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.

Braun, who has become one of the most powerful and prolific managers in the music business at the mere age of 42, wasn’t wrong—we all deserve vacations, especially me. But the moment was one of several over the past year that evidenced to people in the industry that Braun’s priorities had shifted. He delegated. He’d layered up his friends. It was sometimes easier to find him in the “yachts” section of the Daily Mail than in a big meeting. Not long after that call, on Monday, I broke the news on Twitter/X that Grande had parted ways with Braun as her manager. “This decision has been a long time coming and was well thought-out by Ariana,” a source close to the Wicked star told me today. Braun declined to comment.

This usually wouldn’t be that big a deal. Artists shitcan their representatives all the time. Coldplay split last year from Dave Holmes, its manager of more than two decades, and nobody cared or even noticed until Holmes sued the band this month. Grande, herself, had publicly fired Braun in 2016 and later rehired him—that has happened privately a few other times, I’m told.