Now that Taylor Swift has bought back the masters to her first six albums, Scooter Braun is reflecting on his part in the yearslong back-and-forth he ignited by purchasing the singer’s catalog from Scott Borchetta back in 2019.
While speaking about the feud during an episode of The Diary of a CEO posted Monday (June 9), the music mogul began by sharing how he’d originally had high hopes for his relationship with the “Fortnight” singer after he bought Big Machine Label Group from Borchetta for a reported $300 million six years ago, gaining ownership of Swift’s back catalog in the process. Shortly afterward, the pop star shared a Tumblr post calling the sale her “worst case scenario,” accusing Braun of “incessant, manipulative bullying” over the years and included a screenshot of a post from Justin Bieber featuring Braun and Kanye West with the caption “Taylor swift what’s up.”
Braun says that he was “shocked” when he read Swift’s post. “When I bought Big Machine, I thought I was going to work with all the artists on Big Machine,” Braun recalled on the podcast. “[Taylor] and I had only met three or four times. One of the times, it was years earlier, it was really a great engagement. She invited me to her party. We respected each other.”
“In between that time since I’d seen her last, I started managing Kanye West,” he continued. “I managed Justin Bieber. I knew she didn’t get along with them. This is where my arrogance came in. I had a feeling she probably didn’t like me because I managed them, but I thought once this announcement happened, she’d talk to me, see who I am, and we’d work together. Then this Tumblr comes out, and it says all of this stuff, and I was just shocked.”
The involved parties would spend the next few weeks disputing details of how the deal went down — including whether or not Swift found out about the purchase only as it was publicly announced, which she claimed in her post — with Braun later writing in an open letter of his own that he was “disappointed” in the 14-time Grammy winner for having “remained silent” despite his family receiving “numerous death threats” amid the debacle. Swift would later announce plans to re-record her old albums, while the retired manager eventually sold her catalog again to Shamrock Holdings.
“I couldn’t fix the relationship that I didn’t have, but then I was able to figure out, ‘You know what? We’ll sell it,’” Braun said of selling to Shamrock on The Diary of a CEO. “In the world of streaming, the re-records will only help the old catalog as much as they help the new catalog. Both will get a bump. I showed how everyone can be a winner here, and I was able to sell the catalog and — I don’t want to go into too much detail, but it’s now come out very factually that I did offer it [to Taylor] … multiple times in that process. They said no, I sold to someone else, washed my hands of it and moved on.”
Swift has also previously addressed Braun’s alleged offers to sell her catalog back to her, though she recalls it much differently. According to the “Karma” artist, his team had asked her to sign a non-disclosure agreement before she could even “bid on [her] own work.”
“He would never even quote my team a price,” Swift wrote in a post on X at the time. “These master recordings were not for sale to me.”
Billboard has reached out to Swift’s rep for comment.
In any case, the musician walked away from negotiations and hammered away at her Taylor’s Version re-recording project, releasing highly successful new versions of Fearless, Speak Now, Red and 1989 between 2021 and 2023. Everything came full circle at the end of May 2025, when Swift announced that she’d finally been able to acquire her old catalog from Shamrock, about which Braun told Billboard at the time, “I am happy for her.”
On the podcast, Braun reiterated that he only hopes for the best for Swift. “I can’t worry about everyone’s niece being mad at me,” he quipped. “What I gotta do is show up for my niece, and I gotta show up for my friends and my family. I wish everyone involved, across the board, whether I know them or not, good wishes.”
Even so, the businessman confessed that the fallout was hard on his mental health and personal life, especially as he was going through a tough time with then-wife Yael Cohen that would eventually lead to a divorce. “When something happens to you that feels deeply unfair, and you can’t fix it, then you’ve really got to look at everything and realize the role you played in this or that, who you want to be,” Braun said of his disagreement with Swift.
“Everything in life is a gift,” he added. “Having that experience allows me to have empathy for people I worked with. I never knew what it was like to be on the global stage like that. I never knew what criticism like that felt like.”
Watch Braun’s full interview on The Diary of a CEO above.
