The first time I was fired by Carlos Watson was in 2012. I’d been putting in 18-hour days, seven days a week, and on more than two occasions, there were 24-hour days. For? For the launch of Ozy, the digital-newsmagazine startup Watson had conjured into existence in Mountain View, California. Ozy was part of his transition away from the Stimulist, his first attempt at online publishing, and a tenure as a contributor and an anchor at MSNBC, a gig earned on the strength of an Emmy Award–winning bow at a Hearst-backed show. Before that, Watson had started and sold a college-prep business called Achieva, a company funded by Laurene Powell Jobs and bought by the Washington Post Company. Watson had never run a newsroom before.
After eight weeks of churning out articles about everything from football star Marcus Dupree to Mexican narco lord Joaquín Guzmán Loera, as well as serving as a shoulder, literally, to cry on for one of the executive assistants Watson would burn through, I took a scheduled weekend off. Watson, whom I’d told about that weekend in advance several times, in email and face-to-face, dressed me down, full shriek, his fists pounding the table. Then he fired me. (Watson was given the opportunity to respond to multiple inquiries from Alta Journal. A spokesperson for Watson replied to dispute the circumstances of Robinson’s departure from Ozy and declined to answer any questions.)
A few weeks later, and a few days before Thanksgiving, we spoke on the phone. At the behest of the chair of the board, he rehired me. All of the signs were there: our deal was doomed. Had this been a love relationship, I never would have re-upped. But if I hadn’t accepted his second offer, I might’ve missed out on being a part of one of the strangest business stories of the past few years, a story that started with the breathless hype of a Silicon Valley startup and may end with a prison term for its founder, my former boss, Carlos Watson.
In October 2021, Ben Smith, then the media columnist for the New York Times, dropped me a line: “Would you be open to chatting about OZY?” I’d gotten calls from mainstream-media folks before, like the time Jemima McEvoy, now at Forbes, then at Inc., contacted me about workplace toxicity, a condition Ozy could have been a poster child for. McEvoy had reached out to me through my work email, an address I was sure was monitored, so I didn’t return her request. I assumed that was what Smith was calling about.
“No. This is about financial misrepresentation and high-level fraud,” Smith said. I was all ears.
You see, Ozy had planned to turn journalism on its head by reinventing how a news organization could and should address the planet we call home. Instead of regurgitating news under different bylines, we’d seek out stories that the majors had missed—and do this nimbly every day. And the “we” who would do this? A newsroom of folks who looked like the people we’d be covering, reporters and editors who were Asian, Black, LGBTQ. Extra points for intersectionality.
Founded in 2012, Ozy was funded as lavishly as many tech companies, pulling in a reported $83 mil by 2020 from high-net-worth individuals like Jobs and corporations like German publisher Axel Springer. It was also my professional home for the better part of the past decade.
According to Louise Rogers, former chair of the board, I was the first employee, which is to say, I was there in the early meetings when Jobs dropped by with ice cream sandwiches. I heard venture capitalist Ron Conway boast about what he first saw in Mark Zuckerberg. (A leader with an unquenchable desire to succeed, apparently.) I was there when we worked out of a crowded coffee shop on Castro Street in Mountain View. And, mostly, I was there when our founder, a TV newscaster turned would-be media mogul, refined the pitch that got him in the same room with those moneyed shakers and movers, also known as “eager believers,” in the first place.
“It’s not TV…it’s HBO,” Watson used to say, echoing the pay TV channel’s reinvention of television as a premium product. “It’s Apple,” he’d sometimes say. Or, “It’s Oprah,” or any other boldface name he’d check as part of a laundry list of iconic brands he hoped Ozy would emulate.
“This is how we should think about delivering flavorful takes on both the news and the world,” he’d say. Then he’d give a studied look off into space, the better to illustrate his visionary gaze at not only what was but all that could be. I’d heard him deliver some version of this speech dozens of times and could recite it from memory.
Smith didn’t want to talk about that. Neither did the Department of Justice when its agents eventually showed up at my jujitsu academy, following Smith’s initial column, from September 26, 2021. What they all wanted to talk about was precisely what would get Watson arrested a year and a half later, on February 23, 2023: what Breon Peace, the United States attorney for the Eastern District of New York, called a “business strategy [that] was based on outright deceit and fraud.” Watson, Peace added, “ran Ozy as a criminal organization rather than as a reputable media company.”
Watson’s team was a no-show at his arraignment on March 8, 2023, for wire and securities fraud. A judge had to enter his plea of “not guilty.” A court-appointed public defender had to ask a local journalist what the case was about.
Before all that, Watson responded to the charges on Twitter, admitting that he’d made “mistakes” and asking why he’d been “singled out.”
It’s possible to see Watson spinning here, the implication being that in a valley of fabulists where “reality distortion fields” and “faking it till you make it” have been part of the code for two generations, he may have been singled out because he’s Black. But if race is a part of the Ozy story, that’s because it was part of Watson’s original grift. The news media has been too white for too long, which is true. And Ozy would be what news would look like if it looked like the world it was purporting to cover.
That was the elevator pitch, anyway. That’s also the pitch that hooked me when I got the call from Rogers in 2012.
Media was rough in 2012. Freelance work had been winnowed down to 50 cents a word in some cases, 20 cents a word if we were talking about Vice. This was true even for someone like me, who had been in the media trenches since the 1980s, serving as editor in chief at EQ Magazine, a trade journal for the recording industry, and at Code Magazine, a men’s fashion title, and Intel’s corporate publication, with turns in senior editorial positions at Apple and Adobe. My articles had also appeared in GQ, the LA Weekly, and a raft of music magazines, but by 2012, with so many publications closing, Ozy smelled like…money.
When Rogers, a British media executive and my former boss at EQ, called to say she’d met Watson at a Stanford Graduate School of Business event and was having dinner with him, she asked if I was interested. At that point, I was interested in anything.
“Sure,” I said. “Tell him I’m a genius.”
They had dinner Monday night. I heard from Watson on Tuesday. We met on Wednesday. By Thursday, I was writing for him. My tentative title was deputy editor. Salary was paid with checks he tore out of his checkbook.
Here’s what I learned about my new boss, though. Raised in Florida by two schoolteachers, Watson was a Harvard undergrad and went to Stanford Law School. He served as an anchor at CNN and later at MSNBC and was extraordinarily well-connected.
How well-connected? On one of our first business trips together, to London, he advised me, bootstrap-style, to book myself into the most inexpensive hotel I could find. I found a place on the outskirts of South London that had heat only every other day.
When he asked me later if my accommodations were to my liking, I said no and asked if I might book myself wherever he was staying.
“Well, I’m staying with Tony,” he said.
To me and you? That would be Tony Blair, former prime minister of the United Kingdom. To Carlos Watson? “Tony.”
Despite his East Coast, old-media pedigree, Watson was a Silicon Valley creature through and through, a founder with the connections and cojones to ask Jobs, Conway, Chegg CEO Dan Rosensweig, Sterling Partner’s cofounder Steven Taslitz, and superlawyer Larry Sonsini for cash.
Among investors and famous potential collaborators, Watson was glib and easygoing. He had a knack for kissing up yet was a holy terror when punching down. One of his favorite stories was about Sonsini, founder of the estimable law firm Wilson Sonsini, which repped Ozy for a time, and it involved “Larry” answering Watson’s texts immediately, no matter when they came in.
That is precisely what Watson expected from everyone. Texts and calls from him came whenever he was in the mood to send them. The workweek was a seven-day-a-week death march. Screaming, shrieking, threats of firing, and the actual docking of pay for unwritten infractions were normal. When Watson could not be there to dole out the cruelty, his second-in-command, cofounder and chief operating officer (also now known as codefendant) Samir Rao, stepped in.
We were told that if a friend was getting married or had died, send flowers. We were told that Watson had no interest in employees but, rather, viewed us all as owners. Passion was the number-one qualifier, since, the thinking went, people who are passionate about something will work 24-hour days.
Which is how we continued to attract talent from the Wall Street Journal, CNN, and some of the private equity giants that funded us. It made for an exciting newsroom, and some of the work we did was actually bold and groundbreaking. Our 2017 “States of the Nation” series, which brought reporting from every state, comes to mind.
And again, as much of a drag as it was to work with Watson, the team, as teams do under duress, grew closer. We got very few nos regarding anything we wanted to write about. And cool ideas were embraced. At first.
There were, of course, signs that something was not quite right. In an early article Watson had written about publisher and real estate mogul Mort Zuckerman, numbers attributed to Zuckerman’s finances seemed…off. A cursory Google search supported this, and when approached about the discrepancy, Watson waved it off with a “Good catch.”
So it went with numbers on his whiteboard that projected Ozy readership going forward. Numbers that started at 50,000 and ended up in the multiple millions. I remember thinking, “If he delivers on 80 percent of that at least, I’ll be happy.”
The public face and the rah-rah staff meetings supported the idea that we were succeeding in the digital news realm where others were not. No one doubted it. Snark was snuffed. No eyes rolled; no groans were issued. Ensconced in an office in Mountain View, we were joined at the hip with other startups at 444 Castro, most notably 500 Startups, an early-stage venture fund and seed accelerator. Elevator rides were heady, and 15-minute lunch breaks were shared in the plaza downstairs with other aspiring Valley types, with a healthy serving of shoptalk about monetizing this and amortizing that. All that money talk turned me off, but it was good to see people excited about something.
Amid all this was Watson breezing in and out, world-beater-style, shouting work-stopping announcements over the bullpen about some success or another. Visits from the Warby Parker cats or the Lululemon guys were standard. Like a shark, Watson moved relentlessly forward. Indeed, “Ozy onward” became his catchphrase, the sig on many employees’ emails, and the way we ended meetings. Like our shark of a boss, we also knew we had to move forward or die.
Momentum can be contagious. So can innovation. Covering elections by going to every state in the United States? Bold. Covering the world by going to every single country? Expensive but solid journalism, especially for a digital-first newsroom. For a while, it felt as though we were doing things no one else was doing—even the things others did. Take Ozy Fest, a gabfest pitched as a cross between South by Southwest and TED that kicked off in New York’s Central Park with some big-name sponsors and guests like Malcolm Gladwell, Dr. Jill Biden, Wyclef Jean, and Hillary Clinton talking about soft-sell items like mindfulness, racism being bad, and the shifting political tides. This, though, was where I got my first whiff of something rotten.
You see, I’ve also been a musician since 1980, so I have an eye for crowds. I’ve played festivals and I’ve played basements. When Watson and Ozy’s PR team claimed we’d drawn 20,000 people to Ozy Fest, I knew this to be fanciful. Was inflating our in-person audience aspirational? Sure. Was it fraud? I’m not a judge.
If that was only the tip of what we saw, the full scale of the iceberg Smith detailed was disturbing. Later, we’d see it all spelled out by Smith and other reporters, and sickeningly so. Signatures forged on documents. Knowingly inflated valuations. Aggressively falsified partnerships with Amazon and YouTube. Bogus traffic figures. All of this concealing a churn of staff—people fired for disloyalty, or for no reason at all that we could see; others resigning after one too many late nights, impossibly crazy demands, or better offers at better-known websites. Or, and this was noteworthy, no offers at all. Some people left just to get out.
Despite my own attempts to resign a number of times, the lure back was always the payout. Those stock options I’d been hoarding from the beginning added up to the promise of some real money. If only they’d pay out. If. Only.
“Say, when are these stock options going to pay out?” I had cornered COO Rao, a man who’d later become known for using a voice-changing device to portray a YouTube executive in a $40 million finance call with his former employer Goldman Sachs. (Rao has since pleaded guilty, as has Watson’s chief of staff, Suzee Han, which will make pleading anything else extremely difficult for Watson. Rao did not respond to Alta’s interview request.)
“Well…when there is an ‘event,’” Rao told me as he hunched over his desk and stared at his phone.
“What kind of an ‘event’?” It was a yearly review, and the choice that was made annually was to take more stock or go for the cash. I was going through a divorce at the time, and I needed to decide fast.
“Well…an event.”
“Like what?” I said, the New Yorker in me getting irked. “Like me chasing you around the parking lot with a meat cleaver?” And here I laughed. He shrugged.
“Like a sale.”
A sale was always just ahead of us, just out of reach. Axel Springer had invested $20 million. Jobs and Conway put in $5.4 million. Sonsini, Marc Lasry from the Milwaukee Bucks, Rosensweig, Mike Moe, Dave Drummond—the people who make the Valley the Valley were knocking on Ozy’s door. If we held on to our options, the logic went, we’d all get rich.
“OZY’s best days are ahead of us,” said Moe, founder and CEO of GSV, the investment platform behind Spotify, Facebook (Meta), and Palantir. Moe was also the last board member standing at Ozy (other than Watson). “I am so proud of the work that Carlos and the team are doing…as we learn, grow and continue to build one of the most consequential media companies in the world.” This came from a press release a little over a year before Watson was arrested at his hotel in midtown Manhattan.
I took the cash. I couldn’t pay my mortgage with stock options. But to get my cash, I had to meet with Watson, who told me that I was making a shortsighted move. I couldn’t pay for my kids’ college with chances, so I stood firm before he dismissed me, disgusted.
That was the thing as well. Despite all the kayfabe about a multiculti approach to news and building a truly diverse newsroom, Watson was routinely rougher on the African American employees than he was on any others. Most of the employees fired were African American men. Previous VPs from Rosetta Stone. Hotshot designers from back East. Award-winning media executives. Men who had sold houses and moved west with their families to work for Watson.
It took two years for us to get weekends back, and even these were often interrupted by calls from Watson to hurry to his house in Mountain View for some sort of snipe hunt. Was this all-week “Ozy onward” necessary? Probably not. Did it keep the troops in an agitated state of readiness? Probably.
And all this time, we were creating work that few actual readers were engaging with—certainly not when measured against the companies we were supposed to have been routinely lapping. Watson, though, had one more gambit for drumming up attention for his brand: a massively expensive ad campaign featuring himself as the face—smiling, unlined, perfectly groomed, and dead-eyed—of Ozy.
I don’t know what bus ads cost, but Ozy was spending it. And this figures into the grift: special glossy-magazine inserts in newspapers in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and elsewhere—these paid inserts were then quoted by Ozy’s publicists as though they were originally sourced in the pubs where they appeared.
The ads touted Watson’s talk show, proclaimed him better than Oprah, and seemed like an expensive way to paint a target on him and his company. Think Magic Johnson’s The Magic Hour but without the personality. Watson was a leaden interviewer, but the show gave him the adjacency to power that he seemed to crave—as well as the marketing positioning that went with it. Seeing all this, we smothered our misgivings with shrugs and “I don’t knows.” I mean, it seemed you could never go broke underestimating people for the kind of crap they’d watch.
But Smith eventually laid it all out. Before he joined the New York Times, Smith had been at Buzzfeed News and had been in talks with Watson at one point for his company to acquire Ozy. After breaking the news about Rao’s financing call with Goldman Sachs, Smith’s reporting uncovered all the other allegations of fraud.
When Smith called me, I listened. Quiet. “Did you have any idea any of this was going on?” he asked. Smith had talked to lots of folks and sourced the shit out of this. It was a Thursday when we spoke, and the piece was scheduled to run on Sunday. His initial interview with me was intended to be on background, meaning I wouldn’t be quoted by name. But as the receipts tumbled out, it seemed pretty clear that you didn’t need a weatherman to know which way this wind was blowing.
Moreover, I had just gotten a text from my attorney. Ozy was denying my claim for severance. You see, I had been fired. Again. This time for refusing to take down a Substack that the company had told me I could start. Something that I had in writing. Apparently, Ozy would not continue severance talks with me on account of a negative Glassdoor review that Rao and Watson believed I had written. It had actually been written by another employee, but it wasn’t my job to tell them that.
It was, however, my job to tell Smith that he could quote me on all of what we had just spent an hour talking about. Most specifically, my description of what Watson had wrought with Ozy: little more than a Potemkin village.
After Smith’s story ran, the dominoes started to fall, and as the company tumbled into greater insignificance, I trundled over to Glassdoor and wrote a review. My first.
“In 2021 and for the prior nine years I worked there it was a meat-grinding, micromanaged hell hole where being lied to was as common as being screamed at.”
I signed it with my title, the one I had right before the company fired me: editor at large. I left out my coda, though I’ll mention it here: Ozy downward.•
Eugene S. Robinson will be a guest on Alta Live on Wednesday, June 14, at 12:30 p.m. Pacific time. Register here.
Eugene S Robinson pens Look What You Made Me Do, a Substack, and is the author of A Walk Across Dirty Water and Straight into Murderer’s Row, forthcoming from Feral House.
