Late last week, Puck’s ever-active general Slack channel lit up with a surprising Friday
evening news dump. Carlos Watson, the disgraced founder of Ozy Media, who had late been preparing to serve a nearly 10-year prison sentence and service a nearly $100 million fine for conspiracy to commit securities fraud, had become the latest beneficiary of the Trump pardon machine. He’d received the golden ticket previously bestowed on fellow white-collar ne’er-do-wells such as Michael Milken, Charles Kushner, Steve
Bannon, and Paul Manafort—quite a crew.
Watson’s antics were particularly memorable, though. As you might recall, back in 2021, during a due diligence phone call with bankers from Goldman Sachs, Ozy’s C.O.O. impersonated a YouTube executive in an effort to validate the company’s claimed viewership numbers. Alas, the meeting and its aftermath was memorialized in a remarkable
Times column, which solidified the impression that many in the media industry had already formed about Ozy: It was an irrelevant vanity project that seemed compelling only to investors. Watson, after all, was a second-time entrepreneur with degrees from Harvard and Stanford and a potent ego-ambition engine who knew how to play the fundraising game. But some things really are too good to be true.
Anyway,
Watson actually conjures a fair amount of nostalgia for me personally. Years ago, in the earliest months of Puck’s journey, he was the subject of one of our most memorable pieces. At the time, amid Ozy’s unravelling, Watson had reached out to my partner Bill Cohan to tell his side of the story. What happened next, of course, was stranger than fiction—a true misadventure in crisis management, delinquent meetings, touchy lawyers and, believe it or not, an infamous turkey club
sandwich.
We titled the piece Carlos Watson Has a Cold, an homage to the legendary 1966 Gay Talese piece about Frank Sinatra for Esquire. I’m not sure that more than a handful of people got the reference, but it sure gave me and Bill a chuckle.
More importantly, however, the story helped hone our identity, both in terms of the type of company we wanted to become and the type of journalism we wanted to produce. I reread Carlos Watson Has a Cold shortly after Watson’s pardon was announced, and I’m pleased to say that it holds up and then some. I behoove you to read to the end to behold the greatest kicker I’ve read in decades in the business.
Meanwhile, I’d also steer you to Bill’s latest master
stroke on Watson, and what his emancipation suggests about Trump’s relationship with Wall Street and the financial services community. Carlos Watson’s Prison Break is enlightening on a number of levels, particularly its reflections on the art of reinvention—in politics and finance, alike. This is indeed one of the great stories of our
time, and precisely what you should expect to read in Puck.
