Scooter Braun, CEO and board member of HYBE America and Founder of SB Projects, is a leading entrepreneur, disrupter and innovator in entertainment, music, tech industries and beyond. Braun is also a dedicated philanthropist, serving personally on the board of numerous charitable organizations and remains committed to SB Projects’ founding philosophy of giving back.
Braun is the Founder and Chairman of Ithaca Holdings LLC., now a part of the HYBE America portfolio, a wholly owned subsidiary of HYBE, a South Korean entertainment lifestyle platform company. Ithaca Holdings LLC is a fully integrated holding company which invests in some of the largest management, media, and rights companies in the industry. The company has built an elite portfolio of acquisitions and partnerships including Big Machine Label Group, Mythos Studios with Marvel Founding ChairmanDavid Maisel, unscripted content studio GoodStory Entertainment with JD Roth, the acquisition of Atlas Publishing and partnerships with management companies including Jason Owen’s Sandbox Entertainment, Morris Higham Management as well as a long-standing partnership with Aubrey ‘Drake’Graham and Adel ‘Future’ Nur. Ithaca also launched Raised in Space, an investment fund focused on the intersection of music and technology led by former BMG President Zach Katz. Braun is also co-founder of TQ Ventures, a leading investment firm focused on early-stage and growth-stage companies, with Schuster Tanger and Andrew Marks.
In 2007, Braun launched SB Projects, a diversified entertainment and media company housed by IthacaHoldings with ventures at the junction of music, film, television, technology, brands, culture and social good. Today, Braun has a roster of the top pop culture icons under his management, record label and publishing companies that include Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande, Demi Lovato, The Kid LAROI, Idina Menzel, and Tori Kelly, to name a few. Braun has broken more new artists than any other music executive in the last decade and by establishing Ithaca Holdings, expanded both his and SB Projects’ reach even further.
SB Projects has grown their film and television division to include a prolific slate of projects including the FX Network’s most watched comedy series “Dave,” YouTube’s record breaking docuseries “Justin Bieber: Seasons,” CBS’s “Scorpion,” Ariana Grande feature documentary “Excuse Me, I Love You” with Netflix,“Never Say Never,” which remains the highest grossing music documentary in domestic box-office history and most recently, YouTube’s critically acclaimed four part docuseries “Demi Lovato: Dancing With The Devil”. Recently SB Projects announced the pick-up of scripted comedy NEON at Netflix for an eight-episode first season. The company also renewed a multi-year, first-look television deal withAmazon Studios to develop scripted and unscripted projects and has many projects in active development including Neon Machine from creator Jason Kim, the film Tuna Melt from Eddie Huang starring SZA and Chloe Cherry, Phantom written by Academy Award-nominated Anthony McCarten (“Bohemian Rhapsody”), an Untitled Lady Macbeth Musical with Channing Tatum’s Free Association for Amazon Studios, and an untitled K-Pop film for 20th Century Studios along with a variety of others.
SB Projects has a number of investments under its tech incubator Silent Labs and Braun personally impacts new verticals through his own investments which include Uber, Spotify, Songza, Casper, Waze, Dropbox, Pinterest, Coupang, Grab and many others.
Braun remains committed to his company’s founding philosophy of giving back and designs a philanthropic element for each new initiative. Braun serves as chair of the advisory board of Pencils of Promise, a global education non-profit, and supports Fuck Cancer, an organization focused on prevention and early detection of cancer. Braun, his clients, and his companies have–together–granted over 575 wishes for Make-A-Wish. In 2017, Braun proved to be the music industry’s “first-responder” when he organized the “One Love Manchester” benefit concert and “Hand in Hand: A Benefit for Hurricane Relief” telethon, within just months of one another. In 2018, Braun also worked with the founders of March for Our Lives to execute one of the biggest youth-led rallies in U.S. history. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, SB Projects with clients Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande launched charity single “Stuck with U,” with all net proceeds from streams and sales going to First Responders Children’s Foundation. “Stuck with U,” which marked the first of many charitable singles from the SB Projects roster, debuted at number one on Billboard’s Hot 100 Chart.
Braun lives in Los Angeles with his three children.