Scooter Braun Is Finally Quitting His High School Job

Not to be all “in this economy,” but in this economy, it’s rare to see someone hold onto the same job for more than a few years, let alone 23 of them. Scooter Braun, however, has been a music manager for that long, beginning with, according to him, an Atlanta-based rapper called Cato, when Braun was 19.

On Monday, Braun announced in a lengthy statement on his Instagram that he would be retiring from music management. “Along the way I have had so many experiences I could never have dreamt of,” he wrote.

Braun, whose retirement announcement came the day before his 43rd birthday, said in the post that he had been “blessed to have had a Forrest Gump–like life while witnessing and taking part in the journeys of some of the most extraordinarily talented people the world has ever seen.”

Explaining his decision to shift gears, he wrote, “For my entire adult life I played the role of an artist manager on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And for 20 years I loved it. It’s all I had known.”

But hold the phone, didn’t he say he had been a manager for twenty-three years? Yeah, about those last three.

“Over the past two years I have been heading towards this destination, but it wasn’t until last summer that this new chapter became a reality,” he wrote. “One of my biggest clients and friends told me that they wanted to spread their wings and go in a new direction. We had been through so much together over the last decade, but instead of being hurt I saw it as a sign.”

Braun did not name the client specifically, but the dots are not so hard to connect: Ariana Grande fired him as her manager last summer, with Puck reporting that the tipping point came when Grande was going through a very public separation from her husband while Braun was on vacation. One guess on the year Grande signed with him originally, and do not pass go, do not collect $200 if that guess is not 2013. Soon after, reports emerged of Idina Menzel, J Balvin, and Demi Lovato also ditching Braun, not to mention Justin Bieber sniffing around for new management. Taylor Swift fans were also familiar with the name, due to the long-simmering feud between the two over the ownership of her masters and the “incessant, manipulative bullying I’ve received at [Braun’s] hands for years,” as she wrote on Tumblr in 2019. In fact, she has credited his control of the tapes with inspiring her to rerecord her older albums and release the (Taylor’s Version) records. (In response, Braun later said he was “firmly against anyone ever being bullied.”)

Now, in Braun’s words, he’s entering his “father first, a CEO second, and a manager no more” era.