In a new episode of the Second Thought With Suzy Weiss podcast, music impresario Scooter Braun discussed his famous public feud with Taylor Swift and how the fallout from the situation turned him into, as he says on the show, “a villain.”
The situation began in 2019, when Braun bought Swift’s then-six-album catalog for upward of $300 million as part of his acquisition of the Big Machine Label Group, an action that Swift said at the time “stripped me of my life’s work.”
Speaking on the podcast, Braun said that amid the fallout from the ordeal, he went from being “loved and appreciated for over a decade to literally a villain the next night.”
He also shared some perhaps surprising information about his relationship (or lack thereof) with Swift, continuing that while “I don’t want to go into that, I will say something that will really sum it up that I don’t know if I’ve ever really said: I don’t know Taylor Swift. I think I’ve met her in my life three times. I have never had a substantial conversation with her in my life. I, one time, got invited to a private party by her. She told me she had the utmost respect for me. I told her I had the utmost respect for her. You don’t spend $300 million buying a label that she’s on unless you’re excited at the opportunity to work with her. I will never truly understand that situation, to this day. I wish her nothing but the best.”
Continuing, Braun said that the situation was a big lesson and that he learned “a tremendous amount from it. I chose to grow from it. I’m grateful for it at this point in my life. But I think there’s this big misconception that, like, we knew each other and we had this feud and, like, I managed her for years. And people are usually shocked to find out that I legitimately don’t know her and didn’t have many interactions with her and never really knew her.”
“And like I said,” he continued, “I think I met her three times in my life, and I think I spoke to her really once for like more than two minutes. But it was a very nice conversation. And beyond that, nothing ever. And then the three years prior to us buying Big Machine, she and I had no contact. I think it was two years. The party was like two years earlier or three years earlier, and then never had any contact through the whole thing. So I’m just as confused that this is part of my life as you are. But I choose to learn and grow from it.” Watch the full interview below.
After Braun’s acquisition of her albums, Swift famously went about re-recording them, making the “Taylor’s Version” editions of Fearless, Red, Speak Now and 1989. In May 2025, she announced that she was able to buy back the masters to her first six albums, purchasing them from Shamrock Capital nearly five years after the firm first bought them from Braun.
