The Big Machine founder discovered the billionaire pop star when she was just a teenager. With the $450 million fortune he’s made, he now runs successful businesses in Nashville’s holy trinity of entertainment—music, racing and whiskey.
Inthe days leading up to the 20th anniversary of his record label in early September, Big Machine founder Scott Borchetta spent some time looking back through memorabilia from its earliest days. In the collection he found a note from his first meeting with the label’s very first artist—14-year-old Taylor Swift. It included a bold and prescient prediction: I think I found my Mick Jagger.
“We wanted to take over the world,” Borchetta tells Forbes. “That was the mission.”
By the time the pair went through a contentious and very public split in 2019, they had mostly achieved that goal. Swift was one of the biggest recording artists in the world—a few years away from becoming a billionaire solely from her music—and Borchetta had built one of the most successful independent record labels in Nashville, selling the majority of it that year to Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings at a $300 million valuation. Since, the 63-year-old Borchetta has poured that money into the city’s real estate and its biggest passions—country music, auto racing and Tennessee whiskey—boosting his net worth to $450 million, according to Forbes estimates.
Borchetta likes to say that his interests haven’t changed much since he was a kid growing up in Southern California. The son of record executive Mike Borchetta—who worked with the likes of Tim McGraw, Dusty Springfield and The Beach Boys—he’s always loved music (playing in punk bands under the name “Scott Rage”) and racing, first on BMX bikes and eventually falling in love with cars of all kinds.
The difference now, of course, is money. Borchetta owns a Nascar Xfinity Series team (Big Machine Racing), a spirits company (Big Machine Distillery), and a collection of cars and racing paraphernalia valued at more than $50 million (according to one close friend, Borchetta has “a bad case of Ferrari-itis”). He stores the best of them in a Tony Stark-style garage he built several floors beneath the European medieval-style castle on the outskirts of Nashville he scooped up a decade ago for nearly $8 million, one piece of an estimated $100 million-plus real estate portfolio.
The cars aren’t just trophies. Borchetta drives them frequently, including to the office, with a bliss that draws comparison to an extremely expensive toy collection. On an afternoon joyride, he presses his foot down on the accelerator of a 1985 Ferrari 288 GTO to enthusiastically demonstrate the lurch caused by the car’s twin-turbochargers. As for the possibility of scratching or crashing the $5 million sportscar, “I try not to think about it,” he says from behind the wheel, “these are cars, they’re meant to be driven.”
Borchetta first moved to Nashville in the early 1980s, building a reputation as a tenacious executive at MCA Records, then Dreamworks Records and Universal Music Group, moonlighting as an even more hard-charging driver in the Nascar Weekly Series’ Super Truck division, where he won three straight championships at Nashville’s Fairgrounds Speedway.
“Back then it was like full-on punk rock—I’m going to kill you,” Borchetta says of his early ambition. “I’ve always felt that we could figure out a way to win, whether I was racing motocross or quarter-midgets or Nascar Weekly Series or Trans-Am or records. It’s like, there’s a number one record on Monday, and I want it.”
Convinced that his bosses were out of touch with the times, Borchetta decided to start his own label in 2005. His timing was perfect, as then-New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer cracked down on major labels’ use of payola—the practice of paying under the table for radio play—and suddenly the only way to power a hit record was through relationships and determination, which Borchetta had in ample supply.
“I knew he would be relentless,” says his wife, Sandi, who became one of the label’s initial 13 employees. “I knew how hard he worked, and if I didn’t jump in and be a part of it, I would feel like I never see him.”
Twenty years ago, Borchetta had no idea of just how big his “Mick Jagger” would become. He first heard Swift play in the listening room at Nashville’s Bluebird Café in late 2004 and offered to sign the teenager to his new label, even though it didn’t officially exist yet. She agreed, and Borchetta set about raising the money needed to launch Big Machine.
“One of the things she loved early on is that it was a secret,” Borchetta says. “We had this kind of secret society about what we were doing.”
He initially wanted to sell 40% of the company’s equity at a $10 million valuation, but after his business partner dropped out and other potential investors (including Mark Cuban’s team) didn’t bite, the newly formed record label was two months away from insolvency. A wealthy Pittsburgh businessman named Ray Pronto, who had recently sold his insurance and loan business—and just months before had heard Swift sing—stepped in with a $3 million investment. Taylor’s father, Scott Swift, a longtime financial advisor, invested another $500,000, and country superstar Toby Keith added some more, agreeing to share a back office with his upstart Show Dog label.
Big Machine launched with music from Danielle Peck and Jack Ingram, gaining a No. 1 radio single in just its second release, but by the fall of 2006, the company coffers had drained to just over $1 million. If it ever fell below that threshold, Borchetta would have to raise more money. Then in October of that year, Swift released her debut album, which sold 40,000 units in its first week and surpassed one million sales by the following June.
“Literally the end of the month was when we got paid from Universal. And I walked in and I had a $3 million check,” says Andrew Kautz, president of Big Machine Label Group and its first back-office manager. “Scott just kind of smiled and he said, ‘Here we go.’ And from then on it was nonstop.”
Big Machine and its subsidiary brands—Valory and Nashville Harbor—would go on to launch the careers of numerous country music superstars, including Florida Georgia Line, Thomas Rhett, Lady A, Carly Pearce, Brett Young and Riley Green, and also found success selling new music from established stars like Garth Brooks, Rascal Flatts, Tim McGraw and Sheryl Crow.
“I think his gift is marketing and promotion, but I also think it’s dreaming,” says Crow, who promoted her 2019 song Redemption Day by projecting the music video on the sides of trucks and buildings in cities across the country. “[Artists] really do rely on people to be creative, but also to be truthful, and also to do what they say they’re going to do. And that is Scott.”
While Big Machine continued to grow, the definition of success in the music industry was changing dramatically. A label’s value used to be determined by how many options it had on artists’ contracts to demand new albums, since 80% or more of sales were earned in the first 10 weeks after a release. (Traditionally, the label finances projects and owns the publishing and recording rights, distributing a negotiated share of the residual income with the artist.) Today, the business model has flipped, with less than 20% of revenue made upon release and the rest coming from the “long tail” on streaming services like Spotify, where back catalogs of music can continue to earn royalties forever.
No Slowing Down: After surviving a bad car crash in 2023, Borchetta says he had one thought: “I’m not going to let this define the rest of my life.”
Jamel Toppin for Forbes
Borchetta rejected the streaming revolution at first, going so far as to pull Swift’s music from Spotify for nearly three years between 2014 and 2017 over the fractions of a penny it paid artists for each stream. During his two seasons as a mentor on American Idol, he wore attention-grabbing outfits, designed by his wife, adorned with the words, “Music Has Value.”
He wasn’t the only one to recognize it. In 2018, Swift wanted to re-acquire the publishing and royalty rights to her first six albums—a rare but not unprecedented request for artists with the leverage of global superstardom, like Garth Brooks, Jay-Z or U2—but by then the catalog accounted for a significant portion of Big Machine’s total value. Swift would later say that Big Machine’s offer was to earn back each album one at a time by producing new albums, but Borchetta claims that the final iteration of the deal would have given Swift the rights after a 10-year license to Big Machine. The two sides could not reach an agreement.
That November, Swift left Big Machine to sign with Universal’s Republic Records in a deal that gave her ownership over all future music. By all accounts, Borchetta and Swift separated on friendly terms. “What we accomplished together will be a lasting legacy and a case study on excellent partnerships,” Swift said to Borchetta in a text message he shared online. “I still view you as a partner and friend and I hope you feel the same.”
Things soured a year later when Borchetta agreed to sell Big Machine to Scooter Braun—the record executive who discovered Justin Bieber and went on to manage Ariana Grande and Demi Lovato—with Swift’s catalog worth an estimated $140 million of the $300 million total. Swift called the deal “my worst-case scenario” because of her longtime distaste for Braun, who was then managing Kanye West, a longtime Swift adversary. In an incendiary social media post, she took direct aim at Borchetta.
“This is what happens when you sign a deal at fifteen to someone for whom the term ‘loyalty’ is clearly just a contractual concept,” she wrote. “And when that man says ‘Music has value’, he means its value is beholden to men who had no part in creating it.”
Borchetta said he never experienced Swift’s ill-will toward Braun, but that did little to slow the social media battering he received from the legions of Swifties. Borchetta says that he has not communicated with Swift since.
“We didn’t do anything to hurt anybody. I would never do that, but I’m never going to win that conversation,” Borchetta says of the uncivil war. “What should have been a really awesome celebration, wasn’t. But in the big picture it gave me the opportunity to do a lot of things that I wanted to do in my life. And so I can’t look back with regret. It’s a decision that I made, and I lived with it.”
At the time of the sale, Borchetta owned 90% of Big Machine (he bought out Pronto in 2015; Scott Swift and Keith still owned their shares). The cash and stock deal gave him a 13% stake in Ithaca, allowing him to profit when Swift’s catalog was sold again in 2020 to Shamrock Capital for an estimated $360 million, and when Braun sold Ithaca entirely to Korean entertainment powerhouse HYBE in 2021 for just over $1 billion. All the while, Borchetta has maintained his position as Big Machine Label Group CEO and given a similar message to each new set of owners. “Just leave me alone,” he says. “And you’ll be really happy.”
Flush with cash, Borchetta returned to his other great passion, taking inspiration from the second career of legendary actor-turned-race car driver Paul Newman. Borchetta had sponsored teams and races before, but in 2021 he started Big Machine Racing, which competes in Nascar’s second division. Much like minor league baseball, there is far less money to be made there, but the Xfinity series does offer Borchetta a place in the garage, where he has befriended racing giants and personal heroes like Roger Penske and Chip Ganassi. The same year, he was instrumental in bringing the IndyCar series to Nashville as its title sponsor, and for the past handful of years, he can be seen on the mic at the Borchetta Bourbon Music City Grand Prix giving the pre-race command, “Drivers, start your engines!”
He got back behind the wheel himself in the fall of 2019, joining the Sportscar Vintage Racing Association at the urging of Ray Evernham, a former pit crew chief for Jeff Gordon and 50-year racing veteran. Borchetta’s 1971 Corvette dominated the field, reeling off a string of national championships.
Then in March 2023, tragedy struck at a SVRA race in Atlanta. Borchetta’s car experienced total brake failure while making a turn and he slammed into a wall at more than 150 mph, shattering bones in both legs and knocking him momentarily unconscious. Evernham would later say that based on all his years of racing, “there’s no way he should have survived that crash.”
After being cut out of the car and rushed to the hospital, Borchetta remembers telling himself to just survive to the next minute, and the next, making peace with the fact that any of them could be his last. When he woke up, alive, he says he had one thought: “I’m not going to let this define the rest of my life.”
Miraculously, he made a full recovery. Today, he walks without what many veteran drivers call the “IndyCar limp,” earning him a new level of respect around the racetrack. And back at the Big Machine office, Kautz has noticed a “renewed passion” from his boss to “put some more up on the board,” including signing young artists Preston Cooper and The Jack Wharff Band in the past year.
Borchetta is even scaling up his distillery business, which he admits started as a vanity project and a tax shelter. Borchetta Bourbon posted $5 million in sales last year and acquired the nearby Pickers Vodka brand in December.
Though he is now the type of mogul who commutes in helicopters, private planes and Ferraris, Borchetta recognizes plenty of challenges still lie ahead, including another potential change in the music business. Inspired by Swift’s public war over ownership, which ended in May when she purchased the rights to her early catalog from Shamrock—Forbes estimates she paid close to the $360 million price of the previous transaction—Borchetta says he’s noticed younger and less proven artists pursuing licensing deals with labels that revert their rights back after a set amount of time. In the future, he predicts, “Record labels will become more of a service than really an ownership entity.”
If that is the case, there are few who can match Borchetta’s ability to create spectacle. For Big Machine’s 20th birthday during Labor Day weekend, he threw a concert in downtown Nashville with artists from the label’s entire history. A reported crowd of 146,000 people lined the streets and Honky Tonks for several blocks to watch, and as the artists greeted and hugged Borchetta going on and off the stage, he seemed nothing short of Nashville royalty.
“It’s a very special thing to have a champion like Scott Borchetta,” country music star Carly Pearce said from the stage, practically making a sales pitch on his behalf. “I’m sure there are a lot of aspiring country singers out here, and I just want to say that I moved to Nashville 16 years ago and I had the same dream you did, and it took a champion like Scott to believe in me.”
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