Early Childhood & Education
Scott Samuel Braun was born on June 18,1981 in New York City to Conservative Jewish parents.
His father name is Ervin Braun while his Mother is and Susan (née Schlussel) Braun.
Ervin’s parents “had barely escaped” the Holocaust, and lived in Hungary until 1956. Shortly before the Soviet Union intervened to suppress the Hungarian Revolution, they fled to the United States.
Ervin grew up in Queens, and a professional Dentist while Susan Schlussel Braun was an Orthodontist. The couple relocated to Greenwich, Connecticut after they married.
Braun has four siblings: Liza, Cornelio, Sam, and Adam. Adam Braun is the founder of Pencils of Promise, a charitable organisation focused on building schools in the developing world.
Braun grew up in Cos Cob, Connecticut and attended Greenwich High School where he was elected Class President.
He played basketball from age 13 to 18 in the Amateur Athletic Union with the Connecticut Flame.
Scooter Braun’s real name is Scott. His name was accidentally changed at a birthday party when a paid entertainer mistakenly called him Scooter. Even though he resented the name, his friends insisted on calling him Scooter including his brother.
When Braun was 17, his parents adopted Sam Mahanga and Cornelio Giubunda, former members of the Mozambique junior-national team.
Without a team at the time because of an athletic-basketball program that had soured, Ervin Braun recruited them for an all-star tournament.
Mahanga and Giubunda became stars in the Greenwich High basketball team despite being dismissed by fans–an experience that affected the Braun in no small measure later in life.
While at Greenwich High School Braun entered a video-documentary contest for National History Day with a 10-minute piece titled The Hungarian Conflict about Jews in Hungary before, during, and after the Holocaust.
The film won in regional and state competitions and then placed third overall.
A member of Braun’s family sent the film to Director, Steven Spielberg‘s office, who, in turn, submitted Braun’s video to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Braun recalled years later that Spielberg’s affirmation was one of the most inspirational moments in his life.Braun went to college at Emory University in Atlanta where he also played college basketball until his sophomore year.
Career & Growth
Braun began his career by organising parties while studying at Emory University in Atlanta.
In 2002, Braun was hired to plan after-parties in each of the five cities on the Anger Management Tour, featuring Ludacris and Eminem.
This launch into the world of hip-hop led Braun to meet producer Jermaine Dupri, the founder of So So Def Records.
Whiele he is still in his sophomore year at Emory, Braun was working at So So Def and operating his party promotion business. Months after Dupri asked him to become the Head of Marketing at his label, So So Def, Braun eventually dropped out of university without a Degree.
Some of his successful, larger events included parties for the 2003 NBA All-Star Game and after-parties on Britney Spears’ Onyx Hotel Tour.
Braun first encountered Justin Bieber when he saw a video of a 12-year-old Bieber on YouTube, performing a song by Ne-Yo. Braun contacted Bieber’s mother, Pattie Mallette, who agreed to bring her son to Atlanta for a no-strings-attached trial period.
Eventually, Braun convinced them to relocate fully from Canada to the United States. After further online success, Braun pitched Bieber to two successful artists, Usher and Justin Timberlake and surprisingly both showed interest in the 12-year-old artiste.
At the end of the day, Usher’s mentor, music executive L. A. Reid, signed Bieber to a deal with Island Def Jam in partnership with Raymond-Braun Media Group (RBMG).
Achievements
Braun was just 19 years old when Jermain Dupri asked him to join So So Def Records, he advised him that he had a bright future in the industry, and he was going to learn the rope at So So Def.
“He told me that he didn’t want me involved in his parties,” Braun says. “He said I had more to offer than just parties. He wanted me doing his marketing, his business.”
By the time he was 20, Braun became Executive Director of Marketing for So So Def Records. He left the company after a stint of about a year and a half with the record label.
In 2006, few weeks after Braun left So So Def to focus fully on his side hustle of running his own Marketing Agency, Braun brokered a $12 million campaign deal between Ludacris and Pontiac. The deal was considered very huge at the time. Hip-hop stars traditionally haven’t had much luck landing big endorsement packages because of their Thug image.
The deal was especially unique in that just two years earlier, Bill O’Reilly of Fox News set up a campaign to boycott Pepsi for engaging Ludacris as the face of its Advertising campaign.
Braun was able to convince Pontiac that the O’Reilly factor shouldn’t dissuade them from jumping in bed with Ludacris.
Braun told Pontiac representatives, “You guys need a younger audience.” Ludacris has a song called “Two Miles an Hour,” and Braun says he convinced Pontiac to do a deal where their cars were featured in the song’s music video, and the song was featured in their commercials.
Scooter Braun clients are an easy target to a number of accolades including Billboard and Grammy Awards. He has an eagle view to evaluate the potential of a person into investment in the glamour world.
Scooter Braun clients include Ariana Grande, Black Eyed Peas, CL, Dan+ Shay, Carly Rae Jepsen, Justin Bieber, Karlie Kloss, Lil Dicky, Justin Bieber, Rixton, Psy, Martin Garrix, Kanye West many more.
In 2013, he is one of the entertainment industry’s biggest power brokers, was named one of Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in the World”, headlined Billboard’s “40 Under 40” the same year, and was named one of Fast Company’s “100 Most Creative People in Business” in 2014.
In 2018, The New York Times reported that Braun has partnered David Maisel, founding chairman of Marvel Studios, to establish Mythos Studios to produce comic-book movie franchises in live-action and animated formats.
In late 2018, Braun invested in 100 THIEVES, a large e-sports organisation, as it went through series A funding.
The co-owner position of 100 Thieves was between Audrey Drake Graham and founding CEO Matt “Nadeshot” Haag and him. His networth is about 50 million dollars in 2018.
Downs
In his junior year, with his grades slipping from spending too much time travelling organising parties for celebrities across the states and not enough time in class, Braun decided to drop out of Emory.
His father, Ervin Braun who is a cosmetic dentist, says he was unhappy with the fact that his son dropped out of College organizing gigs.
“To say I was disappointed is an understatement,”
“I went to four years of college and four years of dental school and four years of training. So him dropping out was difficult for me to accept.” But he says he also realised that Braun had a unique opportunity.
In 2013, When the career of Justin Beiber was threatened, Beiber was practically falling from grace where it was rumored that the teen idol was having serious problems with alcohol and prescription drugs and a string of arrests for vandalism, driving offenses and assaults.
It should have been the stuff of career-ending disaster. But the artiste managed to pull through with support from SB Project team. Bieber is, clean, sober and a bigger star than ever, thanks not just to the exceptionally well-made 2015 album, Purpose, but also to a public rehabilitation that Braun says he began planning the moment Bieber “looked me in the eye and said: ‘I’m making a change.’”
Braun do not wish to remember what went wrong in the first place, other than to say that he thought Bieber might die.
“I was not going to give up on him, I was not going to let him die, I was not going to put him in that position of: ‘Oh, let’s just keep him working.’”
Although he acknowledged Bieber’s recent born-again Christianity may affect his popularity, he says he isn’t worried.
“At the end of the day, I would choose this result over what I was dealing with, a thousand times over,” says Braun. He thinks for a moment. “The best thing that happened to Justin Beiber is that he found God.”
“He was able to remove himself from being worshiped, and realise he’s in service to others. Because I don’t think human beings are built to be worshiped.”
In June 2017, After Ariana Grande’s concert at the Manchester Arena in Manchester, England, on May 22, a suicide bomber detonated an explosive in the foyer of the arena, causing 23 fatalities and hundreds of injuries.
Scooter Braun and his team suspended the tour until June 7 and held a televised benefit concert, One Manchester Concert, on June 4 at the Old Trafford Cricket Ground in Manchester, helping to raise $23 million to aid the bombing victims and affected families.
Braun proved to be the music industry’s ‘first-responder’ when he organises the One Love Manchester benefit concert as after the terrorist bombing at Grande’s Manchester Arena gig last year.
Although he later admits his initial reaction was initially prompted by anger.
“I wanted to fight back. My grandparents are Holocaust survivors, so I have known that kind of evil exists my whole life. I’ve been waiting for it to come my way for my whole life, and my initial reaction was: ‘You’ve fucked with the wrong person.’”
He arranged for Grande to see a therapist and pulled together the star-studded One Love Manchester benefit concert in 12 days, calling in favours from everyone including Justin Beiber, Katty Perry, Chris Martin, to the footballer Robbie Keane and other artists.
In April 2018, his relationship with his most controversial artist, Kanye West was threatened when Kanye West went on Twitter to announced to the world that he no longer has a Manager and that he cannot be managed.
Although he is back on, after a “rough” couple of weeks in which West fired him, apparently enraged at Braun’s refusal to get rid of all his other clients and work solely with him.
A “manic moment”, suggests Braun, brought on by the rapper’s bipolar disorder. West subsequently “called me up and said:
‘We’ve had a great thing for the last couple of years. And in the last two weeks, I think, a lot of things have got out of hand, and we’re brothers – come help.’ I really do love the guy.”
“We’ll see how long it lasts, but I’ll always be a friend to him. We’re not going to use the word ‘manager’ – it’s not a word that he likes, nor does it really describe our relationship. I see myself as an adviser and a partner in his efforts.”
Braun’s stock is more buoyant than ever, in part because he has shown a remarkable capacity for turning tragedy into triumph.
He says that “doubt and disrespect” remain his motivation.
He has an eidetic imagery for almost all the events or people that has ever offended him, from a kid at school who disrespected his father to a basketball coach who is now in jail, from Piers Morgan who accused Ariana Grande of “running away” when she returned to Florida after the Manchester bombing), to rock manager Peter Mensch, who announced that Bieber’s drink-and drug travails didn’t matter because “no one’s going to remember his name in three years anyway”.
“And that was four years ago,” in dish-best-served-cold style. “Or five, I believe, at this point.”He says.
Future
In 2017, it was reported that the Democrats had approached him about running for governor of California.
He was,“ getting pressured to do so at certain points”, but thinks he would be better off “doing good work in the private sector”. He says.
“I think I still have unfinished business on the business side of my life,” “If I were to go into a public-office position, I would want to remove myself completely from the business world.”He says.
Still, he thinks management may have primed him for politics. “In politics, you’re representing your constituency, and you have to listen to opinions that you might find to be irrational.
“And, in doing my job as a manager, I have learned how to humble myself to have conversations with people who at times I find irrational, and come to common ground or get them to see the light, or hear what they’re saying.”
Management has taught me that if you don’t like something, you don’t strike it down: you respect it, and you have a conversation with that person.”
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