Since his breakthrough appearance on America’s Got Talent, Oz Pearlman has been working his magic on Corporate America. Now he’s taking his game to a new level by enchanting the world’s top athletes—to the tune of $10 million.
By Justin Birnbaum, Forbes Staff
Inside a Manhattan studio on a chilly December day, Oz Pearlman is asked just how, exactly, he managed to transform a deck of cards clasped between Dak Prescott’s hands into an animal suggested by the quarterback’s Dallas Cowboys teammate. Like any good magician, however, Pearlman is reluctant to divulge “a secret of the trade.”
“The better question is: ‘How did you even know he picked a goldfish?’” the 42-year-old Brooklyn-based mentalist says of the trick, performed during a visit to Cowboys training camp in 2023. “Because the funniest part of that video, what made it go viral, is one guy goes, ‘What if you picked a giraffe?’ Those little authentic moments are everything, right? So you see how it’s real; there’s nothing staged or set up because you could tell if it was.”
Prescott’s reaction—a four-letter word that rhymes with Andrew Luck—certainly seemed genuine. And with dozens of reviews just like it, Pearlman—who specializes in mentalism, a generally prop-free subset of magic focused on influencing and discerning the audience’s thoughts—has become a fixture at NFL team complexes, reading the minds of superstar quarterbacks including the Baltimore Ravens’ Lamar Jackson and the Cincinnati Bengals’ Joe Burrow.
On HBO’s Hard Knocks last year, Pearlman replicated the goldfish trick with New York Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers. But his performances also come with somewhat higher stakes. He has correctly guessed Seattle Seahawks wide receiver D.K. Metcalf’s phone password, for instance, and Buffalo Bills offensive lineman Connor McGovern’s bank PIN. (On this December day, he repeated that feat with a Forbes reporter’s debit card. The passcode has since been changed.)
You might have seen Pearlman bewitching famous athletes in one of the TikTok videos promoted by ESPN or on Instagram, where he has 6.9 million followers. But despite his seeming ubiquity, performing for sports teams is a relatively recent pivot for Pearlman. He still makes the bulk of his living on the corporate circuit, catering to companies including Apple, Netflix and Walmart, and he isn’t cheap, typically charging between $75,000 and $150,000 per gig, or more than $200,000 if he’s performing overseas. With 145 events this year, Forbes estimates Pearlman will collect roughly $10 million in pretax earnings for 2024.
That kind of cash may not put him on the level of, say, David Copperfield, who hauled in an estimated $60 million on Forbes’ last list of the highest-paid magicians in 2019, but Pearlman would have landed among the top five in that ranking. And unlike rival magicians with residencies on the Las Vegas Strip or tours around the country, he doesn’t have to worry about expensive pyrotechnics, and he has never had to sell tickets or chase “butts in seats.”
Since 2022, Pearlman has mesmerized nine teams from the NFL, three from college football and two from the NBA, and he has appeared on countless sports shows across ESPN and Barstool Sports. The sports world usually doesn’t pay as well as Corporate America, but the strategy has caused his popularity to skyrocket, feeding right back to his bottom line.
It’s just as Pearlman foresaw it.
“The only part of linear TV that’s growing still is sports,” he says, backed by Nielsen data that shows 96 of 2023’s 100 most watched TV broadcasts were professional or college football games. “Everything else is nose diving.
“Look how lucrative the NFL deal just was,” he adds, referring to a package of media agreements that were signed in 2021 and are set to pay more than $125 billion over 11 years. “Look how lucrative the NBA deal just was. … I want to tie my ship to someone going up, not someone going down.”
Clairvoyant as he may seem, even Pearlman never predicted his choice of profession, or the magnitude of his success. “‘It’s a good hobby for a doctor’ is what a Jewish mother would say,” he jokes. That didn’t stop him from falling in love with the craft after his first glimpse of live magic on a cruise at age 13.
A few years later, after his parents had divorced and separately returned to Israel—where Pearlman was born and lived until he was 3—he arrived at the University of Michigan, where performing helped him pay for tuition, books and rent. It even helped him land a job on Wall Street with investment management firm Merrill Lynch—it was hard to resist hiring someone with “professional magician” on his résumé.
“I feel bad for the person after me,” Pearlman says. “Every one of my interviews ran 15 minutes over. And at the end, you get that wink and the nod, like, ‘Don’t worry, you’ll be hearing from us later,’ because you win people over.”
The irony for a man who now gets hired by companies like Apollo Global Management, Citi and JPMorgan Chase is that working in the financial world wasn’t a fit. His moment of clarity came after a performance for Merrill Lynch’s chief financial officer, who was shocked to learn he was an employee and not a full-time magician. “What the hell are you doing working here?” Pearlman recalls the executive remarking. He asked himself the same question and quit a month later.
The next decade was a grind. Pearlman performed in restaurants and bars and headlined bar mitzvahs and bridal showers. His breakthrough moment came in 2015 on Season 10 of NBC’s America’s Got Talent. He didn’t win, finishing third behind a ventriloquist and a comedian, but the national exposure catapulted him to a previously unimaginable level.
“Oz is successful as opposed to other people that were on America’s Got Talent because he paid his dues for years,” says Pearlman’s friend Bill Herz, the president of booking agency Magicorp Productions and a renowned magician in his own right. “He played the places where your feet stuck to the ground because there was beer on the floor. He did the audiences where nobody was paying attention, but this is how you learn to capture an audience.”
Mind-Bending: Oz Pearlman cast a spell on the judges of “America’s Got Talent.” He finished in third on Season 10.
NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images
That’s exactly how he made an unlikely connection who would eventually help him break into the sports world. Playing Christmas parties for less than $1,000 a pop about 15 years ago, Pearlman met the host’s brother-in-law: ESPN’s NFL reporter Adam Schefter. That led to gigs at Schefter’s 50th birthday party and his children’s bar and bat mitzvahs.
It just so happens that Seth Markman, a vice president of production at ESPN, was in attendance at Schefter’s daughter’s party three years ago and loved Pearlman’s act, which featured a football-related trick. Pearlman had done some small performances with the network in the past, but this was a launching pad to try something bigger. With Schefter playing the role of unofficial booker, Pearlman lined up three NFL teams for that summer: the Ravens, the Seahawks and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. ESPN sent a film crew with him, shooting video to use on television and social media.
For the teams, Pearlman is an easy sell. “Coaches are always looking for alternative activities,” Schefter says, noting the need to break up the monotony of training camp. The options might include water parks, bowling alleys or movie theaters, in addition to live entertainers. One NFL team budgets between $30,000 and $50,000 for one or two player entertainment events per season, a former employee tells Forbes, with a large chunk of the expenses generally allocated to food and transportation.
Pearlman’s first round of NFL visits, in 2022, was a roaring success. He followed with the Cowboys, the Bengals, the Green Bay Packers and the Jets a year later. This year, he has taken his act to the Bills and, leading up to a preseason game on the road, the Philadelphia Eagles. That performance then scored him a booking at New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft’s house.
“At first I was trying to talk teams into it,” Schefter says. “Now I’ll have teams call me, asking me, ‘Hey, can we get Oz this year?’”
Pearlman says he wants to hit all 32 NFL franchises eventually, but he’s being careful to avoid oversaturation in the sport, limiting himself to three or four each season. Plus, coming up with his routines is a lengthy process, taking almost a year of planning each time. “I bought a waterproof notepad that I have with suction cups, and I swear to God, I write down notes in the shower when it comes to me,” he says. “My creative process is, I start with an ending, and I work backwards.”
While he is far from his peak of 265 events per year, Pearlman, a father of four, wants to bring that number down even further and “work smarter, not harder.” Sports are a key to that goal.
“The last three years have seen just massive growth and exposure, where my rates were able to jump because I’m now the most televised mentalist in the country,” Pearlman says. He has already expanded to the NBA, with video of his performances for the Milwaukee Bucks and the Los Angeles Lakers releasing this month, and he has ideas for other sports, especially golf. “I want to be associated with sports,” he says. “I want to be seen as the sports mentalist.”
In the meantime, Pearlman is embracing his growing celebrity, like when his Uber driver recognized him on the way to meet with Forbes—a bit surprising, he notes, because he was in casual clothes instead of the suit and tie he typically wears in videos online. So when the driver told him he was a huge soccer fan, Pearlman asked him to think of any player. As he exited the car, the driver said it was Manchester City’s Erling Haaland, and Pearlman handed him a sheet of paper with that exact name written down.
“Those little moments you leave people with, they remember them,” Pearlman says. “They tell that story forever, is my hope.”
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