Early in 1993 Michael Jackson walked to the top of the stage at the Super Bowl, folded his arms, and just stood there. He didn’t move for well over a minute. A packed stadium and close to a hundred million people at home waited on him. This was the biggest star on the planet at the absolute peak of his fame.
Watch the whole thing and you’ll get why halftime shows were never small again.
Michael Jackson Super Bowl Complete Version HQ
Here’s what almost nobody thinks about while they watch it. The smartest money Michael ever made had nothing to do with that stage, or any stage. And his single biggest payday wouldn’t land until years after he was gone, from a deal he never signed.
Go back to 1985. He was 26, fresh off Thriller, and instead of spending that fortune the usual way he quietly bought a music publishing company called ATV for $47.5 million. Tucked inside were 251 songs written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. In one move he owned most of the Beatles’ catalog.
Owning a song isn’t the same as singing it. The owner gets paid every time it plays, in a film, an advert or a stadium, pretty much forever. So Michael started taking a cut of the Beatles.
Paul McCartney wasn’t happy. By most accounts he’d told Michael years before that publishing was where the real money sat, then watched Michael buy the rights to Paul’s own songs. McCartney later said he wrote asking for them back and got no reply. Can’t fully confirm how those letters went, but they were never close again.
That purchase kept snowballing. In 1995 Michael merged the catalog into a giant partnership with Sony. Then, long after his death, his estate sold his remaining half of it back to Sony for a figure in the hundreds of millions. It dwarfed almost everything he earned while he was alive.
His own records never slowed down either. One of the songs he performed on that Super Bowl stage is the same single that first made him rich enough to go shopping for the Beatles.
Michael Jackson – Billie Jean (Official Video)
If you want the full breakdown of that thirteen-minute halftime show, we went deep on it right here.
So the man standing frozen on that stage, soaking up the loudest moment of his career, had already made his cleverest money somewhere much quieter. He placed a bet in 1985 that most fans have forgotten, and it paid off bigger than any show ever did. That last and biggest payday went to his three kids.