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Michael Jackson died about $500 million in debt. A song catalog he bought for $41.5 million in 1985 later sold for $750 million. His father wasn't in the will.
The clip opens in a Las Vegas shop, where he's buying vases at $275,000 each. Then what he earned against what he spent. Then Paul McCartney on how Michael ended up owning the Beatles songs. Then Joe Jackson, three days after his son died.
McCartney gave him the idea himself: think about music publishing. Michael said he'd buy Paul's songs. Paul thought it was a joke. Years later he asked for a raise on his own work. The answer, he says: "That's just business."
The math.
1985: the ATV catalog, with most of the Beatles songs: $41.5 million, by most reports.
1995: merged with Sony. He kept half of the bigger company.
2005: income about $20 million a year, spending $30 million to $40 million.
2009: died owing about $500 million, by reports and a later court filing.
2016: his half sold to Sony for $750 million. About 18 times the 1985 price, roughly 10% a year for 31 years.
2024: Sony reportedly paid at least $600 million for half of his own catalog.
2026: the film "Michael" passed $1 billion, the first biopic to do it.
The will: 40% to his mother, 40% to his three children, 20% to charity. Joe Jackson, who had built and managed the Jackson 5, wasn't named. He asked the estate for more than $15,000 a month. A judge shut the door on any inheritance.
Income never saved him. One asset did. He spent more than he earned for years and borrowed against the catalog, and it only worked because no one ever forced the sale while he was alive. Ruin takes one bad day. He didn't have it, and the family collected everything after.
You owe $500 million and own one asset that keeps growing. Do you sell it and walk away free, or keep borrowing against it and hope you outlast the debt?
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Christy Carlson Romano was paid $6,000 an episode on Disney’s Even Stevens. Her co-star, Shia LaBeouf, got $12,000.
At 21, she fired her own mother.
In the video below, she explains where the money went.
She was 13 when she booked the show. She and her mom left Connecticut and her three siblings behind for Los Angeles.
Every check got split: 10% to her agent, 15% to her manager, 5% to a business manager, 30 to 35% to taxes. “You’re making less than half.”
Her mom ran her career and her money.
At 21, with a book deal and a record deal, she made a million dollars in one year.
Nobody told her to save. No house, no rental property.
Then a boyfriend asked how much money she had in the bank. She had no idea. “I think that your family is taking from you,” he told her.
She was paying her mom a salary and renting her mom’s apartment as an “office.”
She went no contact with her entire family, took back her money and fired her mom.
The case for her mom: she moved across the country with a 13-year-old. In 2000 she wrote to Christy’s agent: “Shia receives $12,000 per episode and Christy $6,000… Christy wants what Shia is getting.”
Today she still helps her mom financially. “I just wish that she would have had the foresight to say, ‘Hey, let’s get you a house.’”
Her co-star got $12,000 an episode. She got $6,000, and her mom got a salary.
So did her mom take her money, or just never teach her to keep it?
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The three actors of The Blair Witch Project made $500 a week, and the film took $248 million at the box office.
When it passed $100 million, the studio sent them a fruit basket.
In the video below, Heather Donahue recalls strangers on the street asking the actors for their ticket money back. "And I'm like, oh honey, I didn't get any of the money."
The actors shot the film themselves, on handheld cameras, with no union. Their page-and-a-half deal memo promised them 1% of net profits if the film grossed over $1 million.
The marketing presented the actors as dead. Donahue says they "weren't really allowed to be alive until the box office numbers started to drop."
Later the actors sued the studio over their names and faces in ads for the sequel, and settled. Forbes estimates each got about $375,000, mostly from settlements, against about $1.3 million under the original deal.
Lionsgate owns the film now, and the actors want payments in line with a union contract. Joshua Leonard wrote that it's "25 years of disrespect from the folks who've pocketed the lion's share" of the profits.
Lionsgate declined to comment. Now the studio is making a new Blair Witch with Blumhouse.
Was a fruit basket for $100 million at the box office a thank-you, or a way of mocking the actors?
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The 1960 Yankees outscored the Pirates 55-27 in the World Series. They won games 16-3, 10-0 and 12-0.
They lost the series.
Pittsburgh won the other four, every one of them close: 6-4, 3-2, 5-2. Then Game 7 at Forbes Field turned into one of the strangest games ever played.
The Pirates go up 4-0. The Yankees come back and lead 7-4 in the eighth. Then a routine double-play grounder takes a bad hop and hits shortstop Tony Kubek in the throat. He leaves the game, the inning stays alive, and catcher Hal Smith hits a three-run homer over the left-field wall. Pirates 9-7.
Top of the ninth, the Yankees tie it 9-9.
Bottom of the ninth. Bill Mazeroski, the Pirates' second baseman, known for his glove, leads off against Ralph Terry. Ball one. Then the second pitch goes over the left-field wall.
It was the first walk-off home run to end a World Series, and it came in a Game 7. Mazeroski rounds third waving his helmet, and the fans are on the field before he gets home.
The Yankees' Bobby Richardson drove in 12 runs and was named Series MVP, the only one ever picked from the losing team. Casey Stengel was out as Yankees manager days later.
28 more runs, three blowouts, and nothing to show for it. Has there ever been a stranger World Series?
Sara Blakely started Spanx with $5,000 in savings at 29.
At 41, Forbes put her on the billionaires list. She still owned 100% of the company.
She was supposed to be a lawyer. She took the LSAT and, in her words, "basically failed it." She took a prep course and tried again. That didn't work either.
So she sold fax machines door to door instead.
The idea came from a simple problem. She wanted no panty lines under white pants.
Then Oprah called. Later she went on QVC with her second product and sold over 8,000 in 6 minutes. That's when she knew she wasn't "a one-hit wonder."
Most founders give away pieces of their company just to survive. She kept every share.
In the video below, she explains how she sees money: "Money just makes you more of who you already were."
That line aged well.
In 2021 she sold a majority stake to Blackstone in a deal that valued Spanx at $1.2 billion.
Then she gave every employee $10,000 and two first-class plane tickets.
My takeaway: every share you keep is a decision you get to make later. I've given up a bigger cut than I should have on a side project, and I still think about it.
Would you rather own 100% of something small or 10% of something huge?
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Michael Oher was the homeless kid in The Blind Side, a $300 million hit that won Sandra Bullock an Oscar. In 2023, he says he found out the family from the movie never adopted him.
They had made themselves his conservators instead. For almost 20 years they had legal control over his deals.
In the video below, Good Morning America visits the Tuohys in 2009 and tells the country that Michael was "eventually adopted by the family."
Oher was 18 when he signed the papers in 2004. He says he was told it was part of the adoption.
Two years later the Tuohys negotiated the movie deal. His lawsuit says Sean, Leigh Anne and their two kids were each promised $225,000 plus 2.5% of the profits.
Sean Tuohy first said they hadn't made any money from the film. Then he said everyone, Michael included, got about $14,000.
Their own accounting later showed the family received more than $432,000 from the studios, and paid Oher $138,311 in ten checks over 16 years.
Oher's lawyers put it simply: "Without Mr. Oher, there would be no movie."
And one detail tells you how it looked from the other side. The Tuohys' lawyer said they never needed his money, because Sean Tuohy sold his company for $220 million.
In 2023 a judge ended the conservatorship. She said she was disturbed he had ever been put in one.
The Tuohys deny taking advantage of him and called his lawsuit ludicrous.
The movie made them America's favorite family. The paperwork made them his managers.
Was it love that got complicated, or a business that called itself a family?
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Billionaire Clippers owner Donald Sterling was 80 and married.
His 31-year-old assistant, V. Stiviano, got a $1.8 million duplex, a Ferrari, a Bentley and a Range Rover from him.
Then his wife sued, and a judge ordered the assistant to hand back $2.6 million.
Sterling and Stiviano had met at the Super Bowl in 2010. By 2014 she was a regular at the owner's side at Clippers games.
His wife of nearly 60 years, Shelly, took her to court. The lawsuit described a woman who targets wealthy older men and gets them to hand over their money as gifts.
In April 2014 a tape of Sterling's racist remarks got him banned from the NBA for life. Stiviano was the one who had recorded it, and days later she sat down with Barbara Walters on ABC's 20/20. Asked what the relationship was, she said:
"I'm his confidant, his best friend, his silly rabbit."
Walters pointed out the 50 years between them and wanted to know if he paid her:
"He at first started paying me as an employee, and then he started paying me off the books."
Was she in love with him?
"I love him like a father figure."
Then Walters asked what the biggest misconception about her was. Stiviano smiled:
"That I'm a mistress or a whore, or a woman of the night."
Was she an assistant paid off the books, or a mistress who got caught?
Chris Gardner was homeless with a 14-month-old son while training to be a stockbroker.
Hollywood turned it into a $307 million movie. He says real life was harder.
In the movie, they hide in a subway bathroom and pretend to be cavemen.
In the video below, he explains his real game. It was simpler. No matter who pounded on that door, they weren't there. "We're invisible."
But the bathroom wasn't the worst part.
He says after rent, child care is the biggest bill a young parent has. Every morning he left his boy with strangers and hoped everything was okay.
Nobody at work had a clue. He owned two suits, one blue and one gray, and wore them for a whole year.
The office joke was that he was "re-enacting the Civil War."
By day he learned to manage other people's money. At night he had nowhere to sleep.
In 1987 he started his own investment firm.
Ask him how, and he doesn't talk about luck. "You've got to have a plan." And then: "Plan B sucks."
My takeaway: a plan doesn't fix a bad month. It gives you a reason to show up in the same suit tomorrow.
Is having a Plan B smart, or is it what keeps people from going all in?
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Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos made $49.8 million in 2023. Aaron Paul won three Emmys for Breaking Bad, a show Netflix has streamed since 2011. He says Netflix pays him $0 for it.
He said it on a picket line, outside the studio that made the show.
In the video below, Paul stands outside Sony in 2023 and says: "I don't get a piece from Netflix on Breaking Bad, to be totally honest, and that's insane to me."
Breaking Bad ran on AMC from 2008 to 2013. Paul has said it drew about 700,000 viewers before Netflix. Then Netflix put the early seasons online, people binged them, and the finale pulled 10.3 million.
"I just saw the other day Breaking Bad was trending on Netflix," he says. "Shows live forever on these streamers."
At the same picket, Bryan Cranston is blunter. Without unions, he says, management "will just keep stuffing their pockets."
The case for Netflix: it didn't make the show. Sony did, and Netflix paid Sony to stream it. When Paul signed on in 2007, Netflix was still mostly mailing DVDs. And he was paid for every episode he shot.
The case for Paul: the show keeps making money from his face, years after the cameras stopped. He says he doesn't.
One man helped run Netflix that year and made $49.8 million. The other played Jesse Pinkman, and he says he got $0.
The show never stopped making money. It just stopped paying him.
So does Netflix owe Aaron Paul a cut, or was he already paid in full?
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Corey Feldman of The Goonies says the only way his father would sign the emancipation papers was if he paid him the last $40,000 he had. He had grossed $1 million by 14.
"The only way my father, who loves me so much, would sign the papers to release me is if I paid him $40,000."
He started working at 3. Both of his parents were his managers, and he says each of them took 15% off the top. At 8 he was living in a $400,000 house in his own name. He says they took out a second and a third mortgage on it and lost it.
At 15 he went to court to get free of them.
$1 million grossed. $40,000 to walk away.
In 1997 he told the story on Howard Stern's TV show with his father sitting a few feet away. Asked if it was true, Bob Feldman said: "I'm sorry, that's wrong." He said he fought the emancipation because he wanted his son to finish school.
"What was that piece of paper I signed?" Corey asked. "And what was that check?"
Asked if he had ever hit his son, his father said he had spanked him. His mother has denied the abuse.
He paid the $40,000. He got the signature.
Was Bob Feldman a father worried about his son's schooling, or a manager who simply billed his son for the way out?
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A few weeks after breast surgery, she was walking through a shopping center in Miami when a car stopped next to her. The window rolled down, someone told her she was gorgeous and handed her a card, and asked if she wanted to model. She went home, googled the company, and found out it made porn.
Mia Khalifa was born in Lebanon and moved to the US when she was about 10. Two weeks after she started school, 9/11 happened, and her classmates started calling her “the terrorist.” In college her weight dropped to 98 pounds. She says she grew up never feeling pretty and craved male attention.
Two weeks later she called back. She thought it would be her dirty little secret. She had 400 friends on Facebook, so who would ever find out?
In late 2014 she shot a scene wearing a hijab. Within three days her Instagram went from 400 followers to 200,000. ISIS sent her a photoshopped picture of her head on a beheaded body. She joked about it online. A week later someone posted a Google Maps image of her apartment, and she lived in a hotel for two weeks.
In the video below she tells both stories herself, the card from the car and the night she realized they knew where she lived.
In the same interview she says she still hates leaving the house. When fans ask for a photo and thank her for her “work,” it makes her feel dirty.
She also admits she kept the link in her bio after she quit, because she needed the money. Asked what she’d tell young girls, her first answer is “Don’t do porn. Don’t ever do porn.”
Three years later she was back, selling adult content to subscribers.
So was she a victim of her own fame, or did she learn to sell it better than anyone?
Rob Gronkowski got a few BodyArmor shares in 2012 and forgot he owned them.
In 2021, Coca-Cola bought the company in a deal that valued it at $8 billion.
He was one of the first athletes to sign with the brand. Some cash up front, some shares.
Then he won the Super Bowl, and BodyArmor offered him less than before.
In the video below, he admits: "I didn't know how companies worked, I didn't know how business worked."
A pay cut right after a Super Bowl made no sense to him. So he walked and signed with Monster Energy.
Kobe Bryant became the face of BodyArmor. The brand took off.
Gronk stayed with Monster and didn't think about it again.
Years later, the sale went through and a check showed up for shares he'd totally forgotten.
"That's when I really realized, oh, I see how equity works now."
He walked away over the cash. The shares he never sold were the part that mattered.
Now he tells rookies to skip the $200,000 car and get the $60,000 one. "It's not going to make you play better on the football field."
My takeaway: the best move he made with those shares was doing nothing. No selling, no checking, no panic. I check my portfolio way too often to pull that off.
Would you take less money today for a piece of a company that might be worth nothing?
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Lil Wayne says Birdman sat on $10 million of his money and 49% of the label that signed Drake and Nicki Minaj. So he sued the man he called his father for $51 million.
In the video below, the two of them sit side by side on Rap City in 2007. Then Tampa, 2025, when Birdman tries to give a speech on stage.
Wayne joined Cash Money in 1997.
In 2006 he and Birdman put out a joint album. It was called Like Father, Like Son. The single was "Stuntin' Like My Daddy."
Wayne started his own label inside Cash Money, Young Money. It signed Drake. It signed Nicki Minaj.
Then his album Tha Carter V got stuck. In December 2014 he tweeted: "I am a prisoner and so is my creativity."
And: "I want off this label and nothing to do with these people but unfortunately it ain't that easy."
A month later he sued Cash Money and Birdman for $51 million.
His side said Birdman owed him an $8 million advance for the album and $2 million more once it was done. He said he never got the 49% of Young Money he was due.
The label had registered Young Money under Cash Money. So, he said, he never saw an accounting of what Drake made for it.
It took three and a half years. In June 2018 they settled. The terms are secret. Reports said more than $10 million.
Hours later, a photo showed the two of them in the studio together. Tha Carter V finally came out that September.
Then came Tampa. February 2025, the Hot Boys reunion. Birdman was talking to the crowd. Wayne cut him off mid-speech: "Alright, let's go, let's go, let's go."
Like Father, Like Son, the album said. The son needed a $51 million lawsuit to get paid.
Was Birdman the father who made Lil Wayne, or the boss who kept his money?
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Who fixes the culture after AI deletes the meetings?
Eric Schmidt sat down with Nicolai Tangen, who runs Norway's sovereign wealth fund, and gave Fortune its story. He used to sit in meetings 12 hours a day, and AI, he said, can strip out that coordination tax. A 10,000-person company probably has a couple of thousand people it doesn't need.
Asked how AI reshapes business, he said almost none of the companies listening "will actually do the necessary changes in their culture." Companies are organized around belief systems, he explained, where the morning is predictable and everyone is comfortable. You'd sit through 13 minutes of regulation talk to reach it. The meetings quote Fortune ran comes 23 minutes later.
This is my reading; he never said it. The cut is the easy part. A friend of his laid off 20 percent of his people, mostly the glue people who did planning and shuffled numbers, and got death threats for it. A company can do exactly that and still run the old approval chain with fewer hands.
So the scarce skill is a manager willing to make the morning unpredictable. A team lead who deletes the weekly status meeting but keeps the same three sign-offs gets the layoff without the speed.
Plenty of the people cheering the coordination tax line work at exactly the kind of company he says won't change.
Daymond John's mom took a $100,000 loan on a house worth $75,000 to fund FUBU.
Three months later, $500 was left.
He had $300,000 in orders from stores. 27 banks still turned him down.
In the video below, he remembers what his mother told him: "Let's take all the money we can out of the house."
He turned the house into a factory. Friends slept in sleeping bags next to the sewing machines. He rented rooms to strangers and kept his shifts at Red Lobster.
Here's the part nobody warns you about.
He paid for fabric 90 days ahead. Then staff, then shipping. The stores paid him in 30, 60 or 90 days.
"It wasn't that I was spending on lavish things. I just didn't know how money worked."
He was selling more than ever and running out of cash at the same time. The bank was talking about taking the house.
Then his mom had one last idea. A $2,000 newspaper ad: "Million dollars in orders. Need financing."
33 people called. He says most of them were loan sharks.
But one call came from Samsung's textile division. FUBU got a manufacturing and distribution deal.
My takeaway: orders aren't money. Cash in the bank is. I've had months where people owed me more than I had.
Would you let your mom put her house on the line for your business?
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Yale students pay thousands of dollars for lectures like this. You’re watching for $0
Bonus: the Rule of 72. Divide 72 by the annual interest rate to see how many years it takes your money to double. At 8%, that’s 9 years.
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In 1962, Stan Lee's publisher told him he couldn't call a hero Spider-Man. In 2002, the Spider-Man movie grossed more than $800 million, and Lee sued Marvel for his share.
In the video below, Lee recalls the answer: "You can't call a character Spider-Man. People hate spiders."
Martin Goodman let him try the character once, in Amazing Fantasy #15. It was the last issue of a title already being cancelled.
In 1998, as he stepped back from daily work, Lee signed a lifetime deal: $1 million a year, plus 10% of the profits Marvel made from movies and TV shows using its characters.
The first Spider-Man movie came out in May 2002. Lee had a cameo. He stood in a crowd.
Marvel collected more than $50 million in profits from the film, NBC News reported.
In November 2002, Lee sued. He said he hadn't seen any money from it.
Marvel argued the 10% only counted after production and distribution costs were taken out. In January 2005, a federal judge ruled for Lee. Marvel said it would appeal.
In April 2005, the two sides settled. Marvel booked a one-time charge of $10 million, covering Lee's past and future claims.
In the same announcement, Marvel said it would start making its own movies. Three years later, its studio released Iron Man.
Lee kept his salary and his cameos. The 10% stayed with Marvel.
Did Marvel shortchange the man who pitched Spider-Man, or did Lee sell his share too soon?
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Paris Bennett his IQ 141. The mind of a genius, but the actions of a monster. He was 13 years old when he stabbed his four-year-old sister Ella seventeen times while she slept.
He says he had planned to kill his mother first. Then he decided death was too quick. He wanted her to live with it for the rest of her life, so he took the one thing she loved most.
Under Texas law a 13-year-old could not be given life or the death penalty. He got the maximum available: 40 years.
He has never apologised to her. He becomes eligible for parole in February 2027.
Afterwards he called a friend and talked about nothing for ten minutes.
Then he called emergency services, put panic into his voice, and pretended to be giving his sister CPR.
The first officer walked past him into the bedroom.
"I remember hearing him mutter oh my god when he saw what I had done."
"I just felt like I was drowning in shame."
In the video below Piers Morgan notices that he is talking about his dead sister in the present tense, and stops him on it.
"I loved her. I loved her with every fibre of my being."
She's dead, Morgan says. Because you killed her.
Yes.
But you love her?
"Yes. I do."
Asked whether he even understands what love is, he says he cannot answer that. That he cannot point at something and say, that is love.
His mother is sitting beside him. She answers it for him.
"There is at least one thing he should be able to point at and say that's love. And that's the fact that I'm still here."
He says he spent his childhood feeling alone, left out by his family.
She says he was her only child for years, that her life revolved around him, that he was loved by everybody, and that she remembers his childhood completely differently.
Morgan puts the arithmetic to him plainly. His mother lost both her children in one night. One to death, one to prison.
"At no point did I ever feel like I had accomplished something."
"I realise we're talking about myself, but it doesn't feel like we are."
After the killing he met the criteria for conduct disorder. Standardised assessments later recorded significant psychopathic traits. The experts who examined him did not expect him to change.
His mother has since stopped speaking to him entirely.
"I finally accepted it is okay to love him as my son but really dislike the man he has become."
She has been told that she and her younger son will be at risk when he is released, and that she will probably have to move.
In February a parole board decides whether the thirteen-year-old who did this still exists somewhere inside the man who now talks about him in the third person. If they let him out, his mother has already been told to leave her home. So whose call should that be — the board's, or the one person alive who loved them both?
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ANTHROPIC MADE $16.3B IN 6 MONTHS AND LOST $80.7B DOING IT
the S-1 dropped today. ticker $ANT on Nasdaq, debut expected Thanksgiving week. the numbers that matter:
→ revenue H1 2026: $16.3B, up 13.5x from $1.2B a year ago
→ net loss $80.7B, but $72.4B of it is an accounting charge on convertible notes, not cash
→ compute and infrastructure: ~$8.9B in 6 months
→ ~250 customers pay over $10M a year
→ 1,900+ pay over $1M, 11,900+ pay over $100K
→ net revenue retention ~900%. customers from a year ago now spend 9x more
→ no revenue split by product. Claude Code isn't broken out
→ risk factors name a state-backed group that ran Claude Code against ~30 targets
the headline loss looks scary. the number to watch is the 900%
stop reading 10 recaps of it. the filing is public, let Claude read it for you:
→ open the S-1 on SEC EDGAR, save it as PDF
→ drop it into Claude with the prompt from the reply
→ ask follow-ups: risks for API users, compute deals, voting control
→ every number comes back with the exact quote, so you can check it
before: hundreds of pages of legal text. after: a 1-page brief you can trust
prompt in the reply ↓
follow @X1Kafadzhy for AI news you can actually use
Anthropic has filed an S-1 registration statement with the SEC related to its proposed IPO.
Read more: anthropic.com/news/s1-sec
Legal disclaimer: A registration statement relating to these securities has been filed with the SEC but has not yet become effective. These securities may not be sold, nor may offers to buy be accepted, prior to the time the registration statement becomes effective. This post does not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy these securities, nor shall there be any sale of these securities in any state or jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such state or jurisdiction.
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Michael Jordan signed with Nike in 1984 for about $500,000 a year, plus royalties. Last fiscal year, the Jordan Brand sold $7.03 billion.
The man who signed him says the idea that changed the deal came from Jordan’s mother.
In the video below, Sonny Vaccaro tells Rich Eisen how it came together.
Jordan was not on his A-list that day. Vaccaro had seen him play once, when North Carolina beat Georgetown, and never again until Jordan turned pro.
Eisen asks whether owning a piece of the company was Deloris Jordan’s idea. Vaccaro says it was.
He says he had already promised Michael a piece of the shoe. Then Deloris asked for more, and he and Phil Knight said yes.
Vaccaro says Jordan saved the company. “I don’t know if there’s a Nike today,” he adds. Nike would have been another Reebok or another Puma.
Forbes estimates Nike now pays Jordan nearly $300 million a year. His NBA salaries over his whole career added up to about $90 million.
The case for Vaccaro: he talked Nike into betting its marketing budget on one unproven rookie instead of several players.
So who deserves more credit for the deal: Vaccaro, who bet the budget, or Deloris Jordan, who asked for a piece?