Earlier this month, Ariana Grande was going through a personal crisis amid a separation from her husband and tabloid coverage of her new romantic relationship. Grande’s team wanted her longtime manager, Scooter Braun, to fly to New York from a vacation in Europe to help put out the fires. Braun, who has cultivated an A-list client roster by being the guy who can counsel his artists through scandal—despite, or possibly because of, his own outsized and often shameless public persona—declined to make the trip. That answer took at least one person on Grande’s team by surprise. “I deserve a vacation,” Braun is said to have told them.