on January 22, 2020, in Nets Owner Joe Tsai Is Caught Between Brooklyn and Beijing:
“I’m Chinese,” Tsai says. “I grew up in a very culturally Chinese environment.” He spoke Mandarin as a child, and his parents talked about returning to visit the mainland. At the time, the KMT saw itself as China’s rightful ruler, a status then recognized by most of the West. “My upbringing is always that there is one China,” he says.
Steve Tsang, director of the University of London’s SOAS China Institute, told Bloomberg, “Once Alibaba became so big and became, in effect, adopted by the Chinese government as the next new champion… Tsai must realize that, whether he believes in it or not, he will have to show very clear commitment to the course of the Chinese party.”
That said, Tsai’s very much a bridge between the National Basketball Association and China, a crucial market.
Wu Tsai on the spot
“Economic opportunity is really what drew my parents to the United States from Taiwan,” Wu Tsai told Inside Philanthropy on July 12, 2021. “They were also really enchanted by the democratic ideals of freedom and justice for all… and I grew up believing that is what this country stands for.”
Last April, when Wu Tsai received Columbia Business School’s Botwinick Prize in Business Ethics, she observed that she “grew up with Midwestern values: a strong work ethic, and a real belief in the importance of education.”
“But I should also say that I do also have a legacy of standing up for fairness and what’s right, from a very early age,” she added. “ My grandfather, who was the first democratically elected mayor in Taipei, fought on behalf of Taiwanese rice farmers during the Japanese occupation, during Japanese colonial rule. There were discriminatory policies against the farmers. And then my dad fought for Taiwanese independence and self-determination from abroad. And so from an early age, I had examples of how to stand up for people who didn’t have power, and really how you use your platform to do what is fair and right. So that affected me a lot.”
Later, she was asked by a student, apparently of Chinese heritage: “We’re blessed with values from Taiwan, from U.S., and from mainland China. I’m just curious, obviously these three values are clashing with each other now, just how you think about the world in the future, and how we can best appreciate all these values?”
“Well,” responded Wu Tsai, before pausing. “I think empathy is the most important value you can have. And, you know, do I think about Chinese values, mainland Chinese values, Taiwanese values, and U.S. values? I don’t really think about it like that. I think what I think about is Confucian values.”
“Like, I think about this whole filial piety, you know— should my parents be moving in with me… those types of things,” she continued. “Um, Midwest, I think I’m the most Midwestern, I would say Midwestern values are really what define me more than anything else.”
That somewhat dodged the question, since it didn’t acknowledge, for example, China’s pursuit of Taiwan, an example, as her questioner put it, of clashing values.
The value of separation
Surely, though, Wu Tsai could answer the question far more disarmingly than could her husband.
The posture continues. In a March 10 press release announcing a business loan program with The Asian American Foundation (TAAF), Wu Tsai was described as “founder of the Social Justice Fund and Governor of the New York Liberty.”
Her husband, by contrast, was described only as “TAAF Board Member and Governor of the Brooklyn Nets.”
The hyperlink includes all articles tagged with the Social Justice Fund, including an initial one Feb. 4, 2026, headlined Has the Tsais’ Social Justice Fund Really Invested $25M “In Brooklyn” Since 2020? The series only includes those with the logo “Eye on Joe and Clara Tsai Foundation Social Justice Fund.
Adding to the confusion, the Joe and Clara Tsai Foundation has occasionally been referenced under other names, which boost Clara. An Oct. 11, 2020, press release announcing the 23rd annual Milken Institute Global Conference cited participants, including Wu Tsai, described as “Founder, The Clara Wu and Joe Tsai Foundation.”
On his LinkedIn page, Thomas Skalak describes himself as a Senior Advisor to Clara Wu of the Clara Wu and Joe Tsai Foundation. An alternate designation was applied to a panel he led: Joe Tsai and Clara Wu Foundation.
When Wu Tsai, in June 2022, was named by Mayor Eric Adams and Gov. Kathy Hochul to the “New” New York panel, examining the future of the city and the region’s economy, she was identified as “founder, Clara and Joe Tsai Foundation; and governor, New York Liberty.”
ESPN in April 2022 reported:
Under Tsai’s leadership, Alibaba funded companies that helped China build “an intrusive, omnipresent surveillance state that uses emerging technologies to track individuals with greater efficiency,” according to a 2020 congressional report.
Those technologies have been used widely in the western region of Xinjiang, where the government has forced more than 1 million Uyghur Muslims and other ethnic minorities into barbed-wire “re-education” camps, policies that have been described as cultural “genocide” by the United States, several other countries and human rights organizations.
Human Rights Watch in April 2021 reported:
The United States State Department and the parliaments of Canada and the Netherlands have determined that China’s conduct also constitutes genocide under international law. Human Rights Watch has not documented the existence of the necessary genocidal intent at this time. Nonetheless, nothing in this report precludes such a finding and, if such evidence were to emerge, the acts being committed against Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang—a group protected by the 1948 Genocide Convention—could also support a finding of genocide.
On August 31, 2022, the United Nations’ Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) published OHCHR Assessment of human rights concerns in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, People’s Republic of China (PDF), plus China’s response. From the report.
Serious human rights violations have been committed in XUAR in the context of the Government’s application of counter-terrorism and counter-“extremism” strategies. The implementation of these strategies, and associated policies in XUAR has led to interlocking patterns of severe and undue restrictions on a wide range of human rights. These patterns of restrictions are characterized by a discriminatory component, as the underlying acts often directly or indirectly affect Uyghur and other predominantly Muslim communities.
These human rights violations, as documented in this assessment, flow from a domestic “anti-terrorism law system” that is deeply problematic from the perspective of international human rights norms and standards.
The treatment of persons held in the system of so-called VETC facilities is of equal concern. Allegations of patterns of torture or ill-treatment, including forced medical treatment and adverse conditions of detention, are credible, as are allegations of individual incidents of sexual and gender-based violence.
The systems of arbitrary detention and related patterns of abuse in VETC and other detention facilities come against the backdrop of broader discrimination against members of Uyghur and other predominantly Muslim minorities based on perceived security threats emanating from individual members of these groups.
The described policies and practices in XUAR have transcended borders, separating families and severing human contacts, while causing particular suffering to affected Uyghur, Kazakh and other predominantly Muslim minority families, exacerbated by patterns of intimidations and threats against members of the diaspora community speaking publicly about experiences in XUAR.
From China’s response:
(1) Xinjiang adheres to the principle that everyone is equal before the law, and the accusation that its policy is "based on ethnic discrimination" is groundless.
\(2) The counter-terrorism and de-radicalization efforts in Xinjiang have been all along conducted on the track of the rule of law, and are by no means the alleged 118 "suppression of ethnic minorities"
(3) The vocational education and training centers in Xinjiang are learning facilities established in accordance with law intended for de-radicalization, and are by no means the so-called "concentration camps".
(4) The lawful rights and interests of workers of all ethnic groups in Xinjiang 119 are protected, and there is no such thing as "forced labor".
(5) Xinjiang has earnestly safeguarded the human rights of people of all ethnic groups through the combat against terrorism and extremism, and there is no such thing as "massive violations of rights"
On September 13, 2022, the New Yorker interviewed Nicholas Bequelin, a visiting fellow at the Paul Tsai China Center at Yale Law School, which is funded by Joe Tsai, under the headline Why Hasn’t the U.N. Accused China of Genocide in Xinjiang? Bequelin, the former regional director for Amnesty International in Asia, worked on an early Human Rights Watch report on Xinjiang in 2005, and said:
The report also establishes two important findings. The first is that the entire framework that China is relying on in this campaign to combat what its government calls terrorism and extremism is incompatible with its international human-rights obligations. The [supposed] crimes are vaguely defined. They are arbitrarily determined.
…The second important element is that a range of very severe violations—torture, enforced disappearances, intimidation, the stamping out of religious or cultural expression—were found. Both the legal basis and the implementation of the campaign are profoundly violative of human rights, and that is extremely important when it comes from a U.N. agency.
It may have been removed after my inquiry, but that’s speculation.
Clara Wu Tsai’s EXCELerate is a ‘win-win-win-win’ for Brooklyn and Black business, a New York Daily News headline declared June 24, 2021. The article stated:
Wu Tsai recalls reciting The Pledge of Allegiance every day growing up, an expression of allegiance that ends with “one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” Those are the same democratic ideals her parents relished, the ideals she and Nets owner Joe Tsai are using their stature and finances to bring about in their own backyard.
“The inequities got worse, and they really became exposed,” she said. “But as someone who still clearly believes in these ideals, I still really believe that it’s possible. I want to make sure that these ideals exist and in reality, so in my small part, this is the way that I can correct some of the inequities in a community that I really care about.”