What Happened to the Fortune Michael Jackson Made?

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SEATED in a $9,000-a-night luxury suite in the sail-shaped Burj Al Arab hotel in Dubai, Michael Jackson played the role of a wealthy pop star as he met with two senior executives of the Sony Corporation last December. From the opulent setting to Mr. Jackson's retinue of advisers, there was little indication that Sony's troops were paying a visit because they were concerned that he was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy proceedings. Sony was worried because Mr. Jackson was the company's partner in a lucrative music publishing business that included songs by the Beatles and other musicians. If Mr. Jackson became insolvent, his 50 percent share of that $1 billion business would be up for grabs to the highest bidder, leaving Sony to confront the uncomfortable possibility that it would be forced into a new, unpredictable partnership not of its own choosing. With the waters of the Persian Gulf and a teeming, prosperous emirate splayed out far beneath them, the group got down to business. According to those who attended the meeting and requested anonymity because confidential financial matters were discussed, Mr. Jackson was pensive and cooperative, seemingly well aware of the gravity of his situation despite the grandeur of his surroundings. He only chirped up occasionally to remark on what a wonderful investment the catalog had been. After listening to Mr. Jackson, Robert S. Wiesenthal, a senior Sony executive, eventually proposed that Sony would help the singer find a bank to lend him more than $300 million to pay off his debts. In exchange, Mr. Jackson would possibly forfeit a portion of his half of the Beatles catalog. Just last month, Mr. Jackson — still swamped in debt, with his musical career in stasis and his personal life limned by scandal — agreed to that financial overhaul. It is likely to strip him of about half of his remaining stake in the catalog, which he has relied on as a financial lifeline for about a decade. According to executives involved in the restructuring talks, Mr. Jackson used the catalog, as well as copyrights to his own songs, as collateral for roughly $270 million in bank loans he took out to fund a spending spree that includes upkeep for his sprawling California ranch, Neverland, and other exotic luxuries. Given how precarious Mr. Jackson's financial situation appears to be, it is unclear how long he will be able to retain his remaining stake in his prized music catalog. A reckoning appears near, and Mr. Jackson's ability to hold onto his fortune has proven to be as fleeting as stardom itself. The arc of Mr. Jackson's career, and his management of his business and financial affairs, tracks some of the timeworn truisms about the realities of the entertainment industry and those who inhabit its upper tiers: a child star unwittingly beholden to others who control his bank account; a more mature adult who is savvy about packaging and marketing himself but who grows increasingly undisciplined about his spending; and, finally, a reclusive caricature locked inside a financial and emotional fantasyland of his own making. For those without access to Mr. Jackson's personal accounts, assessing exactly how much money has passed through his hands over a career that spans decades is impossible. Sales of his recordings through Sony's music unit have generated more than $300 million in royalties for Mr. Jackson since the early 1980's, according to three individuals with direct knowledge of the singer's business affairs. Revenues from concerts and music publishing — including the creation of a venture with Sony that controls the Beatles catalog — as well as from endorsements, merchandising and music videos added, perhaps, $400 million more to that amount, these people believe. WHATEVER portion of those earnings actually ended up in Mr. Jackson's wallet is also difficult to assess because it would have to account for hefty costs like recording and production expenses, taxes and the like that would have reduced income from his business endeavors. Mr. Jackson could not be reached for comment. "I think that Michael never had any concept of fiscal responsibility, or logical fiscal responsibility. He was an individual that had been overindulged by those that represented him or worked for him for all of his life," said Alvin Malnik, a former financial adviser to Mr. Jackson and a former lawyer for Meyer Lansky, the late mob kingpin. "There was no planning in terms of allocations of how much he should spend. As a businessman, you can forecast your spending for the next six months to a year. For Michael, it was whatever he wanted at the time he wanted. by Linda Miller

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"Millions of dollars annually were spent on plane charters, purchases of antiques and paintings," Mr. Malnik continued. "If you want to take a trip to London, that's one thing. If you want to continue that trip and have your entourage of 15 or 20 people go with you, it gets expensive." Others close to Mr. Jackson say that the performer's finances have not deteriorated simply because he is a big spender. They say that until the early 1990's, he paid relatively close attention to his accounting and kept an eye on the cash that flowed through his business and creative ventures. After that, they say, Mr. Jackson became overly enamored of something that ensnares wealthy people of all stripes: bad advice. "Some people can go to a person like Michael and say, 'Listen, this is out of hand.' Other people would much rather say, 'Whatever you want,' and they don't care," said Frank Dileo, who was Mr. Jackson's manager from 1984 to 1989. "I think after me, there were a lot of people that didn't care. All they were interested in was what they were getting. And they killed the golden goose." Michael Jackson has spent a lifetime surprising people, in recent years largely because of a surreal personal life, lurid legal scandals, serial plastic surgeries and erratic public behavior that have turned him — on his very best days — into the butt of late-night talk-show jokes and tabloid headlines. But when his career began to take off nearly four decades ago as a member of the pop group the Jackson 5, fans and entertainment industry veterans recognized something else about the pint-size musical dynamo that was unusual: He was in possession of an outsize, mesmerizing talent. Deke Richards, a writer and producer who worked closely with Berry Gordy, the founder of Motown Records, in shaping the earliest stages of Mr. Jackson's career, recalls watching the singer in one of his earliest performances in Los Angeles. It was 1969 at the Daisy Club, a Beverly Hills venue located on Rodeo Drive, and while the entire Jackson entourage impressed Mr. Richards, Michael was the star. "It was almost evident that it was something special, it was like the reincarnation of Frankie Lyman," said Mr. Richards, referring to the 1950's teenage vocalist who turned "Why Do Fools Fall in Love" into a hit. "Nobody had seen anything like that since Frankie, a kid with chops like that who could sing like that. It was like a 30-year-old man was inside this little boy." Although Mr. Gordy promoted Mr. Jackson as an 8-year-old wunderkind in advance of the Daisy Club appearance, the singer was just weeks shy of his 11th birthday when he performed there. Even so, he had already spent years in talent shows and performing in seedy Midwestern clubs under the aegis of Joe Jackson, his dictatorial and ambitious father. Joe Jackson and Mr. Gordy were the singer's twin mentors during Michael's early career; neither of them could be reached to comment for this article. Despite Michael Jackson's youth, Mr. Gordy and others recognized that in addition to the singer's talent he also was an observant, diligent understudy keen to learn all that he could about the workings of the music business. "Michael had a knowingness about him," Mr. Gordy recalled in a 1994 interview with Billboard magazine. "He paid close attention to every single thing I said. Even when my back was turned, I knew he'd be watching me like a hawk. The other kids might have been playing or doing whatever they were doing, but Michael was dead serious. And he stayed that way." Mr. Jackson had his own recollections of those years. "When you're a show-business child, you really don't have the maturity to understand a great deal of what is going on around you. People make a lot of decisions concerning your life when you're out of the room," he wrote in "Moon Walk," his 1988 autobiography. "Berry insisted on perfection and attention to detail. I'll never forget his persistence. This was his genius. Then and later, I observed every moment of the sessions where Berry was present and never forgot what I learned. To this day, I use the same principles."

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Mr. Gordy paid many of Motown's most successful acts, including the Jackson 5, far stingier royalty rates on their albums than they might have earned in a later era, and certainly lower than what Mr. Jackson himself earned during his heyday in the mid-to-late 1980's. According to J. Randy Taraborrelli's 1991 biography, "Michael Jackson: The Magic and the Madness," Motown paid the Jackson 5 a royalty rate that was just a fraction of what Mr. Jackson secured for himself later in his career. "There was a lot of pressure on Michael as a youngster to perform for the family," said Shelly Finkel, a former rock 'n' roll promoter who currently manages professional boxers and who periodically intersected with the Jackson family when Mr. Jackson was a child. "You get a kid like Michael Jackson and he's unsophisticated with his money and people take advantage. It's not a real upbringing. He didn't mature as a human in all directions." The Jackson 5 jumped from Motown to CBS Records in 1975, and the company rewarded them with better contracts. They also received guaranteed fees of at least $350,000 per album, according to Mr. Taraborrelli's book, well above their Motown fees but still not approaching the stratospheric, multimillion-dollar guarantees Mr. Jackson would begin getting in the 1980's. Concerts offered another source of income, but it was still income that Mr. Jackson shared with his siblings and upon which his father kept a tight rein. Mr. Jackson eventually broke with his father and the Jackson 5, a move toward creative and financial independence marked by his collaborations with Quincy Jones on a trio of albums. The most memorable of those is 1982's "Thriller," which eventually racked up sales of 51 million copies globally, according to the Guinness World Records, making it the best-selling album in history. Yet "Thriller" took a heavy toll, Mr. Jackson's associates say, setting a benchmark of success that the entertainer never stopped chasing. Mr. Jackson's pre-expense share of the "Thriller" bounty — including the album, singles and a popular video — surpassed $125 million, according to a former adviser who requested anonymity because of the confidential nature of Mr. Jackson's finances. Those who counseled him in the "Thriller" era credit the pop star with financial acumen and astute business judgment, evidenced by his $47.5 million purchase of the Beatles catalog in 1985 (a move that served to alienate him from Paul McCartney, the Beatles legend who imparted the financial wisdom of buying catalogs to Mr. Jackson during a casual chat, only to see Mr. Jackson then turn around and buy rights to many of Mr. McCartney's own songs). John Branca, an attorney who structured the purchase for Mr. Jackson and represented him from 1980 to 1990 and periodically after 1993, said he saw no signs of wayward financial behavior in the years straddling the release of "Thriller." "I think Michael was brilliant for a good part of his career — savvy, involved, on top of everything," Mr. Branca said. "I also think he was a marketing genius." In the midst of the "Thriller" phenomenon, Mr. Jackson's appetites were still relatively modest by celebrity standards, and he had just begun to experience the possibilities of riches he had never known in his childhood. Acquaintances from that period say that he would occasionally borrow gas money, and he still lived in the Jackson family home in the suburban Encino section of Los Angeles. Although he made an unsuccessful attempt in 1987 to buy the bones of Joseph Merrick, more famously known as "The Elephant Man," for $1 million, it wasn't until the end of the 1980's that he began to exhibit more baronial tendencies. In 1988, he made his $17 million purchase of property near Santa Ynez, Calif., that became Neverland. At the same time, Mr. Jackson was redefining the concept of spectacle in pop music. He hired Martin Scorsese, the film director, to direct a video for his album "Bad," a clip that one adviser with direct knowledge of the production budget said cost more than $1 million. The same adviser said that Mr. Jackson netted "way north" of $35 million from a yearlong "Bad" tour that began in 1987, and that heading into the 1990's Mr. Jackson was in sound shape financially. While Mr. Jackson began to routinely rotate through different teams of advisers in the 90's, and pour more of his own money into pricey projects like videos, at least one of his advisers from the period contends that Mr. Jackson kept a lid on his spending until even the late 1990's. "I didn't ever see him take all kinds of people all around the world," said James Morey, who served as one of Mr. Jackson's personal managers from 1990 to 1997 (when Mr. Jackson fired him and turned for advice instead to the Saudi sheik Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal). "Michael is very bright, and Michael pretty much knew — even when he was advised something was too expensive — if he felt it was right for the art, he had the means to pay for it. He wasn't oblivious to what budgets were."

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Other events, however, suggest that Mr. Jackson's finances were already under strain by the mid-90's. He retreated from working regularly after the release of "Dangerous" in 1991 and settled a child-molestation lawsuit for about $20 million. More significantly in terms of his finances, he had to sell Sony a 50 percent stake in the Beatles catalog in 1995 for more than $100 million, which one adviser said helped shore up the singer's wobbling accounts. Mr. Jackson wouldn't produce another studio album of completely new material until 2001, yet whenever he surfaced with other works that were compilations of previously released material he still expected promotions and spectacles beyond anything done before. For his 1995 album, "HIStory," for example, he sought to shoot an extravagant "teaser" video to promote it. He shot the video in Hungary for millions of dollars and hired Hungarian soldiers to march in it. "When they were shooting this thing in Hungary, the production company would call me in the middle of the night and say, 'Michael wants more troops,' " said Dan Beck, a senior marketing executive who worked on the video. "He dreamed the big dream. It was P. T. Barnum." MR. JACKSON indulged in other pricey vanity projects, including what one adviser believes to be the most expensive — a 35-minute film called "Ghosts" that he co-wrote with the novelist Stephen King and shot in 1997 with Stan Winston, a special-effects whiz that cost well above $15 million. One person with direct knowledge of Mr. Jackson's spending said that the star paid a substantial portion of as much as $65 million on video projects in the mid-90's — outlays that contributed significantly to his financial problems. Mr. Jackson also came under the sway of an assorted rotation of new advisers who apparently convinced him to make heavy bets on risky investments that never panned out. In late 1996, according to court papers, he met Myung Ho Lee, a Korean adviser who emerged as a central figure in the performer's debt binge. Documents indicate that by late 1998, Mr. Jackson had already taken out and depleted a $90 million bank loan and Mr. Lee arranged a new, $140 million loan from Bank of America that was collateralized by the Beatles catalog and used to pay off earlier debts. Just several months later, the $140 million had evaporated and Mr. Jackson, fresh off of his divorce settlement with Lisa Marie Presley, obtained another $30 million line of credit from Bank of America. Mr. Lee said in court papers that in late 2000 he raised the original $140 million bank loan to $200 million, using part of that loan to pay down the $30 million credit line, which had been entirely tapped. Although documents indicate that Mr. Lee brought at least two risky investment opportunities to Mr. Jackson, Mr. Lee still managed to castigate the performer in court papers for a lack of financial discipline in 1999 and 2000. "Jackson became fixated on obtaining expensive possessions and feeding his ego by listening to the advice of hucksters and imposters," Mr. Lee noted. All the while, Mr. Jackson's spending ramped up. As described by several of Mr. Jackson's former associates, he routinely borrowed large sums of cash to pay for things he may not have been able to afford. Marc Schaffel, who formerly served as an adviser on Mr. Jackson's television projects, alleges in a lawsuit scheduled for trial next month that Mr. Jackson failed to reimburse him for outlays of more than $2.2 million, much of it in cash. THESE expenses included $46,075 in August 2001 for appraisals and architectural work done as Mr. Jackson considered buying a home in Beverly Hills; a $1 million fee paid to Marlon Brando in September 2001 so that the film star would appear at a Madison Square Garden event and in a video honoring Mr. Jackson; more than $380,000 for the purchase of a Bentley Arnage sport sedan and a custom Lincoln Navigator sport-utility vehicle; and $250,000 in June 2003 for antique shopping in Beverly Hills. Mr. Malnik, who began advising Mr. Jackson a few years ago, said in an interview that the entertainer had spent about $8 million annually on plane charters, antiques, paintings, hotel rooms, travel and other personal expenses, and that the annual upkeep for Neverland and its staff was about $4 million. A forensic accountant who testified in Mr. Jackson's criminal trial last year said that the singer's annual budget in 1999 included about $7.5 million for personal expenses and $5 million to maintain Neverland. None of this explains the scale of Mr. Jackson's borrowing, however, or the rapidity with which he burned through those funds.

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The leading drain on Mr. Jackson's ample resources may have been monumentally unwise investments that apparently produced equally colossal losses. Mr. Malnik estimates that some of Mr. Jackson's advisers squandered $50 million on deals that never panned out — what he describes as amusement-park ideas and "bizarre, global kinds of computerized Marvel comic-book characters bigger than life." Mr. Malnik said that he had loaned Mr. Jackson $7 million, part of which was used to settle various lawsuits related to deals gone awry. It's possible that Mr. Jackson's biggest costs may have shifted in early 2000 away from his shopping sprees to simply shouldering enormous monthly interest payments on his debt. According to one executive involved in his affairs, Mr. Jackson was making monthly payments of about $4.5 million in 2005 on $270 million in debt. That works out to an annual interest rate of about 20 percent, a toll more familiar in the worlds of credit cards, subprime lending and loan sharks and not commonly encountered by wealthy people with substantial assets. But Mr. Jackson's wildly errant spending had forced him to confront harsher realities. By the time Mr. Jackson finally met with the Sony executives in Dubai last December, his onerous interest payments had left him in a bind. Fortress Investment Group, a New York-based investment group that specializes in distressed debt, bought Mr. Jackson's loans from Bank of America in 2003 after the singer missed some payments. It then began levying high interest rates. Fortress, which did not respond to an interview request, threatened to call its loan on Dec. 20 last year because of Mr. Jackson's delinquency. What especially concerned Mr. Jackson about that, said one person familiar with the talks, was that it was just five days before Christmas. TO keep Mr. Jackson afloat, Sony arranged an extension with Fortress and brought in Citigroup and other potential lenders to arrange new financing at a lower rate. At a meeting in London on Valentine's Day earlier this year, Citigroup offered Mr. Jackson a new loan with a 6 percent rate. Citigroup struck a deal because Mr. Jackson agreed to give Sony the right to buy half of Mr. Jackson's 50 percent stake in the Beatles catalog at a future date for about $250 million, providing a backstop for Citigroup if Mr. Jackson defaulted. To the amazement of others involved in the talks, Fortress then offered Mr. Jackson the same terms — a measure of how desirable the Beatles catalog has been and continues to be to the various financiers and advisers who have hovered around Mr. Jackson since he bought it two decades ago. By April, a final deal was in place. Citigroup ended up providing a $25 million mortgage on Neverland, most of which Mr. Jackson used to buy back a 5 percent stake in the catalog held by one of his early advisers, Mr. Branca. For his part, Mr. Malnik said he thought Mr. Jackson might have been able to continue to afford his lifestyle and errant spending if he had continued to work, but, of course, Mr. Jackson chose to work less and less. "For Michael, it was, whatever he wanted at the time he wanted," Mr. Malnik said. "This was perpetuated over a great number of years. Ultimately, if you don't change the course of things, you get to the end of the day." Even at the end of the day, however, some people still remember the beginning. When put on hold, telephone callers to Mr. Gordy's office are treated to the 1971 ballad "Got to Be There," Mr. Jackson's hit on his first album as a solo artist for Motown.

Supernannan

Excellent article!! Really worth to read carefully¬¬ I just finished 3/5¬¬But I think the author is fairly objective¬¬¬ But the way¬¬This article is from The New York Times¬¬: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/1 ... l?pagewanted=1&_r=1 Here is a picture from NYT with this news

josecarreras

have seen it before chinese meaning???

Supernannan

原帖由 josecarreras 于 2006-5-20 00:48 发表 have seen it before chinese meaning???

you have see this before?¬¬This was published on May 14, 2006. your 'before' means few days ago? You don't know chinese meaning how do you know you saw it before:wacko Anyway¬¬¬Good article¬¬Give you a general picture of MJ's financial situation from when he was very young until now, good analysis. From this you can really understand 'What happened to the fortune michael jackson made'.

sweetmj

oh,my god ~~~

I like this article, but some big fans have something to say opinions from other sites DENIS: ALL: Please note that the article is based on the mix of some facts and ***speculation***. For example: 1) authors claims that Jackson's debts were results of "overspendings", while actual sane calculations show that $270 million or like loans debts had nothing to do with Michael's spending habits. According to court data the deficit was no more than $10 million even in such year as 1999, when Michael did not release any material. Let alone 2001, when Michael earned about $50 million from his music career, or 1995-1997 years when Jackson got additional tens million dollars to his standard income of about $20 million in "silent" year. 2) Michael's situation in 1995 was perfect. Even according to ignorant Forbes, which usally underesitmates Michael income, in 1995 he got $90 million from his own music career. Plus $110 million from SME for merging ATV MP to S MP, which had nothing to do with alleged financial difficulties. Let alone Michael did not pay any money for settlement. 3) ... 4) ... I just do not have time to oppose ever BS that they put in the article. Media hopes that none of readers have their own minds or even simply does arithmetic. The point is tha their loan theory is nonse -- with the level of spending that is known from court's accountants, Schaffel, and other sources, it would take for Michael about 30 years to only spend his $270 million loan. Let alone the fact that Jackson earned no less than about $650 million from the early 1980s even according to authors of the article, including about $150-180 million during 1995-1997 years from HIStory project alone. The point is that the loans most probably were used for various investment projects, most of which were never announced, and some projects could have to do with NASDAQ shares market which collapsed back in 2000 and could easily make Michael losing assests. Besides Hollywoodticket.com, for which Michael spend and lost $15 million, there was investment in ticket.com. While most of other money could be simply invested in NASDAQ shares and lost during the crisis. From big MJ's investment projects known the purchasal of Landmark Entertainment, which was one of world biggest makers of entertainment equipment and a part builder (that company built Universal parks, for example). Michael and Saudi Prince Al Waleed bought 50% of this company back in 1996 via joint ventury Kingdom Entertainment. I hope I helped to beat the tabloidish BS out of the situation, described in the article RSW: THis article is transparent. It is part of an ongoing campaign to pressure MJ in some way by some people who continue to plot in secret. JUst because it is not a tabloid does not mean it does not have an agenda. This is a team of journalists who have been financed by their editor by allocating them time to pursue this project and write about MJ finances. And an easy giveaway is the alleged person in a hotel in Dubai. There are two parties to the meeting, MJ and Sony. If this was a PR article on MJ's part and the source in that meeting was on MJ's side, then the headline and tone would be different. But this is a Sony source they are relying on to give their own spin. The talk of demise is meant to someway discourage people doing business with MJ and other stuff by reading out of ignorance. What I find to be so crazy is here is a guy who has worked all his life and made hundreds of millions, yet they seem to have a problem with him spending $17 million on a home or some millions on a video production. How many investors lose money on investments? Hollywood at times invests $50 million, $100 million or more in a movie and it doesn't pan out. So many people invest on the stock exchange and at times things don't pan out. Most wealthy people invested in teh .com and some lost tens and hundreds of millions. They should talk about them, it was a collective downturn that did not just affect MJ. But what gives away this talk of demise is that MJ is not on the backfoot trying to pay off debts and pleading for the best deal he can get, he had both Citigroup and Fortress pleading for him to take their offer, and i think MJ didn't like Fortress after their stupid lawsuit, so he went with Citigroup. Better than that, he got them to give him some more money to buy off Branca, how cool is that? It is not someone who is facing demise. But none of them will put up a headline "MJ buys Branca's share of the SonyATV catalogue". You don't go out buying stuff or asking money to buy if your situation is precarious. And I like the way MJ is using Neverland, he is opening up its potential and utilizing it as an asset to acquire more, while not placing it at risk, as any default would only result in a 25% of loss SonyATV loss if that is true. Why do they think MJ's only source of income should be through "working"? Other media moguls don't spend their life working the way MJ does, yet they make big money. MJ is clever, he combines his music career and also spends time doing business deals. With his fame and wealth, he can earn quite as much through business deals as he does with an album release, already he has done a deal for the themeparks as an advisor. There are advisors and designers who earn up to $1 - $3 million for each project they do. MJ has also set up a partnership record label and is doing lots of other stuff, so they can talk of demise as much as they want while MJ matches on. The way you know these articles aren't true is by looking at the obvious. Forensics give you an inside perspective of the direction of things, that is why with DNA and fingerprint forensics, it is the general direction and pattern of the prints or the DNA strands, things that are completely unique that could not be replicated except one in a million or billion. So, from what is well known about MJ's assets, i will name three well known public assets, the SonyATV of which his share is no less that $500million, the Mijac catalogue which he fully owns, which is no less than $100 million and Neverland, which is no less than $20 million. These are all assets that MJ bought one in 1985 and the other in 1988, while Mijac just gets added on with new music he acquires and that which he alredy owns. Well, no one in the media ever tells you about the $890million Sony contract MJ signed in 1991, the $200million Sony paid MJ to merge the catalogue and other earnings from tours, appearances, promotions and other stuff. If you want to believe them that MJ is an overspender, then if MJ was spending $33million each year since 1990, then he has only used up $495million of this entire amount which is 1.09billion from Sony alone. for the merger and record contract. MJ has investments beside the three well known above, unless you want to believe the media that besides the $47million on ATV catalogue in 1985 and the $17million on Neverland in 1988, MJ has never made any other investment. Arnold Schwarzenegger's wealth is estimated to be around $800 million, and this is not from well known standalone assets like MJ. It is said he owns stock in, among other companies, Starbucks, PepsiCo, Coca Cola and Roto Rooter and has millions of dollars in municipal bonds and real estate investments. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/ar ... 03/08/10/ARNOLD.TMP http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/en/doc/2003-08/11/content_253814.htm Now, do you think MJ does not have investments in real estate, shares in the stock market, Pepsico for which he did many adverts since 1980s, Disney, Apple and other sectors both in the US and abroad? Well, it has been publicised MJ's loans are about $200 to $300million. Do your forensics and see what you come up with, no matter how much they say his loans are, they cannot even 25% of the SonyATV catalogue, of which he owns 50%. Arnold Schwaezenegger has a loan of $120million, moreso invested in an asset with depreciating value, not appreciating. Yet the media does not go on all the time about Arnold's $120million loan. The oddest investment, probably the $133 million dollar 747 that he bought from Singapore Airlines and leased back to the company. Schwarzenegger borrowed $120 million on the plane. After the 10-year lease is up, Arnold's investment advisor hopes he can sell the used plane and make a lot of money. http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=politics&id=4085877 MJ has a loan against an asset that is always appreciating in value but the media has endlessly talked about the $200million loan like it is the end of the world for MJ. So, when forensically looking at MJ's financial shape, he is way better off than many other wealthy celebrities who haven't even had certain people conspiring to ruin them. And what is obvious is, if Arnold has such a sizeable fortune in investments alone, what about MJ's fortune in the investments he has made? Look at Arnold's earnings from those investments, on average $20million a year and a loan of $120million. Then compare him to MJ's situation and assets. Here's how much he (Schwarzenegger) made for those three years: Gov. Schwarzenegger's Total Gross Income 2004 -- $19.5 million 2003 -- $13.6 million 2002 -- $25.7 million Most of that is from investments. 2002 was the year he made Terminator 3. http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=politics&id=4085877