I expect what it really means is that the money is squirreled away in various corporations, trusts, limited liability companies, etc. So the celebrity may have no personal assets and may have a lot of personal debt, but the money is there to fund their lifestyle, in the form of corporate assets.
Indeed. It’s appalling how much of that stuff is tacky, tasteless crap.
It’s a classic part of the profile for pedophiles to fill their houses with things that will be attractive to their target age and gender. Video games, toys, snacks, computers, etc. are all pretty common. Michael Jackson just had the means to groom his home to the nth degree. It was literally an amusement park. Kids could drive around the ranch on golf carts. Forget a stack of console games, he had an arcade. Forget DVD’s, he had his own movie theater. Forget a cute little puppy, he had a zoo. He had a kitchen and a staff who could instantly whip up whatever decadent snack, or dessert or a kid could possibly devise. It was a heaven on earth for 12-year old boys…except for when bedtime rolled around.
Just to clarify for the OP, Forbes says that MJ was $500 million in debt.
Anyone know if he making some kind of payments on that debt? Like, I used to carry a small credit card debt, but I was paying it and still in the black (I could have paid it all off all at one if I really had to, although it was less of a hardship to carry the balance for a few months). Or was he just borrowing more money to pay off his outstanding lonas, like using your Visa to pay off your Mastercard?
You do realize that he could command like $ 10m for a private performance for Saudi royalty and the like right? His spending was profligate but the music business was certainly as lucrative as it looks when it came to Michael Jackson. Also he probably commanded a much higher portion of the profits from album sales than most other artists in addition to selling more than most other artists. You’re correct in thinking that album sales represented a small proportion of his income, but he had a lot of different revenue streams throughout his career. He just spent way more than he made and his income probably decreased significantly in the past decade.
Heh, interesting. I was about to say how many awesome treasures there are in there. I mean the guy had the Edward Scissorhands-hands, fer Chrissake! Admittedly, those life-size statues are kinda creepy.
Re: the prices listed, those are just starting bids, right? Seeing as it’s an auction.
Check your PM’s.
ETA: Oh, shit. PM’s not working for me. Don’t know what’s up. Sorry!
Especially in the past 10+ years as a significant percentage of the once record-buying public feels warranted to steal and copy to their hearts content.
It’s interesting how a guy like Michael Jackson can own so much useless crap that people are willing to pay retarded sums of money for. What’s even funnier about it is that it’s made more valuable by the simple fact that you are buying it from Michael Jackson. His taste in art and stuff he collected shows what a man-child he truly was. It was hard to hate him for his pedophilia because mentally he likely was a peer to those children. I pity him, but he was a dangerous twisted monster at the same time.
Never mind.
So now that he’s dead, and seeing as you can’t defame a dead person*, will there be people coming out of the woodworks with creepy stories of bedtime at the Neverland Ranch?
- Almost true. In U.S. libel law, it’s very hard, but not impossible, to defame the dead.
I think a lot of those were collectible replicas, not the real things (can’t remember what pages the Scissorhands were on). Also of note, that 242 page catalog was only one of five and was the “amusement” stuff. He also had more grown up fine arts stuff.
You realize The Hangover wasn’t a documentary right?
Mike Tyson lives in Phoenix in a pretty normal neighborhood. Sadly, his 4 year old daughter had an accident and died in that home a few months ago.
http://msn.foxsports.com/boxing/story/9490078/Tyson’s-daughter,-4,-dies-day-after-accident
I think Michael Jackson was allowed to go into so much debt simply because he had enough of an income stream to make the minimum payments. The same way someone making $24,000/yr can wind up with $80,000 in debt on various credit cards.
Michael Jackson had a lot of money coming in. I don’t know how much, but his income didn’t just come from album sales of his music or his ownership of other music catalogs. The big money comes in from the songwriting. Michael Jackson wrote all his own songs. Elvis Presley never got a nickel if someone did a cover of ‘Hound Dog’, but every time someone covers a Michael Jackson song, MJ would get a royalty.
Every time a MJ song is used in a movie, or on TV, he’d get royalties. And his songs are in a LOT of movies and TV shows. Every time one of his videos is played on MTV or other stations, he got a royalty, and his videos are among the most played of all time. Michael Jackson impersonators play entire concerts of his songs, and he got a royalty for every one of the songs they sing.
American Idol did a Michael Jackson show this year. I’m sure he got big bucks for that, and then all those songs went on sale on iTunes, and sold tens of thousands of copies each, for which he would also have gotten a big cut. And so it goes.
Last year, Jackson was paid $400,000 for the rights to stage a broadway play of “Thriller”. Imagine how many other deals like that have come along over the decades. MJ was huge in Japan, and they probably had all kinds of Michael Jackson products, exhibits, games, and other products. Then there are toys (Millions of Michael Jackson figures have been sold over the decades), posters, T-shirts, and other merchandise.
I’m guessing Michael Jackson was pulling in more money per month in royalties from his own music and other intellectual property than was any other performer.
Yeah; if he could’ve just lived like a regular upper-middle class person for a couple or three years, he probably could’ve serviced the debt.
Actually, Elvis got co-writing credits on several tunes he didn’t write as “payment” for recording the songs. “Love Me Tender” is one such song. This was limited to only a few songs, but it did happen.
If he was capable of living like a regular wealthy person he may never have incurred the debt to begin with.
I was listening to a radio documentary about how Jose Conseco’s battle with bankruptcy, and they had a financial advisor on the show who works primarily with pro athletes. He was saying the biggest problem that young superstars face, is that when the money starts coming in, they have a terrible time finding someone they really truly can trust, who is actually skilled, trained and experienced with handling the wealth. Often they end up just asking their peers and get terrible advice, or go with a “friend” or a weasely “business manager” whose true interests are their own cuts (managers often get 10-15% off the top).
The quote I remember from the documentary, was that the advisor always made sure when a young athlete got his first big huge payment and signing bonus, it was treated as if it was the last income the athlete would ever have. The new millionaire could buy a car with the next paycheck, but that first huge sum was locked into something the kid could retire on.
Celine Dionne gets a portion of publishing rights and songwriting royalties too. If you’re the one and only true songwriter, it’s still a reasonable deal because it’s unlikely your song will ever generate as much income as it would if Celine makes it go platinum. Faced with getting $8,000 one year for some small band to record your tune on an album that sells 100,000 copies, or splitting $80,000 with Celine, who may sell one million albums, get radio play, and licensing deals… Sharing with the big star is not so bad.
As long as you can convince people to keep lending you money, you can keep going deeper into debt. MJ could, for two reasons:
(1) His interests in some pretty valuable publishing rights, which are potentially an ever-renewing asset that can be sliced, diced, used as collateral, etc.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,155529,00.html
(2) Him. He was an established brand and some reasonably smart money could have been on him pulling off a bailout by a focused, well-marketed comeback (even if only in the form of the nostalgia shows or a gargantuan, tacky residency in Vegas). When you have at least the potential to swing a couple hundred million dollar deal, it may seem at least marginally less insane to let yourself get into debt of the same magnitude.
And that’s just based on his existing assets. He was a talented guy and while he hadn’t done much new recently, it wouldn’t be impossible to imagine his cranking out a few more multi-platinum albums or somehow regrouping as an entertainment entrepreneur, producer, whatever, and to financing him in the meanwhile.
Oh, a final factor – a lot of lenders LIKE lending money to people in desperate straits IF they can handicap that the guy may eventually turn it around OR if they can price the cost of the loan such that they recoup their investment through high interest even if the principal partly or totally goes away. We can assume with some safety that the last million dollars MJ borrowed/paid interest on was not at any single digit rate.