https://twitter.com/SaysSimonson/status/1016399881680846856?s=19

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4301771&forum_id=2#38524343)

https://youtu.be/8KGgaTzMRMM

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4301771&forum_id=2#38526857)

https://shorefire.com/releases/entry/megan-rapinoe-joins-ozy-fest-2019

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4301771&forum_id=2#38534986)

Won't you give equal pay

Mr Carlos

Tell me what do you say

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4301771&forum_id=2#38535038)

https://www.broadwayworld.com/bwwtv/article/Megan-Rapinoe-Joins-OZY-Fest-2019-20190715

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4301771&forum_id=2#38537992)

https://twitter.com/ozyfest/status/1152299105437323264?s=21

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4301771&forum_id=2#38557654)

42m42 minutes ago

More

Replying to @OZYfest

Can’t wait for the @netflix documentary about this!

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4301771&forum_id=2#38557936)

https://www.ozy.com/politics-and-power/how-john-kasich-could-reshape-2020-and-beyond/95685

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4301771&forum_id=2#38587253)

https://www.ozy.com/ozyfestlineup/

Stacy Abrams not listed - expecting to be VP nom?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4301771&forum_id=2#39737949)

OZY Fest is closely monitoring the outbreak of the COVID-19 virus and is following the guidance of the City of New York. The health and safety of festival attendees is, and will continue to be, our top priority. As of today’s date, we expect OZY Fest 2020 to go ahead, but will actively communicate with ticket holders if that changes. In the event there is an impact, ticket purchasers will be fully refunded if their attendance is impacted by any event postponement.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4301771&forum_id=2#40078326)

https://twitter.com/OZYfest/status/1278835379194466304/photo/1

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4301771&forum_id=2#40537669)

https://twitter.com/ozyfest/status/1384235911924224000?s=21

Of course DiBlasio announces today that the city will fully reopen July 1...

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4301771&forum_id=2#42370315)

https://twitter.com/ozyfest/status/1384235911924224000?s=21

Don’t miss Fauci, Jim Cramer, Mark Cuban, Maxine Waters, Valerie Jarrett, Malcolm Gladwell, Condi Rice and more!

Also, too bad they didn’t try to it this weekend in NYC, instead concert for NYC was cancelled.

https://twitter.com/maggienyt/status/1429226518937587713?s=21

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4301771&forum_id=2#42988166)

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/26/business/media/ozy-media-goldman-sachs.html

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4301771&forum_id=2#43188283)

The digital media company has raised eyebrows for its claims about its audience size for years. Then came the strange voice on the phone.

239

OzyFest in Manhattan in 2017. Ozy has had success with the semiregular festival of comedy, music and talks.

OzyFest in Manhattan in 2017. Ozy has had success with the semiregular festival of comedy, music and talks.Credit...Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for Ozy Fusion Fest 2017

By Ben Smith

Sept. 26, 2021

This past winter, Goldman Sachs was closing in on a $40 million investment in Ozy, a digital media company founded in 2013, and there seemed to be a lot of reasons to do the deal. Ozy boasted of a large audience for its general interest website, its newsletters and its videos, and the company had a charismatic chief executive, Carlos Watson, a onetime cable news anchor who had worked at Goldman Sachs early in his career. And, crucially, Ozy said it had a great relationship with YouTube, where many of its videos attracted more than a million views.

That’s what the Zoom videoconference on Feb. 2 that Ozy arranged between the Goldman Sachs asset management division and YouTube was supposed to be about. The scheduled participants included Alex Piper, the head of unscripted programming for YouTube Originals. He was running late and apologized to the Goldman Sachs team, saying he’d had trouble logging onto Zoom, and he suggested that the meeting be moved to a conference call, according to four people who were briefed on the meeting, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to reveal details of a private discussion.

Once everyone had made the switch to an old-fashioned conference call, the guest told the bankers what they had been wanting to hear: that Ozy was a great success on YouTube, racking up significant views and ad dollars, and that Mr. Watson was as good a leader as he seemed to be. As he spoke, however, the man’s voice began to sound strange to the Goldman Sachs team, as though it might have been digitally altered, the four people said.

After the meeting, someone on the Goldman Sachs side reached out to Mr. Piper, not through the Gmail address that Mr. Watson had provided before the meeting, but through Mr. Piper’s assistant at YouTube. That’s when things got weird.

A confused Mr. Piper told the Goldman Sachs investor that he had never spoken with her before. Someone else, it seemed, had been playing the part of Mr. Piper on the call with Ozy.

When YouTube learned that someone had apparently impersonated one of their executives at a business meeting, its security team started an investigation, the company confirmed to me. The inquiry didn’t get far before a name emerged: Within days, Mr. Watson had apologized profusely to Goldman Sachs, saying the voice on the call belonged to Samir Rao, the co-founder and chief operating officer of Ozy, according to the four people.

Did you know you can share 10 gift articles a month, even with nonsubscribers?

Share this article.

In his apology to Goldman Sachs and in an email to me on Friday, Mr. Watson attributed the incident to a mental health crisis and shared what he said were details of Mr. Rao’s diagnosis.

“Samir is a valued colleague and a close friend,” Mr. Watson said. “I’m proud that we stood by him while he struggled, and we’re all glad to see him now thriving again.”

He added that Mr. Rao took time off from work after the call and is now back at Ozy. Mr. Rao did not reply to requests for comment.

Editors’ Picks

Jonathan Franzen’s ‘Crossroads,’ a Mellow, ’70s-Era Heartbreaker That Starts a Trilogy

How Billy Strings Picked His Way to the Other Side

Finding Memories, and Mom’s Sewing Stuff, in a Reused Cookie Tin

Marc Lasry, a hedge fund manager, a co-owner of the Milwaukee Bucks basketball team and chairman of the Ozy board, said in a statement: “The board was made aware of the incident, and we fully support the way it was handled. The incident was an unfortunate one-time event, and Carlos and his team showed the kind of compassion we would all want if any of us faced a difficult situation in our own lives.”

While the explanation satisfied the company’s board, which did not formally investigate, it did not answer all the questions the incident raised. Even in an industry known for smoke and mirrors, Ozy has for years raised eyebrows over its claims about its audience size. And one nagging question in this era of spectacular booms and busts is where, exactly, the line is drawn between fake-it-til-you-make-it hype (Tesla!) and possible fraud (Theranos!). That line is often blurry and comes into focus only in retrospect. Early fluffery can be excused by later success. And since, unlike Theranos, nobody is drawing literal blood in the media business, high-profile investors may not be expected to do all that much homework.

One thing is evident, though: Trying to fool the world’s most famous bank, even by the hype-ridden standards of the media business, is way over the line.

A Gen X Media Dream

Ozy was born in 2013 as a Gen X dream of what millennial media ought to be: earnest, policy-focused, inclusive, slickly sans-serif. Other ventures of the same era, Mic and Fusion, projected similar images.

Ozy’s public face was Mr. Watson, the son of a working-class Jamaican family in Miami and a graduate of Harvard University and Stanford Law School. In addition to his early-career stop at Goldman Sachs, he worked at McKinsey & Company and was an anchor on MSNBC for part of 2009. His co-founder, Mr. Rao, also came from Goldman Sachs, via Harvard.

Image

Carlos Watson, Ozy’s chief executive, at a panel discussion in Nashville sponsored by the company in 2018.

Carlos Watson, Ozy’s chief executive, at a panel discussion in Nashville sponsored by the company in 2018.Credit...Jason Kempin/Getty Images

Mr. Watson raised the money to start Ozy from a list of blue-chip friends. Laurene Powell Jobs, who had co-founded a college prep nonprofit with Mr. Watson in 1997, invested and joined the Ozy board. The Silicon Valley venture capitalist Ron Conway also invested, as did David Drummond, who was then Google’s chief legal officer.

In 2014, Axel Springer, the Berlin publishing giant, invested an undisclosed amount. In 2019, Ozy also raised $35 million from a group led by Mr. Lasry, a boon that included money from the media-focused investment bank LionTree and the radio and podcast company iHeart Media. The Ford Foundation, seeking to support a minority-led company, also backed it with grants, its president, Darren Walker, said. The data service PitchBook reports that Ozy had raised more than $83 million by April 2020 and valued itself at $159 million.

Ozy spent some of that money to hire journalists and produce a raft of newsletters, feature stories and videos, as well as sponsored articles promoting a range of companies, from its offices in Mountain View, Calif. Its top editors included Jonathan Dahl, who had led Smart Money magazine and The Wall Street Journal’s weekend section, and Fay Schlesinger, a star journalist at The Times of London, both of whom left Ozy after relatively short tenures.

The site generated some buzz, and Mr. Watson said it had the traffic to match. In a 2019 news release, the company said it had 50 million monthly unique users.

Eugene Robinson, an early Ozy hire whose title was editor-at-large, said that, after he heard Mr. Watson boast of the company’s traffic numbers sometime around 2015, he thought they “seemed high” and started comparing the claims to public sources of audience data. Mr. Robinson, who said in an interview that he was fired earlier this year, concluded that the site was a “Potemkin village.”

In 2017, BuzzFeed News reported that Ozy had been among the publishers buying web traffic from “low-quality sources,” companies using systems that caused articles to pop open under a reader’s browser without the reader’s knowledge. Ozy said it had been buying the traffic to build its email lists and had not billed advertisers for those views. (I was editor in chief of BuzzFeed News at the time of that article. Later, I met Mr. Watson when I was peripherally involved in acquisition talks between the companies. Mr. Watson told The Times he believed that it was unethical for me to write this column. Under New York Times policy, I can’t write about BuzzFeed extensively until I divest stock options in the company, which I left last year.)

Image

Marc Lasry, a hedge fund manager and a co-owner of the Milwaukee Bucks basketball team, is a member of the Ozy board.

Marc Lasry, a hedge fund manager and a co-owner of the Milwaukee Bucks basketball team, is a member of the Ozy board.Credit...Thibault Camus)/Associated Press

Ozy doesn’t rely on standard measurements of traffic, but the best known service, Comscore, shows nothing close to the company’s public claims. According to Comscore, Ozy reached nearly 2.5 million people during some months in 2018, but only 230,000 people in June 2021 and 479,000 in July. Mr. Watson called the Comscore numbers “incomplete,” noting they don’t include impressions on platforms ranging from social media to television and podcasts.

Other figures seem off, but are harder to verify. Ozy told Axios in January that the company’s newsletters had “more than 20 million subscribers.” By comparison, the Morning Brew, a successful newsletter-based business media company, says it has three million subscribers.

“I’ve never heard an explanation of Ozy that made sense to me,” said Brian Morrissey, the former editor in chief of Digiday, a publication covering digital media and the tech industry, who now writes The Rebooting, a newsletter focused on media businesses. He said he was struck by the company’s claims, adding, “then you do the gut check, and never once in my life has a piece of content from Ozy crossed into my world organically.”

Mr. Watson said in the email that he understood the skepticism but that Ozy’s growth “has been completely real.”

“It’s the result of our team acting pretty fearlessly to launch and grow five newsletters, 12 TV shows, six podcasts, now four annual festivals starting next year, and the Ozy Genius Awards,” he said. “Each of our verticals is thriving, and we stand completely behind our numbers and performance.”

But the company has overstated its success on big platforms, as well as the strength of its relationship with them. Billboards in Los Angeles, for instance, say that “The Carlos Watson Show” is “Amazon Prime’s First Talk Show.” In fact, Ozy has been uploading the show to the platform through a service called “video direct,” which many YouTube channels use to pick up extra views on Amazon’s video platform but which receives no promotion from Amazon Prime Video itself. Last week, Amazon complained that Ozy’s use of its brand name on the billboards violated promotion guidelines; Ozy apologized and promised to take down the signs, an Amazon Prime Video spokesman said.

Mr. Watson said the billboards’ claim was “accurate,” but confirmed that the company would stop making that claim at Amazon’s request.

Ozy also markets Mr. Watson’s show as “the fastest-growing talk show in YouTube history,” a quote that appears to be drawn from a question posed by a host of ABC’s “Good Morning America” during Mr. Watson’s appearance last year. Asked about the claim, Mr. Watson said that his show had more views than any other “premium daily talk show we’ve been able to identify that was launched on YouTube.”

Jason Urgo, the head of the analytics firm Social Blade, said Ozy’s YouTube effort “doesn’t really stand out as a breakout channel.” On the channel, many videos have more than a million views but fewer than a hundred comments, an unusual ratio for YouTube that suggests the views aren’t coming from regular YouTube watchers, Mr. Urgo said. Other videos on the channel have fewer than a thousand views.

Even as it has struggled to build a digital audience, however, Ozy also has had success offline, with events including OzyFest, a semiregular festival of comedy, music and talks. And thanks to Mr. Watson’s ceaseless drive and his network of relationships, Ozy has closed a series of production deals of the kind that other new media companies crave. Those include “Third Rail With Ozy,” a PBS discussion series in 2017 hosted by Mr. Watson, and “Defining Moments,” a 2020 interview series on Hulu that has profiled the musician John Legend, the investor Mark Cuban and the actress Jameela Jamil. “OWN Spotlight: Black Women OWN the Conversation,” an Ozy show hosted by Mr. Watson, on the Oprah Winfrey Network, won an Emmy last year in the category of news discussion and analysis.

Image

Mr. Watson, at Carnegie Hall in 2020. He has been Ozy’s public face.

Mr. Watson, at Carnegie Hall in 2020. He has been Ozy’s public face.Credit...Noam Galai/Getty Images For History

While Mr. Watson often disavowed an interest in turning the company into a vehicle for his own broadcast talent, his genial style of interviewing has carried most of the shows, including a podcast Ozy started last year with the BBC, featuring its anchor Katty Kay, called “When Katty Met Carlos.” (Ms. Kay left the BBC for Ozy this year.)

The company has more recently invested in a wave of marketing for “The Carlos Watson Show,” which has featured interviews with Dr. Anthony Fauci and the filmmaker Ava DuVernay (as well as lower-profile figures, including me). In addition to the billboards, promotions of the show have included a magazine-style advertising supplement, with Mr. Watson’s face on the cover, inside the weekend print edition of The New York Times. The headline: “Meet Carlos Watson.”

After the Call

Goldman Sachs took no further action after the call with the Ozy executive who had apparently impersonated the YouTube executive. But the security team at Google, which owns YouTube, determined a crime might have been committed.

Google has alerted the Federal Bureau of Investigation, two people with knowledge of the matter said. Goldman Sachs then received an inquiry from federal law enforcement officials, one person with knowledge of that inquiry said. Mr. Watson said on Friday that Ozy had not been contacted by investigators. Mr. Piper declined, through a YouTube official, to comment.

The legal risk is real, said John C. Coffee Jr., law professor at Columbia University, to whom I described the case. Tricking potential investors while raising capital would be grounds for criminal charges of wire fraud and securities fraud, he said, as well as a potential civil suit from the Securities and Exchange Commission. He added, though, that a prosecutor might not proceed with the case because the deal never went through.

The F.B.I.’s San Francisco field office said in an email that it would not confirm or deny the existence of an investigation.

Ozy’s high-profile backers are reacting to the situation differently. A spokeswoman for Ms. Powell Jobs’s Emerson Collective, Robin Reck, distanced her company from Ozy in a statement: “Emerson Collective was one of Ozy’s first investors in 2013. Emerson did not participate in Ozy’s latest investment round and has not served on its board since 2019.”

The president of the Ford Foundation, Mr. Walker, said in an email that he had confidence in Ozy. “We need new media companies to challenge the status quo, shake things up, and go deep on the issues that matter most,” he said. “In an increasingly diverse world, it’s no coincidence that a company with co-founders of Black and Indian descent would be so successful.”

And Ozy did not allow the episode to curb its fund-raising efforts. In April, two months after Goldman Sachs walked away, the company raised another round of financing, two people familiar with the transaction said.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4301771&forum_id=2#43188290)

Also there is zero information available about OZY FEST Miami which is supposed to occur in 3 weeks, so it’s definitely going on my CANCELLED? watch

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4301771&forum_id=2#43188706)

In trying to figure out if OZY FEST MIAMI was happening last week, I came across this clip from the talk show of 8Chans founder talking about Drumpf supporters - apparently the answer to my question “who the fuck would watch this?” was nobody.

https://twitter.com/ozy/status/1441517833611972616?s=21

Ozy Built a TV Show on a False Claim, Says Its Former Producer

Producers say they were led to believe they were making a talk show for A&E, which said no to the program. “You are playing a dangerous game with the truth,” the top producer wrote in his resignation email.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/30/business/media/ozy-media-carlos-watson.html

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4301771&forum_id=2#43205382)

A Miami parks official tells me Ozy Fest Miami, which was set for October 16, has been postponed.

https://twitter.com/maxwelltani/status/1442973046101331968?s=21

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4301771&forum_id=2#43206764)

That escalated quickly!

Ozy Media, the digital media company that came under scrutiny for its business practices in recent days, announced on Friday that it was shutting down.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/01/business/media/ozy-media.html

Really want to thank Buck the Club, A-Rod, Megan da Rappin Hoe, Dr Fauci, Andrew Yang and everyone else who contributed to the thread over the years.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4301771&forum_id=2#43207641)

180^180

WE DID IT, BROS

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4301771&forum_id=2#43207907)

Employees saw a different side of Carlos Watson once they’d come aboard. He was volatile, switching abruptly from solicitous charm to screaming rage. “The ritual humiliation begins with the lull. He’s like, ‘How’s your family?’ As soon as you’re comfortable, he comes in with a hammer,” says Robinson. “You’re completely fucking shocked.” One time, Robinson miscalculated when a flight would land and was late coming to work. Watson became so enraged that he docked $5,000 from his paycheck, Robinson says.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4301771&forum_id=2#43209665)

But will they survive Black October?

The CEO of Ozy Media on Monday called the company's announcement last week that it was shutting down "premature" and that after meeting with advertisers and other partners that it would continue to operate.

https://twitter.com/carlquintanilla/status/1445004025041235971?s=21

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4301771&forum_id=2#43219081)

Oct. 7, 2021, 3:00 p.m. ET

Video

Cinemagraph

By Eugene S. Robinson

Mr. Robinson was an editor and writer at Ozy Media from 2012 to 2021.

It was 2007 and I was in some kind of a souk in Tel Aviv. A three-card monte dealer was encouraging passers-by to “find the red” as he lifted and dropped the cards from the left to the right. Later, over drinks, I asked the dealer to show me how the grift worked. He put down his glass and looked me in the eyes for longer than felt comfortable before he hit me with it: “No one who knows anything about life plays this game, Eugene.” I felt almost embarrassed for asking.

Six years later, I found myself standing before a whiteboard in the Mountain View, Calif., headquarters of Ozy Media, a digital-media start-up focused on the “new and the next,” thinking of that dealer in Tel Aviv. On that whiteboard someone had drawn several concentric circles that seemed to lay out the company goals.

The board and those circles would later appear in a photo taken by Fortune. In front of the board sat Carlos Watson, the chief executive and a co-founder of Ozy Media. Mr. Watson had done time in the trenches at Goldman Sachs, McKinsey and MSNBC and had been educated at Harvard and Stanford. He seemed groomed for this master of the universe moment.

“I think you might be a visionary … that is, seeing things that are not there,” I recall telling him, as we sat in his office sometime during the first year of working on the launch, plotting the Ozy global takeover. If he managed to deliver on, say, 80 percent of his promises, he’d make a believer out of me.

Eight years later, I received a call from Ben Smith, The New York Times media columnist. He was preparing what turned out to be a brutal piece about Ozy’s apparent lies about its readership and its wildly misleading branding campaign. The article would include an incident from February in which Samir Rao, the co-founder and chief operating officer, had apparently impersonated a YouTube executive to boost the company’s profile before a possible Goldman Sachs investment.

In the couple of days after the article was published last month more questions about Ozy’s apparently preposterous reader numbers and the veracity of its marketing claims emerged, alongside tales of a toxic workplace. Suddenly, the company seemed to have become the Theranos of the media world.

In Silicon Valley, there’s a gospel that says hard-driving expectations beget growth, which, in turn, begets greatness — riches. But that approach has come to seem increasingly hollow.

Five days after Mr. Smith’s piece ran, Ozy announced it would be shutting down, mere months after I had been fired from the company for a second time. Then on Monday, Mr. Watson said that the shutdown announcement had been “premature.” He insisted the company would rise from the dead like “Lazarus.”

I was not exactly surprised by Ozy’s collapse, just amazed that it took so long.

I started at Ozy as it was working toward its 2013 launch. As a Stanford-educated, successful freelance journalist and former staffer at the now-defunct Code magazine who’d also booked time at MacLife, I knew both Silicon Valley and the media industry. So I was a sensible pick for Mr. Watson.

At Ozy, I had come to believe that a small, scrappy outfit like ours could unearth stuff the legacy news outlets would miss. At the very least it was a thought experiment. I was pleased to find that billionaires — including Laurene Powell Jobs, an early investor, and later, Marc Lasry — were willing to put some money into it.

So we published easily consumable stories, on topics like Haitian poverty crusaders and 30-something South American politicos. Not what I liked reading, for the most part. But the world had changed, and this was the kind of stuff my kids definitely did like to read.

Mr. Watson created a demanding environment for his small team of editors and reporters. But the excitement of building something new and alive was infectious. In a moment of macho exhilaration, I had even suggested that each reporter publish 14 articles a week. Was the journalism good? Sometimes. As good as it could be at a fast pace. But the objective was to build the Ozy brand. So we did.

The expectations were steep. In part, this is just life in Silicon Valley. But the culture also stemmed from Mr. Watson’s origin story. I recalled him sharing a lesson from his mother: “No one should be able to outwork you.”

In close to a decade at Ozy, I think I averaged something like six to eight articles a week. Sometimes my pieces drew on original reporting. Sometimes they did not. By my count, I worked at least two 24-hour days leading up to the launch. Twelve- to 18-hour days were not unusual, and weekends belonged to the company. “I don’t want employees here,” Mr. Watson would say. “I want owners.” And he got them: We were a lovely mélange of racial, gender and age diversity.

Frazzled employees would tell me how Mr. Watson would ream them out or threaten to dock their pay for even the most minor of errors — a missed meeting, in my case, led to my pay being docked.

[When asked by The Times for comment, Mr. Watson confirmed that Mr. Robinson was fired twice and that his pay was docked, but he disputed the circumstances.]

After the first time I was fired, I came back. I saw something in Ozy.

The West Coast has always been a strange beast. Outside the normal media-industry churn, surrounded by people who cared much less about the industry’s drama and gossip than they did about tech widgets and the sale of tech widgets, I thought, maybe we could do something great here. This was a chance to work with some people who took media … seriously?

The company also granted me the freedom to pursue projects I cared about, like my series about organized crime in New York and my work on “Ozy Confidential,” a podcast covering the edgy and the outré.

But throughout it all, my colleagues and I endured angry encounters with a shrieking Mr. Watson about some missed benchmark. He went through several assistants; one lasted a week.

Neither Mr. Watson nor any of the investors I managed to side channel into a conversation seemed concerned about employee attrition. It seemed that our human resources were fungible but the pressure to meet magical targets was not.

By year four, we were still having to explain who we were to our sources.

The employee turnover made it tough for Ozy to build something lasting. This and the lack of wider public recognition increased suspicions for me and others that our much-touted figure of 50 million monthly unique users — and other numbers, like more than 20 million newsletter subscribers — were far from real. With grinding weekly demands, I spent little time questioning the analytics. Any lingering doubts were dispensed with fresh rounds of happy talk. In the Valley, anything is possible.

There’s been some chortling on social media that no one read Ozy. That’s unfair. Plenty of people knew about it; 50 million a month of plenty? I don’t think so. But there were plenty of someones.

The thing is, investors don’t care about someones fewer than 50 million. To Ozy’s investors, this number must have been exciting. And the temptation to give big money what it wants is substantial.

Over time, I was dispatched to several sections of the site, like True Stories, our biography section. I believed in what we were creating.

Eugenius, a video series I worked on, was a moderate success, but it was shelved a few years ago. But over the years, it seemed much of Ozy’s video content became a shrine honoring the “greatness” of Mr. Watson.

My work languished and went unpublished, including an interview with a Holocaust survivor who died before we had our final interview for “Ozy Confidential.” The company back-burnered the podcast. At the start of the Covid pandemic, once management cut our salaries, I took my unpublished work to Substack. Four months later, I was told that I had to write a letter of apology and take down my Substack if I didn’t want to be fired again.

I refused to do either. So after nearly a decade at Ozy, I was paid for my unused vacation time and bid adieu in June — months after Mr. Rao’s bizarre apparent impersonation incident, I would later learn. (Mr. Watson attributed Mr. Rao’s actions to a mental health crisis.)

Mr. Watson told me in one of our final conversations that he didn’t think there were many people who believed in my talent more than he did.

A few years ago, a reporter from the business publication Inc. reached out to me to ask about Ozy’s poisonous culture. She made the fatal error of writing to me at my Ozy email address. I was worried that Mr. Watson and Mr. Rao read employee emails, so I wasn’t about to respond. But I wonder now: What might have happened had I spoken out sooner?

Nothing, I suspect. In 2017, Ozy was riding high on the hog. The valuation of employee feelings was not at all competitive when measured against cash. But I’d probably have felt a little better — definitely a little more sane — just to have been able to tell the truth in some small measure.

For many of us who worked at Ozy, the revelations of the past week and a half have been a eureka moment. Mr. Smith put some flesh on the weirdness and paranoia that had been part of our daily lives at the company. And the back-from-the-dead announcement cemented once and for all that bad ideas are like bad jokes, which bad comedians seem to have in abundance.

So I guess in the end, despite all attempts to conceal it, true character reveals itself. Or maybe the failures and foibles of the characterless characters who prize prizes over substance have just always been a part of the Valley Hustle.

Eugene S. Robinson was a writer and editor at Ozy Media from 2012 to 2021 and is the author of “Fight: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Ass-Kicking but Were Afraid You’d Get Your Ass Kicked for Asking.”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4301771&forum_id=2#43238481)

https://nypost.com/2023/02/24/disgraced-ozy-media-ceo-carlos-watson-faked-600m-takeover-offer-to-lure-investor-feds/

https://nypost.com/2023/02/23/ozy-media-founder-carlos-watson-charged-with-fraud/

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4301771&forum_id=2#45980156)

Can’t believe Suzee Han and Samir Rao narced on Carlos

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4301771&forum_id=2#45980214)

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/28/trump-commutes-sentences-of-ozy-media-founder-carlos-watson-and-company.html

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4301771&forum_id=2#48796120)