Michael Jackson Is Worth More Than Ever, and the IRS Wants Its Cut

The man who engineered Michael Jackson’s afterlife comeback made the pop star’s heirs rich. Now the IRS wants to be startin’ somethin’.

- Devin Leonard

Seven years after Michael Jackson’s fatal overdose of propofol and lorazepam in 2009, the statute of limitations on gossiping about the deceased is, apparently, over. In one of her rare interviews in the midst of the presidential campaign, future First Lady Melania Trump told the luxury magazine DuJour how Jackson, a friend of Donald’s and onetime Trump Tower resident, mischievously suggested they kiss to make her husband jealous. Then Madonna, on CBS’s Late Late Show, revealed that she’d smooched amorously with him long ago. And the New York Post’s Page Six dropped a chunk from Tommy Hilfiger’s memoir, American Dreamer: My Life in Fashion and Business, about the designer’s visit in the 1990's at Neverland Ranch, the singer’s compound in Santa Barbara County, Calif. After encountering a giraffe and a string of baby elephants outside, Hilfiger found Jackson in his office, with a bandage on his nose, wearing sunglasses and sitting on “an enormous gold-and-burgundy throne.” His two oldest children, Prince and Paris, were there, dressed “like characters from a Broadway show or The Sound of Music—velveteen knickers, dirndl jumper, ruffled blouses, patent leather shoes, each in full makeup.”

Paris, in response to such banter and because she’s now 18, just gave her first full-length interview in a Rolling Stone cover story, setting the record straight: She’d had a wonderful childhood until her father’s death at age 50. After, she struggled with drugs and attempted suicide several times, but she’s now happy, clean, and, the magazine reports, “heir to a mammoth fortune—the Michael Jackson Trust is likely worth more than $1 billion, with disbursements to the kids in stages.”