>>97772008What a lot of people like to believe about Jackson is that he was this kind of unplugged, ethereal free-spirit (and that his pedofilia, which he basically admitted on-camera while talking to Louis Theroux, was a result of his being child-like in his own mind).
But if you look at the business dealings he made, he was actually a very shrewd investor. Sure, there was stuff about him trying to build a theme park around his home (which is something Walt Disney had done just 30 years earlier, though Disney had always done this with the intention of opening it as a paying attraction, rather than by invitation), into which things like trying to buy the bones of John Merrick might fit, if we look at it as part of the American carnival/sideshow tradition. But plenty of very rich men have eccentric homes related to their interests; John Travolta has a home next to a runway capable of servicing a 747 jet, because as a fully qualified commercial pilot, it makes sense for him to do so in order to keep his annual flying hours up.
What we're interested in is not the veil of eccentricity or the bizarre activities of his later years but the deals themselves. Look at his acquisition of the Beatles back catalog in 1985: he actually out-bid Paul McCartney for ATV, paying a cool 47 million.
Ten years later, he sold *half* of ATV to Sony for twice what he'd paid for the whole deal a decade before - a 4x increase in just 10 years. At his death in 2009, his remaining portion of ATV was valued around $1 billion. When it was sold to Sony in 2016 by Jackson's heirs, it was worth $750,000.
Obviously in the midst of all this the man himself was undergoing some... problems, financial and otherwise, and was reportedly close to bankruptcy in 2006; but the fact is he made a profit of $800 million on his original investment - even if we account for inflation, it was still a very shrewd acquisition, and if he gave a shit about his friend and collaborator Paul McCartney, it didn't show.
