The Canadian singer told BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs that the executive told him his music would not sell.
He told Buble he would only produce his music for $100,000 (£82,000) a track, just to get rid of him.
The singer has now sold more than 50 million albums around the world.
Buble started out as a swing crooner and also sings jazz and pop songs.
He told presenter Kirsty Young that David Foster, who has worked with Whitney Houston and Celine Dion, had told him: “You will never be signed to my label, I will never produce you.
“You are talented but I see no record sales for this genre of music.
“To dismiss me, [Foster] said, ‘For $100,000 a track, I will produce on spec a record for you, and because I’m an executive of Warner Bros they’ll get first right of refusal.
But the singer said the encounter made him determined to raise the money to work with Foster.
“And then he pushed me out the door thinking he would never see me again.”
“What he didn’t know was that I would go back to Vancouver and go bank to bank with a manager I had at the time and find an investor,” Buble said.
“He couldn’t believe I had come back. But he said, ‘All right’, and we started making the record.”
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