蔡崇信訪談：球隊、馬雲、阿里巴巴、TikTok、AI、中美競爭...｜Joe Tsai: Alibaba,, Jack Ma, Tiktok, AI, Us-China Competition...

Nice to see you, how are you? Good to see you, good to see you David.

And the New York Liberty, exactly. It's not easy running a team, is it?

Not easy at all, not easy at all, because a basketball — any professional team is both a business and also it's an institution. You need to keep the fan base happy, so there's sort of this church and state element.

Caitlin Clark definitely had an effect on the WNBA. All the metrics went up. So this was last season, right? When she first came into the league from college. And we've seen all of our metrics from viewership, ticket sales, sponsorship — everything went up like almost 4x.

4x, right? I mean that's incredible. So the economic impact that she's made to the league is extraordinary, undeniable. But because of who she is, you know, she's a little bit of a different kind of player. You know, she is a point guard, she's a smaller player. The knock on her was — was she gonna be able to withstand 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? You know, she has this rivalry with Angel Reese that dated back to college. But some people would like to pit it as a kind of a racial thing, or is it a, you know, 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. I mean, the rookie of the year potential candidate is Sonia Citron. Have you ever heard of her before she came into the league? I mean, no. She I think she just broke the record for the highest three-point shooting percentage in the league. So, you know, you see tremendous amount of talent. And I think — you ask what have they done right. I don't — I think it's a matter of just a confluence of good things coming into the league.

I think she's a — I have an observation about this. And you and I are old school basketball heads, you know, watching — having watched the 80s and 90s, and Patrick Ewing and Charles Barkley. It's more physical, they're tougher in the WNBA. And every time LeBron goes up and he gets flopping all over — it's a foul, it's a foul.

The NBA product is great. I don't think it's fair to compare whether the men's league is more — less physical than the women's league or one or the other. I mean, they're both very physical. I mean, if you are sitting there on the floor, you are watching physicality. Sure. And also athleticism, right? But the game has — you know, the NBA has this committee called the competition committee. So I got put on the competition committee. They call me and they say, 'Joe, we want you to be on the competition committee.' It's about rules, about, you know, like what is the transition take foul. So the committee is every season they make these tweak changes, they make changes to the refereeing to make the product better. I mean, when I got the call, I'm like, 'You want me to sit on the committee with Jason Kidd, Chris Paul, and Coach K?' Like, what do I know about basketball, right, that can really be smarter than them? But what I've seen is — I've said 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 if you change the three-point line, that is a product decision. Absolutely. It's not a competition. I don't think so. When you watch the Boston Celtics throw up 40 threes in a game, you think it's a good product? I think it's a great product, because there are 18 different ways you can throw up 40 threes in a game.

I was just mesmerized by Jack's personality. Every people see the public side of Jack, which is very charismatic. But what I saw was he was able to instill faith in people. I mean, he had a — when I walked into his apartment, there were like 12 to 15 sort of very young people, roughly, you know, students that were just coming out of college. And Jack was kind of the teacher that's 10 years older. And he's able to communicate, he's able to paint a very strong vision. That was the part that I really signed on to. His ability to lead is an amazing ability. And you know, he's a teacher by training. He taught at the Hangzhou University. He taught English actually. You know, 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 gonna do really well.' So they write a recommendation, they do whatever. And also, teachers have enough humility that they're very happy if their students go off and then they come back and become more successful than they are. And in building a company, you need to be able to accommodate all sorts of people that are smarter than you are. And that's really important.

Alibaba has been around for 26 years. I would say the first 15 years were — it was a complete free market kind of, you know, way of growth. And we built a lot of businesses organically. And then we went into a phase where there was extreme competition. Everybody wanted to do e-commerce. Why? It's because if you have traffic online, e-commerce was the best way to monetize your traffic. And today, in today's market, we have five or six 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. So there's a — you go through a period of extreme competition. And then the government felt that this sector has gotten out of line a little bit. First, there's too much competition. And then there are some platforms that have exhibited monopolistic behavior. So then there was a — you know, people may call it a crackdown, whatever. More regulations came in. Regulations. Some of the regulations are very good actually. They protected privacy, anti-monopoly type regulation. And now we kind of 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, where not to go. And it's actually made a better operating environment because of the predictability of it.

I don't agree with that view of the world.

Yeah. I mean, look, I think — I could understand why sitting here in America, you look at the rise of China over the last 20 years, 25 years. China has become strong in terms of manufacturing, that's why such an export juggernaut it has become, because of the economic development. China has become a technology juggernaut as well. And the fear is, well, all that stuff — economic strength and technology strength — is gonna flow into military strength. And that becomes kind of a national security issue. I understand that. I get it. But I think it's — I think these are the two largest economies in the world. And I think you just need to take a step back and say, well, yeah, on the one hand we should compete with China, right? That's fine. Our hyperscaler companies compete with the Chinese internet companies globally. But then on the other hand, there are just so many trouble spots in the world. What did President Trump say? That he stopped seven wars, right? Okay, well, China has didn't start any of them. China has not started a war in the last — how many years, you know — 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. So in a way, China — you know, if you observe the behavior of the Chinese people and the Chinese state, it's a very peaceful nation. China cares about its own economic development. They care about the well-being of its citizens. And I think there is a lot of friction in the course of competition, where China feels that the United States is trying to contain China and stop the rise of China economically, just speaking about the welfare of its citizens.

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