By: Don Driggers
Brooklyn Nets owner Joe Tsai has been revealed as the mystery buyer who snapped up two full-floor condos on the 60th and 61st floors of a residential skyscraper overlooking Central Park that cost a total of more than $157 million, Daily Mail reported.
Tsai, who is also the founder of Alibaba, in one of the biggest real estate transactions ever, the two units at 220 Central Park South on Manhattan’s Billionaire’s Row through a limited liability company, allowing him to remain anonymous at the time.
Daily Mail reported:
Tsai, 57, has now been revealed as the buyer by people familiar with the deal who spoke with CNBC, the network reported. It is believed he intends to join the two condos.
Last month The Wall Street Journal, citing property records, indicated that the deal included $82.5million for the 5,935-square-foot unit on the 60th floor.
In a separate deal, Tsai also paid $75million for the full-floor unit on the 61st floor as well as a studio apartment on the 18th floor that will be designated for his staff.
The deal comes nearly two years after Tsai–worth an estimated $10.6 billion–paid a staggering $3.38 billion for the Brooklyn Nets NBA team, in a deal that included the Barclays Center, Daily Mail reported.
220 Central Park South alone accounted for the top 22 sales of Manhattan condo buildings in fiscal year 2020, according to 6sqft. The residential skyscraper reported a total of $1.52 billion in cumulative sales in 46 units.
The 70-story building found on 58th Street, which stands at 950 feet tall making it the 17th-tallest building in New York City, was still under construction at the time.
Joseph Tsai was born in Taipei, Taiwan Tsai earned a B.A. in Economics and East Asian studies from Yale College in 1986. In 1990, he earned a J.D. from Yale Law School, where he was articles editor of the Yale Law & Policy Review, Wikipedia summarized
Tsai became a tax associate at the white-shoe law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell after graduation and was admitted as an attorney to the New York bar on 6 May 1991. After three years at the law firm, he switched to private equity and joined Rosecliff, Inc., a small management buyout firm based in New York, as vice president and general counsel. He left for Hong Kong in 1995 to join Investor AB, where he was responsible for its Asian private equity investments, Bloomberg reported.
It was in this role that he first met Jack Ma in 1999 in Hangzhou after being introduced by a friend who was trying to sell his own company to Ma. Tsai was impressed with Ma’s idea to create an international import and export marketplace, as well as his charismatic personality, but it was Ma’s followers and their energy and enthusiasm that ultimately convinced Tsai Later that year he quit the $700,000-a-year job at Investor AB and offered to join Ma as a member of the founding team for Alibaba, Bloomberg reported.
