Nolte: Ozy Media CEO Carlos Watson Arrested for Fraud

Carlos Watson participates in "The Contenders: 16 for 16" panel during the PBS T
Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP
John Nolte

Carlos Watson, the CEO of the left-wing Ozy Media, was arrested for securities fraud Thursday morning.

Watson is probably best known for his years as a MSNBC contributor and CNN anchor.

In October of 2021, Ozy Media, which launched in 2013, was forced to cease operations after the New York Times discovered Ozy Media had one of its own employees pretend to be a YouTube executive.

During a conference call with Goldman Sachs investors — people who were considering a $40 million investment into Oxy Media, YouTube executive Alex Piper gushed about how well Ozy Media was doing on its platform. But after the call ended, the fraud was quickly uncovered.

The Times wrote:

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.

The Wall Street Journal now reports that Watson was arrested after his partner, Samir Rao, pleaded guilty to fraud.

“Mr. Watson was taken into custody and is expected to be arraigned in a Brooklyn, N.Y., federal court on charges of conspiring to commit securities fraud and conspiring to commit wire fraud,” a law enforcement official told the Wall Street Journal.

Rao, who likely rolled over on Watson, admitted that “between 2018 and 2021, he made misleading statements to investors and inflated the company’s financial performance.” He also admitted to using “the identity of another person without the authority to do so between February 2020 and February 2021.”

For a whole year, he pretended to be someone he wasn’t.

Wow.

Ozy’s one-time chief of staff, Suzee Han, has also pleaded guilty to fraud and conspiracy. She admitted that she falsified financial information at the behest of two unnamed executives.

One of the investors who put her faith and name into Ozy is Laurene Powell Jobs — the powerful far-left billionaire widow of Apple founder Steve Jobs.

Jobs’ philanthropic outlet, Emerson Collective, has turned her into “a secret super-power behind a vast network of left-wing media outlets, organizations, and politicians,” wrote Breitbart News editor-in-chief Alex Marlow in his New York Times best-seller, Breaking the News: Exposing the Establishment Media’s Hidden Deals and Secret Corruption.

Marlow continued:

Laurene Powell Jobs topped Business Insider’s list of world’s richest women in tech in 2019, even though she’s not really “in tech.” She’s in the philanthropy/being an heiress business. What Jobs does is leverage her incredible wealth, infinite Rolodex, and relatively secretive public persona to wield unfathomable amounts of influence on the American culture. If there’s a well-known persona comparable to Laurene Powell Jobs, it’s Hungarian billionaire George Soros. Soros is known for his philanthropy, but also for being a one-man piggy bank for the far left. (Recently, Soros-connected groups have spent big pushing the Green New Deal, taxpayer-funded health care for illegal aliens, and the expansion of mail- in voting.)

A good share of Laurene Powell Jobs’s power is through the Emerson Collective (EC), which she founded; she currently serves as its president. The Emerson Collective, according to Forbes, is “a hybrid philanthropic and investing limited liability company.” That’s a pretty murky description (which is probably the point), but it seems like the EC has devised a clever and convenient structure where they can claim they are “investing” when the business has a chance to succeed and they are doing “philanthropy” when they fund entities for purely ideological reasons with little or no hope of making money. I’m not sure which of the two categories it falls under, but the Emerson Collective owns the Atlantic.

According to Marlow, “EC functions primarily as a private business owned by Jobs’s trust. This shields it from IRS disclosure rules and allows it to more freely engage in political activity.” So we don’t know how much of the tens of millions Ozy originally raised came from EC. But Laurene Powell Jobs is likely satisfied with her investment. After all, Ozy spread left-wing propaganda for a good eight years before the wheels came off, and when you’re as rich as Powell Jobs, what’s a few million?

The only shocking thing about this story is how desperately amateurish the alleged fraud was. Well, maybe it’s not all that shocking. Look at how desperately amateurish the ongoing fraud is at CNN and MSNBC, where Watson was employed for all those years.

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.

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