Every year, Forbes publishes a list. It does not get the attention it deserves. It does not trend on social media the way new album releases trend, or tour announcements trend, or celebrity feuds trend. It comes out quietly, and most people scroll past it without stopping. I stopped this year. Because the number at the top of the list made me put my phone down and sit with it for a moment.
The list is called the Forbes top-earning dead celebrities. It tracks how much money deceased public figures earn in a given year through catalog royalties, licensing deals, merchandise, film rights, brand partnerships, and estate income. It has been published annually since 2001. In that time, the name at the top has changed hands several times.
Elvis, John Lennon, various others depending on the year and whatever cultural moment was driving their particular catalog. In 2026, Michael Jackson is at the top. By a margin that I am going to show you in a moment, and that I want you to sit with the same way I sat with it. But before the number, I need to give you the context.
Because the number without the context is just a number. With the context, it becomes something else entirely. Stay with me. Because in part four, I am going to show you a comparison that most coverage has been completely ignoring. A side-by-side that involves artists who are currently alive, currently touring, currently releasing music, currently at the peak of their careers.
And what that comparison reveals about what Michael Jackson actually built is something I genuinely have not been able to stop thinking about. Let’s start at the beginning. Michael Jackson died on June 25th, 2009. He was 50 years old. He was in the middle of preparing the largest concert residency of his career, the This Is It shows at the O2 Arena in London.
50 dates that had sold out in hours and generated a level of anticipation that the live music industry had not seen in decades. The shows never happened. The man who was supposed to perform them was found unresponsive at his rented home in Holmby Hills that morning and pronounced dead at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center a short time later.
The cause was acute propofol intoxication. His personal physician, Dr. Conrad Murray, was later convicted of involuntary manslaughter. In the immediate aftermath of his death, the music industry did what it always does when a major artist dies. It recalibrated. Catalog sales spiked. Streaming numbers, which were still relatively new in 2009, jumped dramatically.
Radio stations ran marathons. The conversation about his legacy, which had been complicated for years by the allegations and the trials and the tabloid coverage, shifted in the specific way that death shifts conversations about complicated people. The noise got quieter. The music got louder. And then the estate got to work.
The Michael Jackson estate is managed by John Branca and John McClain, two men who were named co-executors in Michael’s will and who have spent the 16 years since his death doing something that most estates of deceased artists have never managed to do. They have not merely preserved the legacy. They have grown it.
Actively, strategically, and with a level of commercial sophistication that the music industry has studied and attempted to replicate and has not been able to fully reproduce. The deals they have made in those 16 years are worth understanding before we get to the number. Because the number is a product of those deals and understanding where it comes from changes what it means.
In 2012, the estate sold a 50% stake in the Sony/ATV music publishing catalog, which Michael had purchased in 1985 for 47 and a half million dollars, to Sony for approximately 750 million dollars. That single transaction generated a return on investment that would be extraordinary in any industry and is essentially unparalleled in the history of music publishing.
In 2016, Sony purchased the remaining 50% stake for approximately 750 million dollars, bringing the total amount generated from that original 47 and a half million-dollar investment to 1.5 billion dollars over 30 years. The estate has also managed the Mijac music catalog, which contains the rights to Michael’s own compositions, with exceptional care.
Licensing deals, synchronization rights, film and television placements, brand partnerships, the catalog has been placed carefully and lucratively in ways that have maintained its cultural cachet while generating consistent revenue across multiple income streams simultaneously. Then came the biopic. Michael, the biographical film directed by Antoine Fuqua and starring Jaafar Jackson as Michael, opened in the United States on April 24th, 2026.
The film made $97 million in its opening weekend in North America alone. Globally, $218 million in a single weekend. As of this recording, the film has crossed $400 million worldwide and is still in theaters across 82 territories. The estate’s deal with Lionsgate, which distributed the film, included back-end participation in the film’s profits.
The specific terms have not been made public, but industry sources familiar with the negotiation have described it as one of the most favorable back-end deals for an estate in the history of biographical cinema. When a film makes $400 million and the estate has meaningful back-end participation, the income generated from that single project alone is significant enough to affect the annual Forbes ranking substantially.
Add to that the streaming bump. Jackson’s catalog streams jumped 95% over the film’s opening weekend, from 16.3 million streams in the United States the previous weekend to 31.7 million. That bump did not fully normalize after the first week. It settled at a new baseline that is meaningfully higher than the pre-film baseline.
Streaming royalties are calculated on per-stream rates that seem small in isolation, but at the scale of Michael Jackson’s catalog across every streaming platform simultaneously, across every territory where those platforms operate accumulate into numbers that are very large very quickly. Merchandise licensing.
Neverland related intellectual property. The ongoing management of the name and likeness rights which are among the most valuable name and likeness rights in the history of entertainment. All of it flowing through the estate. All of it contributing to the annual number. Now, the number. According to the 2026 Forbes top earning dead celebrities list, Michael Jackson’s estate earned $230 million in the 12 months covered by the report.
$230 million in one year. 16 years after his death. I want to put that number next to some other numbers. Because this is part four and this is the comparison I promised you and this is the thing I have not been able to stop thinking about. Taylor Swift, who is by most measures the biggest active music artist on the planet right now, earned an estimated $190 million in 2025 from her Eras Tour, her catalog, her merchandise, and her various business ventures combined.
The Eras Tour was the highest grossing concert tour in the history of live music. She has a global promotional infrastructure operating every single week. She has a social media presence that drives cultural conversation continuously. She is at the absolute peak of a career that has already been historic. Michael Jackson’s estate outearned her by $40 million without a living person attached to it, without a tour, without a new album, without a social media account, without a single interview or appearance or promotional push of any kind that
required the presence of a human being. Drake earned an estimated $150 million in 2025. Beyoncé earned approximately $160 million. dollars. Bad Bunny, who has dominated Latin streaming and global charts for several years running, earned an estimated $120 million. dollars. All of them are alive. All of them are actively creating and releasing and touring.
All of them have the full machinery of the modern music industry working on their behalf every single day. Michael Jackson has been dead since 2009. He out-earned every single one of them. This is not the first time. This is not a 2026 anomaly driven entirely by the biopic bump. Michael Jackson has appeared on the Forbes top earning dead celebrities list every single year since his death.
In multiple years, including 2016 when the Sony/ATV deal closed, the estate has generated income that would have placed him among the top earners in the entire music industry regardless of whether the artist was alive or dead. What the biopic did was accelerate something that was already happening. It opened the catalog to a new generation.
It created a streaming bump that has settled at a new higher baseline. It generated film income that contributed directly to the annual total. And it did something harder to quantify, but arguably more important than any of those things. It reminded the world at scale, across 82 territories simultaneously, that the music exists and that it does something to people that they cannot explain and cannot stop returning to.
The Shazam number is the one I keep coming back to. Activity tied to Jackson rose 140% following the film’s release. Shazam is not people opening Spotify and deliberately searching for something they already know. Shazam is people hearing something and not recognizing it and needing to find out what it is. 140% means that a massive number of people heard a Michael Jackson song somewhere and encountered it as something new.
Which means the catalog is still finding first-time listeners 16 years after his death, 44 years after Thriller, still finding people who have never heard it before and stopping them in their tracks. That is what $230 million in a single year actually represents. Not just smart estate management, though the estate management has been genuinely exceptional.
Not just the biopic bump, though the biopic contributed significantly. It represents a catalog that was built out of something durable enough to generate first-time listeners in 2026, to make people stop in the middle of whatever they were doing and ask what that song was, to drive streaming numbers to a new baseline that is higher than any baseline that existed before the film opened.
You cannot manufacture that. You cannot replicate it with a marketing budget or an algorithm or a social media strategy. It is either there in the music or it is not. And in Michael Jackson’s catalog, it is there in a way that 16 years of absence and the full weight of everything that was said about him in the years before and after his death have not been able to diminish.
The Forbes list will come out again next year and the year after that. And the estate will continue to be managed by people who understand what they are holding and what it is worth and how to make decisions that honor both the commercial reality and the cultural weight of what Michael Jackson left behind. But the number I want you to carry away from this video is not $230 million.
That is just money. The number I want you to carry away is 140%. The Shazam number. The people who heard something in a theater or on a streaming platform or in a scene from the biopic and did not know what it was and needed to find out. Because that number is not about money. That number is about a song finding someone who was not looking for it.
About music doing what music does when it is built out of something real. It travels. It finds people. It stops them. It makes them ask what it is. Michael Jackson has been dead for 16 years. His music is still finding people for the first time. That is not an estate story. That is not a Forbes story. That is the only story that actually matters.
If this video gave you something to think about, hit that like button and subscribe for more breakdowns like this one. Drop a comment below. What was the first Michael Jackson song that stopped you? We read every single one.
Michael Jackson Out-Earned Every Living Artist in 2026 — The Forbes Number Nobody Is Talking About
Every year, Forbes publishes a list. It does not get the attention it deserves. It does not trend on social media the way new album releases trend, or tour announcements trend, or celebrity feuds trend. It comes out quietly, and most people scroll past it without stopping. I stopped this year. Because the number at the top of the list made me put my phone down and sit with it for a moment.
The list is called the Forbes top-earning dead celebrities. It tracks how much money deceased public figures earn in a given year through catalog royalties, licensing deals, merchandise, film rights, brand partnerships, and estate income. It has been published annually since 2001. In that time, the name at the top has changed hands several times.
Elvis, John Lennon, various others depending on the year and whatever cultural moment was driving their particular catalog. In 2026, Michael Jackson is at the top. By a margin that I am going to show you in a moment, and that I want you to sit with the same way I sat with it. But before the number, I need to give you the context.
Because the number without the context is just a number. With the context, it becomes something else entirely. Stay with me. Because in part four, I am going to show you a comparison that most coverage has been completely ignoring. A side-by-side that involves artists who are currently alive, currently touring, currently releasing music, currently at the peak of their careers.
And what that comparison reveals about what Michael Jackson actually built is something I genuinely have not been able to stop thinking about. Let’s start at the beginning. Michael Jackson died on June 25th, 2009. He was 50 years old. He was in the middle of preparing the largest concert residency of his career, the This Is It shows at the O2 Arena in London.
50 dates that had sold out in hours and generated a level of anticipation that the live music industry had not seen in decades. The shows never happened. The man who was supposed to perform them was found unresponsive at his rented home in Holmby Hills that morning and pronounced dead at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center a short time later.
The cause was acute propofol intoxication. His personal physician, Dr. Conrad Murray, was later convicted of involuntary manslaughter. In the immediate aftermath of his death, the music industry did what it always does when a major artist dies. It recalibrated. Catalog sales spiked. Streaming numbers, which were still relatively new in 2009, jumped dramatically.
Radio stations ran marathons. The conversation about his legacy, which had been complicated for years by the allegations and the trials and the tabloid coverage, shifted in the specific way that death shifts conversations about complicated people. The noise got quieter. The music got louder. And then the estate got to work.
The Michael Jackson estate is managed by John Branca and John McClain, two men who were named co-executors in Michael’s will and who have spent the 16 years since his death doing something that most estates of deceased artists have never managed to do. They have not merely preserved the legacy. They have grown it.
Actively, strategically, and with a level of commercial sophistication that the music industry has studied and attempted to replicate and has not been able to fully reproduce. The deals they have made in those 16 years are worth understanding before we get to the number. Because the number is a product of those deals and understanding where it comes from changes what it means.
In 2012, the estate sold a 50% stake in the Sony/ATV music publishing catalog, which Michael had purchased in 1985 for 47 and a half million dollars, to Sony for approximately 750 million dollars. That single transaction generated a return on investment that would be extraordinary in any industry and is essentially unparalleled in the history of music publishing.
In 2016, Sony purchased the remaining 50% stake for approximately 750 million dollars, bringing the total amount generated from that original 47 and a half million-dollar investment to 1.5 billion dollars over 30 years. The estate has also managed the Mijac music catalog, which contains the rights to Michael’s own compositions, with exceptional care.
Licensing deals, synchronization rights, film and television placements, brand partnerships, the catalog has been placed carefully and lucratively in ways that have maintained its cultural cachet while generating consistent revenue across multiple income streams simultaneously. Then came the biopic. Michael, the biographical film directed by Antoine Fuqua and starring Jaafar Jackson as Michael, opened in the United States on April 24th, 2026.
The film made $97 million in its opening weekend in North America alone. Globally, $218 million in a single weekend. As of this recording, the film has crossed $400 million worldwide and is still in theaters across 82 territories. The estate’s deal with Lionsgate, which distributed the film, included back-end participation in the film’s profits.
The specific terms have not been made public, but industry sources familiar with the negotiation have described it as one of the most favorable back-end deals for an estate in the history of biographical cinema. When a film makes $400 million and the estate has meaningful back-end participation, the income generated from that single project alone is significant enough to affect the annual Forbes ranking substantially.
Add to that the streaming bump. Jackson’s catalog streams jumped 95% over the film’s opening weekend, from 16.3 million streams in the United States the previous weekend to 31.7 million. That bump did not fully normalize after the first week. It settled at a new baseline that is meaningfully higher than the pre-film baseline.
Streaming royalties are calculated on per-stream rates that seem small in isolation, but at the scale of Michael Jackson’s catalog across every streaming platform simultaneously, across every territory where those platforms operate accumulate into numbers that are very large very quickly. Merchandise licensing.
Neverland related intellectual property. The ongoing management of the name and likeness rights which are among the most valuable name and likeness rights in the history of entertainment. All of it flowing through the estate. All of it contributing to the annual number. Now, the number. According to the 2026 Forbes top earning dead celebrities list, Michael Jackson’s estate earned $230 million in the 12 months covered by the report.
$230 million in one year. 16 years after his death. I want to put that number next to some other numbers. Because this is part four and this is the comparison I promised you and this is the thing I have not been able to stop thinking about. Taylor Swift, who is by most measures the biggest active music artist on the planet right now, earned an estimated $190 million in 2025 from her Eras Tour, her catalog, her merchandise, and her various business ventures combined.
The Eras Tour was the highest grossing concert tour in the history of live music. She has a global promotional infrastructure operating every single week. She has a social media presence that drives cultural conversation continuously. She is at the absolute peak of a career that has already been historic. Michael Jackson’s estate outearned her by $40 million without a living person attached to it, without a tour, without a new album, without a social media account, without a single interview or appearance or promotional push of any kind that
required the presence of a human being. Drake earned an estimated $150 million in 2025. Beyoncé earned approximately $160 million. dollars. Bad Bunny, who has dominated Latin streaming and global charts for several years running, earned an estimated $120 million. dollars. All of them are alive. All of them are actively creating and releasing and touring.
All of them have the full machinery of the modern music industry working on their behalf every single day. Michael Jackson has been dead since 2009. He out-earned every single one of them. This is not the first time. This is not a 2026 anomaly driven entirely by the biopic bump. Michael Jackson has appeared on the Forbes top earning dead celebrities list every single year since his death.
In multiple years, including 2016 when the Sony/ATV deal closed, the estate has generated income that would have placed him among the top earners in the entire music industry regardless of whether the artist was alive or dead. What the biopic did was accelerate something that was already happening. It opened the catalog to a new generation.
It created a streaming bump that has settled at a new higher baseline. It generated film income that contributed directly to the annual total. And it did something harder to quantify, but arguably more important than any of those things. It reminded the world at scale, across 82 territories simultaneously, that the music exists and that it does something to people that they cannot explain and cannot stop returning to.
The Shazam number is the one I keep coming back to. Activity tied to Jackson rose 140% following the film’s release. Shazam is not people opening Spotify and deliberately searching for something they already know. Shazam is people hearing something and not recognizing it and needing to find out what it is. 140% means that a massive number of people heard a Michael Jackson song somewhere and encountered it as something new.
Which means the catalog is still finding first-time listeners 16 years after his death, 44 years after Thriller, still finding people who have never heard it before and stopping them in their tracks. That is what $230 million in a single year actually represents. Not just smart estate management, though the estate management has been genuinely exceptional.
Not just the biopic bump, though the biopic contributed significantly. It represents a catalog that was built out of something durable enough to generate first-time listeners in 2026, to make people stop in the middle of whatever they were doing and ask what that song was, to drive streaming numbers to a new baseline that is higher than any baseline that existed before the film opened.
You cannot manufacture that. You cannot replicate it with a marketing budget or an algorithm or a social media strategy. It is either there in the music or it is not. And in Michael Jackson’s catalog, it is there in a way that 16 years of absence and the full weight of everything that was said about him in the years before and after his death have not been able to diminish.
The Forbes list will come out again next year and the year after that. And the estate will continue to be managed by people who understand what they are holding and what it is worth and how to make decisions that honor both the commercial reality and the cultural weight of what Michael Jackson left behind. But the number I want you to carry away from this video is not $230 million.
That is just money. The number I want you to carry away is 140%. The Shazam number. The people who heard something in a theater or on a streaming platform or in a scene from the biopic and did not know what it was and needed to find out. Because that number is not about money. That number is about a song finding someone who was not looking for it.
About music doing what music does when it is built out of something real. It travels. It finds people. It stops them. It makes them ask what it is. Michael Jackson has been dead for 16 years. His music is still finding people for the first time. That is not an estate story. That is not a Forbes story. That is the only story that actually matters.
If this video gave you something to think about, hit that like button and subscribe for more breakdowns like this one. Drop a comment below. What was the first Michael Jackson song that stopped you? We read every single one.
