I love Forbe's richest dead celebrity list. Dead people making more coin that living peoples appeals to both my sense of the macabre and my sense of paradox.
(I would scratch Yves Saint Laurent from this list because (a) he lives on as a corporate entity (b) the bulk of the $350 million was not earned from creative work Laurent did while he was alive and (c) Laurent is not a celebrity. I'm just sayin.'). ~rave! Jackson third richest dead celebrity (UKPA) 2 hours ago Despite raking in millions of dollars through the sale of rights to footage of his final rehearsals, Michael Jackson is not the top-earning dead celebrity, a new survey has found. Forbes magazine puts the former King of Pop in third place behind Yves Saint Laurent and composing duo Rodgers and Hammerstein ($235 million). The fashion designer earned 350 million dollars (£214 million) over the past year, dwarfing the 90 million dollars (£55 million) taken in by the Jackson estate. Laurent, who died of brain cancer in 2008, appears at the top of the index largely due to an auction of artwork including paintings by Mondrian and Matisse that he once owned. The bulk of Jackson's posthumous cash came through selling the rights to This Is It, a film based on rehearsal footage for what would have been his comeback concerts in London. Forbes estimates that this income was bumped up by the sale of around 9 million albums and 5.5 millions digital downloads since his death in June. Elvis Presley came in fourth in the list, making 55 million dollars (£34 million) over the last 12 months. 1. Yves Saint Laurent ($350 mil) 2. Rogers and Hammerstein ($235 mil) 3. Michael Jackson ($90 mil) 4. Elvis Presley ($55 mil) 5. J.R.R. Tolkien ($50) 6. Charles Schulz ($35) 7. John Lennon ($15) 8. Dr. Seuss ($15) 9. Albert Einstein ($10) 10. Michael Cricton ($9) 11. Aaron Spelling ($8) 12. Jimi Spelling ($8) 13. Andy Warhol ($6)
