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BOSTON — A month after Bill Chisholm won the $6.1 billion bidding war for the Celtics, he was vetting investors who wanted in on his new ownership group.
“It’s the Celtics, and you can sort of pick and choose who you want,” Chisholm told Front Office Sports. “And we were oversubscribed.”
One of the people who wanted in was young enough to be the new owner’s son. Chisholm had never met Mario Ho, then 30, and was more than 25 years older than him. He had enough co-owners to round out the group, but he wanted to talk to the entrepreneur anyway.
Ho won Chisholm over on a Zoom call and wound up in the ownership group when it was announced in August. He is among the youngest people to own any stake in an NBA team—four years younger than Robert Pera, the Grizzlies owner who bought the team in 2012 when he was 34.
Ho is from a family wealthy enough to buy its own franchise, but he says the Celtics are the only team he currently wants to be involved with. Ho, now 31, sold Chisholm on making the Celtics more international, and that’s his main priority—for now.
Celtic Pride
The youngest son of Chinese casino tycoon Stanley Ho, Mario was raised in Macao, China, where his family had 19 casinos in the city. He came to the United States in 2013 to attend MIT. In 2024, Bloomberg estimated his family’s fortune to be $13 billion.
Ho didn’t watch much basketball growing up but is old enough to remember the impact Yao Ming had during his nine-year NBA career, when he served as the bridge between the league and China.
“Yao Ming’s influence is all over the place,” Ho told FOS.
His basketball fandom grew when he got to college. While at MIT, Ho attended numerous Celtics games, becoming a fan of the post–Big Three team featuring Isaiah Thomas, Marcus Smart, Jared Sullinger, and Jae Crowder. He’s been hooked ever since.
A year after graduating from MIT, Ho launched ESVF Esports Group in 2018 and merged it with Swedish esports company Ninjas in Pyjamas to form NIP Group in January 2023. The company went public in 2024 in a deal that valued Ho’s NIP stake at $69 million.
After Chisholm won the bid in March 2025, Ho began reaching out to his business contacts to find a way to get in front of the future Celtics owner.
“A lot of people in the investment world, a lot of people on Wall Street knew that I wanted to get in the deal,” Ho said.
In their meeting, Chisholm said Ho impressed him with his humility and his selling point of growing the Celtics brand in Asia. Ho told Chisholm that the Celtics have roughly 25 million fans in China and that “I can probably raise that number.”
“What can I do to help?” Chisholm recalled Ho repeatedly asking him.
Chisholm is from Massachusetts and has an “encyclopedic knowledge” of the Celtics franchise, according to The Boston Globe. Ho impressed Chisholm with his own grasp of Celtics history.
“That was a bit of a criteria,” Chisholm says. “Is this a passion project? Is he gonna align with me and the other owners? Or is this a financial transaction? He’s a student of the game and the Celtics and obviously [had] been to a lot of games. He can hang on that front, which I was really impressed by.”
Ho declined to say how big his stake in the Celtics is or how much he paid for it.
Chisholm says Ho’s age was never a concern to him, but it was a curiosity.
“Age in and of itself doesn’t matter to me,” Chisholm says. “It’s more of if it somehow correlates to other things that may matter.”
A lack of maturity and worldliness were among Chisholm’s concerns about having a younger owner within his group. But he also considered the positives, such as energy level, perspective, and enthusiasm.
“The challenges that might exist weren’t there,” Chisholm says of Ho.
Global Game
Ho has 259,000 followers on Instagram, which Chisholm says is another advantage.
“The credibility he has in China and the credibility he has as a Celtics fan is pretty unique,” Chisholm says.
Ho’s focus since August has been the international development of the Celtics. Chisholm says Ho has talked with the Celtics’ business team about ways to better serve the Chinese market, whether it be through marketing or merchandise, and to make games more accessible in China. NBA regular-season games are primarily available in the country via the Tencent Sports and Migu streaming services.
The Celtics are already among the league’s strongest teams in China. The team ranks third among NBA teams in terms of merchandise sales, according to the league. But Ho still sees room for growth.
Expanding the Footprint
Perhaps the easiest way to expand Celtics fandom in China is the simplest: Have them play there.
After then–Rockets GM Daryl Morey tweeted his support of the Hong Kong protests in October 2019, the fallout from the incident led to the suspension of NBA games in China and on its airwaves for years, despite the country having the league’s largest international fan base outside of the U.S.
The Nets were a natural team to lead the NBA back to China last year. They are owned by Joe Tsai, the cofounder of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group. When the Nets played the Suns in Macao, Ho spent time with Tsai and Nets co-owner Ollie Weisberg.
The Celtics are not next in the NBA’s China rotation. The Rockets and Mavericks will play in the NBA’s 2026 Macao games at The Venetian Arena, which is owned by the gambling company Sands. The Adelson family owns Sands and the Mavericks, and team governor Patrick Dumont is the CEO of Sands. The Rockets remain a popular team in China because of Ming’s nine-year career with the organization.
But it seems inevitable that the Celtics will be in a future Macao game, given Ho’s ties to the area and goals to grow the franchise’s footprint in China.
Ho is the second Asian-born owner of an NBA team, with Tsai being the first. Ho says meeting Tsai and Ming at the Asian University Basketball League games in Hangzhou in August made him feel like an official member of the NBA owners club.
Weisberg has known Ho’s family for years through a decades-long friendship with one of his older half-brothers, Lawrence.
“He’s an impressive, young entrepreneur,” Weisberg, a Nets minority owner, told FOS. “He’s very authentic. He’s got grit. I think he’s going to be an incredible contributor to [Chisholm’s] ownership group.”
Given his age, Ho has plenty of time to explore ownership with other teams and leagues. But he doesn’t think he will.
For now, his focus is singular: expanding the Celtics’ global footprint, especially in China. “No other team will I feel the same as the Celtics,” Ho says.
