Is Michael Jackson Broke?

Michael Jackson earns an enormous amount of money. His annual income is astonishing: somewhere between $18 million and $20 million. But this titanic sum is dwarfed by the amount he manages to spend every year: well over $30 million, including punishing interest payments to various creditors. Jackson is in debt by as much as a quarter of a billion dollars.

Jackson has seemingly always felt any cost could be justified when it came to his work. In 1987, during his Bad tour, Jackson demanded the simultaneous availability of a bus, a jet and a helicopter to ferry him from one venue to the next. That way, he could choose the form of transport he felt like using from day to day.

“We made a ton of money on the Bad tour,” says Frank DiLeo, who was Jackson’s manager from 1984 to 1989. “But Michael was spending it as fast as he was making it. He would have private jets fly his friends, stars and just hangers-on to wherever we were performing.” By the time the tour’s final accounting was complete, it had actually cost Jackson money.

“I think he made $40 million,” DiLeo says, “but he probably spent $40 million.”

Throughout the 1980s, whenever he recorded, Jackson had three fully staffed studios available, so he could select the one that most suited his mood. And while his videos revolutionized the form, they’ve always been extravagantly expensive. The extended video Martin Scorsese directed for “Bad” in 1987 cost more than $2 million. Today, Jackson’s videos cost between $4 million and $5 million each.

And the spending has only gotten worse. For Invincible, he spent more recording each song — sometimes as much as $300,000 — than most artists spend to make entire albums. During the sessions, he recorded an estimated 84 songs — at a rough cost of $20 million — before whittling the track listing down to 16 for the final cut. Include his monthlong stays in a $10,000-a-night suite at New York’s Four Seasons hotel, and it’s clear how he has managed to accrue debt from his work alone.

But his private life is, if anything, even more costly. In 1988, Jackson bought Neverland, his ranch/fairground/petting zoo/homestead in Los Olivos, California, for $17 million. He then spent $9 million on various “improvements.” After closing the deal, he thanked his lawyer, John Branca, by buying him a new Rolls-Royce.

The ranch’s annual maintenance costs alone are huge. When Jackson has children visit him, they zip around the ranch on a toy train. They board it outside his mansion, from where it travels to the zoo, the rides and the movie theater. Inside the theater, the walls are lined with beds, where sick children can rest while they watch the screen.

“He has a video collection bigger than Blockbuster,” says one frequent Neverland visitor. “I once saw him looking through a magazine and ordering almost everything he saw. ‘I want that motorcycle. That bike. This. That.’ One after another, he kept ordering. It was like one of those shows where the contestant has five minutes to run through a store and fill up as many shopping carts as possible. It was crazy.”

In 1993, police investigated Jackson over allegations that he had molested a 13-year-old boy. The investigation was dropped, but Jackson settled out of court a civil suit brought by the boy’s family — for a sum reported to have been between $15 million and $24 million.

Total it up — the house, the rides, exotic pets that require constant care, family members who require financial support, two divorces (from Lisa-Marie Presley and Debbie Rowe) — and Jackson’s annual expenses come to about $13 million. This sum excludes interest payments on all his outstanding loans, which add an estimated $18 million to $22 million a year.

To read more about Wacko Jacko’s bizarre behavior and financial self-destruction, check out the November 2002 issue of Blender, .