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Billionaire investor Marc Lasry on Thursday announced he would step down as chairman of Ozy Media, just days after The New York Times reported that the company’s chief operating officer had posed as a YouTube executive during a call with potential investor Goldman Sachs.
Lasry, who also owns NBA champions the Milwaukee Bucks and CEO of Avenue Capital Group, was named president of Ozy Media exactly three weeks ago.
“I think to move forward, Ozy requires experience in areas like crisis management and investigations, where I don’t have any particular expertise,” Lasry said in a statement announcing his move. He added that there was still an investor in Ozy Media.
The New York Times article published on Sunday evening questioned many of the promotional and journalistic practices of Ozy Media, a digital media start-up. Ozy Media has steadily inflated its viewership on YouTube and other platforms and wrongly attributed glowing comments about itself in the ad, according to the New York Times article and several follow-up reports in other media
Most notably, the company’s board of directors excused the behavior of its COO, Samir Rao, who allegedly impersonated the YouTube executive, by blaming the incident on Rao’s sanity. The company’s board of directors said on Tuesday that it had asked Rao to take time off while he investigated the allegations in the Times report.
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