In 2006, two years before he signed Justin Bieber and 12 years before Georgia implemented hands-free phone laws for motorists, Scooter Braun was juggling multiple cellular devices from behind the wheel of a purple Mercedes in Atlanta. The 23-year-old was fielding calls from venues and celebrity publicists, having forged a reputation for himself as a well-connected party promoter – an image he was trying to shed in front of the local reporter who was in the car profiling him. Then Braun was pulled over and ticketed for not wearing his seatbelt.
Braun had bought the Mercedes in an example of “faking it til you make it,” Ludacris’ longtime manager, Chaka Zulu, told the same reporter for that 2006 profile in Creative Loafing. It seemed to do the trick. Braun was well on his way to making it; within a few short years, he’d signed Justin Bieber and launched that subsequent career machine, soon branching out into other media, businesses and investments as his stable of artists expanded to include other megastars such as Ariana Grande and Demi Lovato, whom he signed in 2013 and 2019, respectively.
