Alibaba's Joe Tsai on US-China Rivalry, AI Future, Owning the Nets/Liberty, Caitlin Clark's Impact

Hey, my man. Good to see you.

Good to see you, brother.

How are you?

Good to see you.

Good to see you. The Brooklyn Nets.

The Brooklyn Nets.

The Nets and the New York Liberty.

And the New York Liberty. Exactly.

It's not easy running a team, is it?

It's not easy at all. Basketball—any professional team—is both a business and an institution. You need to keep the fan base happy, so there's this church-and-state element.

Yeah. It's almost like running a news organization. Can we maybe start with the WNBA and shift to business and basketball? I think Caitlin Clark is out for the season, and there's been a lot of controversy and attention around the WNBA. What has it done right? What has it done wrong? Has the league been doing enough to protect her as a star in the league? It's been almost a microcosm for a social discussion. Do you want to talk about that, as you see it?

Caitlin Clark definitely had an effect on the WNBA. All the metrics went up. This was last season, right, when she first came into the league from college? We've seen all our metrics—from viewership, ticket sales, sponsorship, everything—go up almost 4x.

4x, right? I mean, that's incredible.

That's incredible. The economic impact that she's made to the league is extraordinary.

Undeniable.

Undeniable. But because of who she is, she's a little bit of a different kind of player. She's a point guard, and she's a smaller player. The knock on her was whether she was going to be able to withstand all the physicality of the league, and she's proven that she's able to do that.

Unfortunately, there's been—I think it's always good to have rivalries, right? She has this rivalry with Angel Reese that dates back to college. But some people would like to pit it as a kind of racial thing, or as this or that. I think we need to look past that and just look at the skill set that's being brought into the league now.

We have so many great college players. The rookie-of-the-year potential candidate is Sonia Citron. Have you ever heard of her before she came into the league?

No.

I think she just broke the record for the highest 3-point shooting percentage in the league. You see a tremendous amount of talent, and I think you ask, what have they done right? I don't think it's a matter of just a confluence of good things coming into the league.

And what about the NBA? You guys did just an enormous—

Yeah. Just let me—let me just say, the one thing that's really changed is that prior to the Caitlin Clark season, your average fan base that watches ESPN—basically, you guys were not watching women's basketball. Maybe some of them followed college, but certainly not the WNBA. Now your average ESPN fan base, the mainstream sports fan base, is watching the WNBA.

I have an observation about this. You and I are old-school basketball heads, having watched the '80s and '90s, Patrick Ewing and Charles Barkley. It's more physical. They're tougher in the WNBA. Every time LeBron goes up and gets fouled, he's flopping all the time. How does he do it? It's a foul. It's a foul. Maybe you could comment on LeBron, or just generally on the NBA product.

Yeah. I mean, the NBA—they're so tough, and they're throwing each other around. It's a better game.

The NBA product is great.

I don't think it's fair to compare whether the men's league is more or less physical than the women's league, or one with the other. They're both very physical. If you're sitting there on the floor, you're watching physicality.

Sure.

And also athleticism, right? The NBA has this committee called the competition committee. I got put on the competition committee. They called me and said, "Joe, we want you to be on the competition committee. It's about rules—what is this transition take foul?" Every season, they make these tweak changes. They make changes to reffing to make the product better.

When I got the call, I'm like, "You want me to sit on the committee with Jason Kidd, Chris Paul, and Coach K? What do I know about basketball that could make me smarter than them?" But what I've seen is—and I've said this—the competition committee should be called the product committee, because that is the product the fans see on the floor. If you change, let's say, the 3-point line, that is a product decision.

That sounds like competition. Should they? Is it too much?

I don't think so.

When you watch the Boston Celtics throw up 43 3s in a game, do you think it's a good product?

I think it's a great product, because there are 18 different ways you can throw up 43 3s in a game.

Okay, let's transition to Alibaba for a second. It's an incredible journey—you and Jack Ma, and the whole story has tremendous lore. I mean, it's written in books. Can you take us back to your mindset? I think Jack's mindset is well documented, but how did you get involved? What were you thinking in that moment? What was the risk you were taking?

I was just mesmerized by Jack's personality. People see the public side of Jack, which is very charismatic, but what I saw was that he was able to instill faith in people. When I walked into his apartment, there were 12 to 15 very young people, roughly students who were just coming out of college, and Jack was kind of the teacher who was 10 years older. He was able to communicate and paint a very strong vision. That was the part that I really signed on to.

His ability to lead is amazing. He's a teacher by training. He taught at Zhejiang University; he taught English, actually. Teachers, in a way, make natural leaders because, A, you have to communicate well, and, B, you can identify talent. I think a lot of teachers love to see their students and say, "Oh, this kid is going to do really well," so they write a recommendation, they do whatever.

Also, teachers have enough humility that they're willing—they're very happy if their students go off and then come back and become more successful than they are. In building a company, you need to be able to accommodate all sorts of people who are smarter than you are. That's really important.

There was a phase, I guess, in the early 2010s when it felt like tremendous freewheeling capitalism in China. There was a Cambrian explosion of incredible entrepreneurs—you, Jack, all these others, Pony Ma. Then, I think, starting with the Ant IPO, things changed a little bit.

Can you walk us through the dynamics of how that changed? I think it all leads to the fact that a lot of foreign direct investment into the Chinese ecosystem has changed pretty dramatically. Just give us a sense of what happened over that arc that you've been in, working in it and observing it.

Alibaba has been around for 26 years. I would say the first 15 years were a completely free-market kind of way of growth, and we built a lot of business organically. Then we went into a phase where there was extreme competition. Everybody wanted to do e-commerce. Why? Because if you have traffic online, e-commerce was the best way to monetize your traffic.

In today's market, we have 5 very, very strong competitors, including the parent company of TikTok, ByteDance. They're doing e-commerce. They're not known as an e-commerce company, but they are one of our fiercest competitors.

You go through a period of extreme competition, and then the government felt that this sector had gotten out of line a little bit. First, there was too much competition, and then there were some platforms that had exhibited monopolistic behavior. So there was what people may call a crackdown—more regulations came in.

Some of the regulations are actually very good. They protected privacy, and there were antimonopoly-type regulations. Now we are in a new normal where we believe that the regulatory environment is more predictable. We know what the red lines are, and we know where to go and where not to go. It's actually made for a better operating environment because of the predictability of it.

On a geopolitical level, it seems that the rhetoric in the United States keeps drilling into Americans that China is an existential threat to America, that we're rivals, and that we cannot operate and lead the world to prosperity.

What do you think?

I don’t agree with that view of the world. I’d be interested in your view, David.

I don’t believe in that either. I don’t know why this has to be the only dialogue we have—that we are bitter rivals.

Yeah. I think I could understand why, sitting here in America, you look at the rise of China over the last 20 or 25 years. China has become strong in terms of manufacturing; that’s why it’s such an export juggernaut. Because of its economic development, China has become a technology juggernaut as well, and the fear is that all that economic and technological strength is going to flow into military strength, which becomes a national security issue. I understand that. I get it.

But I think these are the 2 largest economies in the world, and you just need to take a step back and say, “On the one hand, we should compete with China.” That’s fine. Our hyperscaler companies compete with the Chinese internet companies globally. But on the other hand, there are just so many trouble spots in the world. What did President Trump say—that he stopped 7 wars, right?

Yeah.

Okay. Well, China didn’t start any of them. China has not started a war in the last how many years? 30 years? 40 years? I think China was part of the Korean War, maybe the Vietnam War, but that was a long time ago in history.

In a way, China—if you observe the behavior of the Chinese people and the Chinese state—is a very peaceful nation. China cares about its own economic development. They care about the well-being of its citizens, and I think there’s a lot of friction in the course of competition, where China feels that the United States is trying to contain China and stop China’s rise economically.

Just speaking about the welfare of its citizens, you mentioned ByteDance. I think it was reported that ByteDance’s revenue just passed Meta’s revenue. I mean, it’s a juggernaut.

It’s a private company, so I don’t know.

Yeah, they actually released it. One of its core products, TikTok, is a fundamentally different product here than in China. Because of that regulation and a focus on the welfare of its citizens, there are strict rules in terms of the content, the curation, and the algorithms. Whereas here, it’s cat videos and all kinds of nonsense.

Although now I noticed that TikTok put a STEM section inside TikTok in the American product, for whatever reason. There’s a wherewithal in China to think about its citizenry like that. I’m just curious: How do we embrace more of that principle? Because that sort of gets lost in this.

Such a good question. Yeah. What can we learn from China?

Yeah. What should we be doing more of what China does? Well, first, education. You have an extremely highly educated population. You talk to every Chinese parent, and they want their kids to take the national college entrance exam and get into the best universities. If they want to send their kids away to school, they want them to go to the Ivy League or Stanford, or all of that.

I think the emphasis on education is important. I think there are some structural issues here in the United States, like the teachers’ union, that is getting in the way. But there are no teachers’ unions in China.

So, David, what’s your take on America and China succeeding together? Are we destined to be in conflict with this country forever, or is there a path forward with our incredible, amazing, dynamic President Trump?

Well, I think Professor Mearsheimer explained it all in some of his talks last year: The United States and China are in a high-tech competition. They’re in a security competition and an economic competition. The reason is because China has become rich and powerful.

The United States does not tolerate peer competitors. We want to be the number 1 country. We want to be the most powerful country. The balance of power is, to some degree, a zero-sum game. Economics are not, but power is. The history of the United States is that we want to be number 1, and we don’t like having peer competitors.

There are good reasons for this. We live in an anarchic world, meaning there’s no higher authority. If you get in trouble in the global system, you can’t call 911. Countries privilege their survival over all other considerations, and the way to survive in the international system is to be powerful.

You measure your power based on the gap between you and the next most powerful country. I think that 20 years ago, China wasn’t seen as a threat because it wasn’t rich and powerful, but now it is. I think that’s what’s led to a much more hawkish environment in Washington.

I can’t disagree with all of it because I think it’s very important that the United States win the AI race. We don’t want China, for example, to dominate in AI or in chips. We want, as Americans, the United States to be the most powerful country.

If I were Chinese, I would want China to be the most powerful country. I don’t have any resentment toward Chinese people who want their country to be the most powerful country. There’s no animosity in saying this, but I want the United States to be the most powerful country. In my little part of the world, that means winning the AI race.

Can I respond to that?

Yeah.

I think it’s really important that, as a patriotic American, you want America to win. But I think when it comes to AI, there’s no such thing as winning the race. It’s a long marathon. You can see from these model companies that every week there’s a model that’s leading, but then the next week another model overtakes it.

The other thing is that we haven’t figured out what the business model is. In our business, in e-commerce, we have a marketplace model with network dynamics, but I’m not sure if the development of models has those network effects, which means winner-take-all. I don’t think AI is a winner-take-all field.

My definition of winning is not who comes up with the strongest AI model, but who can adopt it faster. I think a lot of resources here in the United States should go into the adoption and diffusion of the technology, as opposed to just plowing billions into it. Literally, each of the hyperscaler companies is investing something like $80 billion a year.

China has espoused open source. A lot of the companies, including ourselves, have launched models that are smaller—not the trillion-parameter models. We have a model that’s 1.7 billion parameters, another that’s 4 billion, and another that’s 8 billion, for mobile devices and laptops. With this type of development, I think it’s more conducive to faster adoption. You want AI to proliferate.

When you look at China, I’m not saying China is technologically winning the model war. But in terms of the actual application and people benefiting from AI, there has been a lot of development. I’ve seen a survey of Chinese firms: Last year, only 8% were using AI in their business. Now that number is approaching half—50%.

The adoption rate has been fairly fast, and I think in the 2 countries, AI is such an important element of life. It’s almost like air.

Right.

Right. And why would any one country say we have a sole claim to AI? We should—there are so many things that AI can do in medicine and biology. I think there’s a lot of room for cooperation.

Joe, one of the key questions that everybody asks when we talk about AI is whether you spin your own models, which you do and which you’ve done a good job with, or whether some people just take them off the shelf. What’s the actual net impact on the operations of the business? Does it change the number of people you hire? At what level does it change it? Does it change efficiency? Does it change the way you think about certain jobs? What’s the practical application that it’s having for you guys on the ground inside Alibaba?

The AI has definitely made our operations more efficient, so we actually don’t have to hire as many people. I’m still on this mission to write our quarterly earnings release with AI and maybe just have a model do it, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Put AI on the analyst conference call and see if people can tell the difference. Yeah. And then they’ll get rid of everybody in the finance department.

The biggest impact AI has made is that we incorporate it into all of our consumer-facing apps. We’re in e-commerce, we’re in maps, and we have a food-delivery business. Once you infuse AI, the consumer has a massively better experience, and that generates a larger user base for us.

We’re seeing the impact from the uplift on the revenue side.

Is the workforce then naturally attriting as more and more of the workload is done?

We haven’t announced any layoffs because of AI, but I keep asking our engineering leads how much of the code is written by AI today.

I think the answer I get is all over the map, depending on which department you ask, but I think it's maybe 30% at this point.

Already?

Yeah, already.

Yeah. Alibaba is an enormous business. It's in so many countries around the world. How do you build a culture? How do you manage just the insanity of having so many employees, so many needs, so many issues? How do you deal with it?

Focus. I came into the chairmanship when I was phasing out and focused on the Brooklyn Nets. Then, about a year and a half ago, I came back into the chairmanship of the company.

The first thing I said was, “We can't talk about our company as being in 6 different businesses.” It's just too confusing. We're in 2 businesses: e-commerce and cloud computing, with an AI element in it. Those are our 2 core businesses, and having that focus was absolutely crucial to get our people and our teams to focus and execute.

Maybe end with just a forecast for the season.

The whole league or just the Brooklyn Nets?

Maybe just the Nets.

Well, I have to say we're in a rebuilding year.

You have a lot of picks.

We've spent all of our picks. We had 5 draft picks this past summer. We have 1 pick in 2026, and we hope to get a good pick. So you can predict what kind of strategy we will use for the season. We have a very young team.

We were talking to Dara on the last panel about how China is a bit different in how it looks at autonomy and self-driving. There are tests going on there, but they also want to make sure that there is tranquility and peace in the country and that people don't lose those jobs—their driver jobs.

What's the climate in China? What do the Chinese working class think when they see self-driving cars and tens of millions of people employed as drivers? There have already been protests in Wuhan, and protests in China are a very rare thing.

Based on what I know—I could be wrong—I have a superficial knowledge. Obviously, you have a deep knowledge. What can you tell us about how the government and the people of China think of this incredible revolution and its impact on jobs?

I think the government is all in on embracing it. In fact, the government just a few weeks ago launched an AI Plus policy, and they say that in 2030, which is 5 years from now, they want to see 90% penetration of AI agents, devices, and things like that in society. That's what the government has publicly and officially said.

Just an all-in.

Just all in. There's really not a lot of talk about AI replacing human jobs. Maybe there are isolated incidents, but in general, there is anxiety about jobs. China graduates about 10 million college graduates every year, and today, if you look at the youth unemployment rate—which is for people between 16 and 24, including graduates—it's 18%. It's actually quite high, so there's a lot of anxiety about that.

Partly, it's because the economy—even though the overall conditions of the Chinese economy are pretty good in terms of infrastructure, access to energy, and all those things—still has a malaise right now. China has gone through the last 4 or 5 years of a property slump. Everybody's average home prices are down about 30%, so there's a very negative wealth effect, and that's still lingering.

Just quickly, is there any fear of AGI in China? You know what I mean by that: out-of-control superintelligence. Is that a fear, or is that just an American thing?

People in government don't talk about it too much because they believe that they could control it better—maybe better than in a society here in the U.S. But there are some lingering fears.

I was just listening to Dario Amodei talk about it. He's predicting 5 to 10 years, but if he's saying 5 to 10 years, I think AGI is probably 20 years from now. It's because the emphasis is on the word “general.” Your AI has to be able to generalize and apply principles to scenarios that you've never seen before.

Right, Joe? Thank you very much.

Great to see you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Pleasure.

Thank you.

Fantastic.

Thank you, brother.