Scooter Braun is once again addressing his feud with Taylor Swift.
While speaking to Danielle Robay on the Thursday (July 17) episode of her Question Everything podcast, the former music manager opened up about the misunderstandings he thinks took place in his famous feud with the pop star before addressing whether her song “Vigilante Shit” is about him. When the topic of his conflict with Swift — which sprung out of Braun acquiring her catalog in his 2019 purchase of Big Machine Records — first came up, the businessman said frankly, “I think going backwards and revisiting this is a waste of time.”
Even so, Braun went on to rehash his perspective on what transpired with Swift, who was outspoken in her opposition to the SB Projects founder’s purchase of her masters from the start. At the time, she accused him of “incessant, manipulative bullying” in a Tumblr post, and when Braun later sold Swift’s catalog to Shamrock Holdings in 2020, the 14-time Grammy winner claimed that he “would never even quote my team a price” without her first signing an NDA, which Swift refused.
“The only thing I didn’t appreciate is it was so public without an understanding of what was actually going on,” Braun reflected in the interview. “When Taylor says that she wasn’t offered the masters, the reason I was under NDA was because we were in negotiations to sell it back to her. I just choose to believe her that maybe [her team] didn’t tell her.”
“For me, the only thing that I really regret is that it’s easy to [see someone as] a monster if you never meet them,” he continued. “Taylor and I have only met three times in our life. I think at that point we hadn’t seen each other in two, three years. I was managing people she wasn’t a fan of, and she probably saw my name come up and was like, ‘I don’t like those people, so I don’t like him.’ But we never had an opportunity to sit in front of each other and have a conversation, to this day.”
At the time of the catalog purchase, Braun — who has since retired from management — represented Justin Bieber and Kanye West, both of whom Swift has clashed with in the past. In her 2019 Tumblr post responding to the initial sale of her masters, she shared a screenshot of an Instagram post from Bieber featuring Braun and West with the caption, “Taylor swift what’s up.”
Though he wishes things had played out differently, Braun says he’s still heartened by the fact that “everyone in the end won.”
“When [Swift] turned it down, we ended up selling it to someone else, because she didn’t want us to have it,” he told Robay. “We did very well in that sale, because we bought it at a really great price, and the value of the masters went up.”
Billboard has reached out to Swift’s rep for comment.
As Braun pointed out, the value of the musician’s old catalog heightened as she embarked on her Taylor’s Version series, re-recording four of her first six albums to reclaim ownership of her work. The project manifested in the record-breaking success of her Eras Tour, which led to her becoming a billionaire and eventually having the chance to finally purchase her masters from Shamrock this past May.
“She did incredibly well and basically had the biggest moment of her career,” Braun praised Swift, calling her the “biggest artist of all time.” “It was brilliant on her part. But also, each time she released [a re-recorded album], you saw a spike in the original catalog, and that’s how we were able to tell, ‘OK, if she doesn’t want them, this is still a really great asset.’”
That said, Swift seemingly hasn’t softened in her opinions on Braun since the beginning of their feud. In her December 2023 TIME Person of the Year interview, she doubled down on her stance that the mogul wanted her catalog for “nefarious reasons” — something he said on Question Everything doesn’t make “any sense” from a “financial standpoint” — and fans have long assumed that Swift has written about the situation on songs such as Folklore‘s “My Tears Ricochet” and Evermore‘s “It’s Time to Go.”
As for one such song — “Vigilante Shit,” on which Swift sings, “Picture me thick as thieves with your ex-wife” — Braun laughed when asked whether he thinks it’s about him. The entrepreneur was previously married to Yael Cohen, but he filed for divorce in 2021.
“No, ’cause I talk to Yael every day,” Braun told Robay, brushing off the possibility of his marriage inspiring the Midnights track. “My ex-wife is one of my best friends. Me and my ex-wife laugh about that stuff — we don’t even call each other ‘ex.’ That’s like my partner. That’s the mother of my children. That is my family for life. So no, I never thought that was about us. Great strategy move, but nah.”
Watch Braun’s full interview on Question Everything above.
