Is Scooter Braun A Billionaire?
Is Scooter Braun A Billionaire?
Whether you call him Justin Bieber's manager or Taylor Swift's nemesis—or simply an international entertainment mogul—it might be time to call him a billionaire.
Scooter Braun’s first crack at becoming a billionaire came nearly two decades ago. Working as a twentysomething party promoter in Atlanta, he happened upon a promising social network and emailed the founder about investing.
Mark Zuckerberg apparently expressed some interest, but decided Facebook didn’t need the extra cash, and moved forward without a check from Braun.
“I definitely didn’t know how big it was going to become,” Braun told me in 2012, back when I was a staff writer at Forbes. “But it made me feel confident in being aggressive the next time I felt good about something.”
True to his word, Braun spent the next decade wheeling and dealing his way through Hollywood—and beyond—while accumulating a substantial fortune. He invested early in startups from Spotify to Uber, infamously bought and sold Taylor Swift’s catalog, and more recently orchestrated a massive merger with the top company in K-Pop.
Some recent moves, including the $200 million-plus sale of Bieber’s catalog—from which Braun seems to have earned an eight-figure windfall—got me wondering: is Braun now a billionaire? Let’s dig a little deeper.
Braun’s early success with Bieber served as a formidable catalyst for building wealth. Per my estimates for Forbes, the pop star racked up roughly $450 million in pretax earnings throughout the 2010s. Managers typically take home a cut of 10-20%. That meant they both had plenty of cash to plow into startups just as the Web 2.0 boom was beginning.
“Scooter has a team that helps find investments,” Bieber told me in a 2012 cover story. “Usually we work together. If I find something, I bring it to the table.”
Braun made startups a priority, investing directly and via venture funds. He racked up early stakes in Uber, Lyft, Pinterest, Dropbox, Waze and Airbnb, all of which became multibillion-dollar publicly traded companies. The initial investments started small, often with six-figure checks, but the value of Braun’s outlays frequently increased by an order of magnitude or more.
Braun soon broadened his management roster, at various points adding stars from Kanye West to Ariana Grande. That meant more income to invest back into his businesses, which he augmented by teaming up with institutional players. Among them: Waddell & Reed, the Kansas firm from which he raised some $100 million for a management company rollup, and Carlyle Group, a private equity giant that invested in his Ithaca Holdings company.
Just as Braun’s financial engagements were starting to sound a little dull, he swooped in and bought Big Machine Label Group—home to Taylor Swift’s catalog—for $300 million. (The superstar’s music was thought to account for roughly half of that value at the time). Less than 18 months later, Braun flipped Swift’s oeuvre to Shamrock Capital for north of $400 million. The episode resulted in a very public feud with Swift, but also netted Braun a quick centimillion-dollar windfall and a valuable asset: the rest of Big Machine.
By 2021, amid the recent catalog boom, the value of Braun’s holdings had increased so much that South Korean entertainment giant Hybe came calling. The company, home to BTS and others, paid $1.2 billion—80% of it in cash—to bring Braun into the fold and acquire both Ithaca and Big Machine at the peak of the market for music copyrights. According to a source close to the deal, Braun owned a 60% share in the assets at the time of the deal.
After federal and California state capital gains taxes, that appears to have left Braun with some $400 million in fresh cash, along with a swath of stock now worth about $150 million by my calculations. That’s on top of a $100 million after-tax gain from the sale of Swift’s catalog. Braun’s recent divorce revealed more than $100 million in real estate and vehicles (a prenuptial agreement allowed him to keep most of his assets, though he forked over an additional $20 million plus a $30 million home in addition to ongoing support payments).
Add another $25 million or so from the recent sale of Bieber’s catalog, and Braun’s net worth has been sitting just shy of $800 million from those recent megadeals and big-ticket personal property items alone.
Ultimately, the question of whether he’s a billionaire comes down to assets that are tricky to pin down. There’s his art collection, which includes over 100 works by the likes of Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat. There are the payouts he received from his Silicon Valley exits. And there’s cash he stacked as a manager, plus his current startup stakes and other investments. Given what Basquiats and Warhols often sell for, Braun’s art collection alone could be enough to push him into ten-figure territory.
Any discussion of Braun’s fortune tends to lead back to a wider conversation about wealth in America, money and music, management versus labor. And indeed, billionaire or not, he’s richer than Taylor Swift—or anyone he’s ever managed (though Kanye West was worth $2 billion before torpedoing his own net worth with a barrage of hate speech).
Why are we talking about this? Should there even be billionaires? Is any of this fair? These are all very reasonable questions to ask. But, like it or not, the fact is our system does reward management ahead of workers. And returns on capital do outpace returns on labor. To put it another way: money can compound on its own, but concerts and albums cannot.
“Justin Bieber was born with the Superman powers,” Braun once told the New Yorker. “He could sing, he could dance, he could play instruments. I wasn’t born with those gifts, so I had to become a different kind of superhero.”
Braun has played the entertainment game as well as anyone in recent memory. David Geffen blazed a similar trail decades ago, selling his company to MCA for $550 million in 1990—shortly before Matsushita Electric gobbled up the combined entity—and Geffen’s now a billionaire eight times over. Richard Branson, who also started out in music, is worth $3.5 billion.
In recent years, a few musicians have crossed the ten-figure mark themselves. Jay-Z, whose net worth sits at $1.5 billion and counting, got there while managing fellow billionaire Rihanna and collaborating frequently with the aforementioned Kanye West. Diddy, who’s done his own share of management work, recently became a billionaire, too.
None of them have been making much music lately. And maybe that’s worth noting, even as we wish for artists to be paid more like management.
Which brings us back to the original question about one particular manager: Is Scooter Braun a billionaire?
I finally asked him point-blank, on the record, and he declined to comment.
Spoken like a true billionaire.
Zack O’Malley Greenburg is the author of five books, including the Jay-Z biography Empire State of Mind. His work has also appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair and Forbes, where he served as senior editor of media & entertainment for a decade.
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