Taiwan-born billionaire and China booster Joe Tsai is selling a minority stake in the New York Nets to David Koch’s widow, Julia, after the sports concern was assessed at a massive $6 billion valuation.
BSE Global owns the Nets, the Barclays Center, and the WNBA’s New York Liberty. And Joe Tsai has controlled it all. And now, in one of the highest valuations in American sports, BSE has been upgraded to $6 billion.
Now, Tsai is looking to dole out some stakes to others, and his first move was to offer a fifteen percent share to Julia Koch, the widow of Koch Industries co-founder David Koch. Julia is making her dabbling in sports a family affair, and she will reportedly invest in it along with her three children, David, Mary, and John, the New York Post reported.
The NBA has already approved the deal.
“I want to emphasize that both our families are committed to making the necessary investments in our franchises to build a sustainable winning culture,” Tsai said of his new partner, “as well as in the people and physical infrastructure to bring the best of sports and entertainment to our fans and audiences.”
Koch and her children — worth an estimated $65.2 billion — will not have any voting power with the league or control over the team. Her husband, David, died in August of 2019.
The valuation comes in at more than double what Tsai paid for the sports teams in the first place.
Tsai is deeply financially connected to China’s authoritarian regime and has also openly defended China’s brutal crackdwons on political dissent at home and in Hong Kong.
Tsai, who made his billions with the Chinese e-merch company Alibaba, has also helped the Chinese government build “an intrusive, omnipresent surveillance state that uses emerging technologies to track individuals with greater efficiency,” ESPN noted in 2022.
That surveillance state — the largest and most intrusive ever created — has been used to imprison and enslave ethnic Chinese people, especially the country’s Uyghur minority group.
The Koch family, of course, is well known for being deep-pocketed bakers of the Republican establishment and have often worked in opposition to conservative organizations and political candidates. The Kochs refused to back Donald Trump in 2016, and during the 2020 campaign, they also worked to defeat some of Trump’s chosen candidates and to hamper the Trump agenda.
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