Scooter Braun Faces Multimillion-Dollar Lawsuit After Private Equity Deal Goes Sour

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Photo Credit: TCDisrupt / CC by 2.0

Scooter Braun is facing a multimillion-dollar lawsuit from former Guggenheim higher-up Peter Comisar, who was allegedly convinced by Braun to trade his lucrative post for a position at a new investment firm – only to see Braun fail to attract the purportedly promised high-profile backers and cease bankrolling the operation.

Peter Comisar, who spent a total of nearly three decades at Goldman and Guggenheim, just recently filed the complaint against Scooter Braun, who sold Taylor Swift’s catalog after only 16 months (in a more than $300 million deal) in November of 2020.

The action appears straightforward enough, as the plaintiff alleges early on in the filing that Braun had “aggressively” attempted to hire him between 2016 and 2017, to establish and lead a firm called “SCOPE Capital Management” alongside business manager and NKSFB, LLC partner David Bolno.

Comisar ultimately believed that Braun – and the financial support that he allegedly promised to secure from the likes of Jimmy Iovine, the Soros family, and others – was the “real deal,” the text discloses. As an aside, Taylor Swift in April of 2020 took aim at a live-performance album that Big Machine Records released without her prior knowledge, including by criticizing “Scooter Braun and his financial backers,” with “Alex Soros and the Soros family” among them.

Accordingly, Comisar departed Guggenheim after a little over eight years on the job, per his LinkedIn profile, and joined Scope as CEO in April of 2017. And besides setting a multimillion-dollar annual operating budget and salary for Scope and Comisar for three years, respectively, Braun relayed that he could raise north of half a billion dollars from the aforementioned “friends,” the plaintiff claims.

Eventually, though, “Braun had to explain to Comisar, tail between his legs, how he had asked David Geffen, his supposed Godfather, to invest in Scope, only to be told by Geffen that he did not view Braun as someone with whom Geffen would invest,” the suit states.

And as the other deep-pocketed acquaintances that Braun name-dropped when wooing Comisar also opted not to write checks to Scope, per the lawsuit, the plaintiff maintains that “the truth was that Braun’s relations valued him as someone to socialize with,” as opposed to someone who they would entrust with millions in capital.

Lastly, the complaint also alleges that Braun was at the same time working to secure an investment from the Carlyle Group on behalf of his Ithaca Holdings, which BTS agency Hybe bought for over $1 billion in April. (Carlyle Group higher-ups cashed out of their Ithaca stake as well.)

Comisar ceased receiving Scope paychecks around April of 2018 (well before the aforementioned three-year contract was to conclude), the lawsuit indicates, and departed the company in August of 2018, signing on as CEO of STORY3 Capital Partners that same month, according to his LinkedIn profile. In a stark contrast to most other defendants in newly filed lawsuits, Scooter Braun this afternoon appeared to fire back against the complaint on social media.

“One day I woke up to find out that a guy who took $5 million from us years ago with zero results has now read a headline of our success and has shown up out of the blue to ask for more money. Got to love a good opportunist. Unfortunately we don’t scare easy. Wish him well,” penned the 39-year-old. “Now back to reality…” a follow-up tweet reads.