Potential Changenaire #004: Michael Jackson

He made the best-selling album in human history, bought the Beatles’ songbook, and gave away hundreds of millions of dollars — much of it quietly. Then came the allegations, and they never fully left. We measure Michael Jackson’s record four ways — and the open questions.

August 29, 1958. Gary, Indiana. Michael Joseph Jackson was the eighth of ten children, born into a working-class family with a steelworker father who ran the household like a boot camp — and heard something in his sons worth drilling.

The Jackson 5 signed to Motown in 1969. Michael was 11: the frontman, the voice, the one the camera found. Four straight number-one singles. He was a child star before he was a teenager — which explains a great deal of what came later, though it excuses none of it.

The breakthrough

The solo run started with Off the Wall in 1979. Then came Thriller, November 1982 — and nothing in pop music was ever the same. Guinness confirms it as the best-selling album of all time: more than 65 million copies, some estimates past 70 million. Thirty-seven weeks at number one. Eight Grammys in a single night, a record at the time. Seven of its nine tracks went top ten.

Then May 1983. Motown 25, forty-seven million people watching. After the Jacksons medley, Michael stayed on stage alone for “Billie Jean” — and did something no one had seen. The moonwalk. He glided backward like gravity had been negotiated. It is still the most famous four seconds in television dance history.

He understood something the industry didn’t yet: the video was the art. The fourteen-minute “Thriller” short film cost half a million dollars — absurd money then — and became the first music video inducted into the National Film Registry. “Billie Jean” and “Beat It” forced MTV, barely a year old, past its unspoken color line. After Jackson, the network played Black artists because not playing them cost too much.

Bad followed in 1987 — the first album ever to produce five consecutive number-one singles. Dangerous in 1991 moved more than 30 million copies. Career total: over 400 million records. Guinness named him the Most Successful Entertainer of All Time. The numbers aren’t close to anyone else’s.

He bought the board

Here’s the move that separates the performer from the owner. In the early eighties, Paul McCartney — Jackson’s duet partner and friend — showed him a booklet of song copyrights he owned and explained where the real money in music lives: not in the singing, in the owning. Whoever holds the publishing gets paid every time a song plays — radio, film, commercial, concert. Jackson reportedly joked back: one day, I’ll own your songs.

McCartney thought he was kidding. He wasn’t.

In August 1985, Jackson paid $47.5 million for ATV Music — some 4,000 songs, including roughly 251 Lennon-McCartney compositions. The Beatles’ songbook. His lawyer John Branca had asked McCartney and Yoko Ono first whether they wanted to bid. Neither did. So a kid from Gary, Indiana — who’d started on a famously thin Motown royalty — bought the publishing on “Yesterday” and “Hey Jude.” Every cover, every commercial, every movie needle-drop: a check with his name on it.

In 1995 he merged ATV with Sony’s publishing arm to form Sony/ATV — a fifty-fifty joint venture, roughly $100 million in his pocket — which grew into the largest music publisher on earth. His own songs stayed separate, in Mijac Music, his own company. After his death, the estate sold his half of Sony/ATV back to Sony for $750 million. The catalogs are still worth well over a billion.

Other artists watched all of it happen, and the lesson traveled: own your publishing, own your masters, or someone else owns you. A generation of artists fought their fights on ground Jackson had mapped. He didn’t just play the game. He bought the board — then showed everyone the board was for sale.

The giving

Here’s the part the highlight reels skip. In 1984, after the Victory Tour, he gave away his entire share — three to five million dollars — to children’s hospitals and scholarship funds.

In 1985 he co-wrote “We Are the World” with Lionel Richie. Forty-five artists, one night, one song. It raised more than $63 million for famine relief and became one of the best-selling singles ever — twenty million copies.

In 1992 he founded the Heal the World Foundation. That November it airlifted 47 tons of medical supplies into besieged Sarajevo. After the LA riots he put $1.25 million into health counseling for inner-city kids. When a Pepsi commercial set his hair on fire in 1984, he donated the $1.5 million settlement to the burn center that treated him — they named it after him.

Guinness recognized him for supporting 39 charities — more than any pop star. The lifetime total is genuinely hard to audit; published estimates run $300 to $500 million, and he gave much of it anonymously. His will directed 20 percent of his estate to children’s charities. The estate still honors it.

The open questions

A serious ranking holds the whole record. Jackson’s includes allegations this profile will not soften and will not adjudicate — here are the facts:

1993. Thirteen-year-old Jordan Chandler’s family accused Jackson of sexual abuse. Police investigated; the FBI kept files. Before criminal charges were filed, Jackson settled the civil claim for a reported $23 million, with no admission of liability. The accuser stopped cooperating with the criminal investigation, and it was closed without charges.

2005. Jackson stood trial in Santa Maria, California — People v. Jackson — on ten counts including child molestation. After sixteen weeks and roughly thirty hours of deliberation, the jury acquitted him on every count. He was never convicted of any crime.

2019. HBO aired Leaving Neverland, with Wade Robson and James Safechuck alleging long-term abuse. The estate sued HBO, called the film a “posthumous character assassination,” and continues to deny wrongdoing. Related civil suits against Jackson’s companies have been revived on appeal; litigation continues.

The FBI files. Released after his death in 2009, they document a decade-long probe. No charges ever resulted from it.

That’s the record as it stands. Readers will weigh it differently, and we won’t tell you how.

How we measure it

How many lives it touches: very high. Over 400 million records. A single song that raised $63 million for famine relief. Hospital wings, burn centers, scholarship funds, and 39 charities across a lifetime.

How deeply it changes a life: high. Famine money fed people. Burn centers healed them. And the art itself — the shared language of half the planet’s dance floors — is a kind of change you can’t spreadsheet.

Will it outlast them: very high. Thriller still sells. The moonwalk is permanent vocabulary. The giving structures — the will’s 20 percent, the ongoing estate donations — are still moving money. And the catalogs he bought still pay: the publishing empire outlives him by design.

Can we actually count it: medium. Album sales and the big single gifts are documented. The lifetime giving total is estimated, never audited — and the foundation’s early books were thin enough that it was dissolved in 2002 over missing filings. We count what’s countable and say so.

Our call: Potential Changenaire — yes, with the open questions on the record. Nobody in history moved more people through music. The giving was real, enormous, and often anonymous — and the business moves rewrote what an artist was allowed to own. The allegations are serious, and the public record on them is unresolved; a ranking that looked away wouldn’t deserve trust. He did a great deal to shape the world. The world, in the end, did far less to protect him. Both go in.

Tomorrow: #005.