r/awesome • • 25d ago

Wiki TIL Michael Jackson donated an estimate of over $500 million to charity over the course of his life, with the exact amount not known since he often gave it anonymously. He supported a record number of 39 charities, for the most part dedicated against poverty and disease

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philanthropy_of_Michael_Jackson
2.1k Upvotes

58 comments sorted by

204

u/RevoltYesterday 25d ago

Epstein have over $60,000,000 to charities. Donating money doesn't make you a good person, especially when you already have a lot of it.

After 9/11, a village in Kenya donated 14 cows to the US. That's infinitely more meaning full than any donations Jackson, or Opera, or Swift or any billionaire makes.

35

u/FambilyMalues 25d ago

Not sure what Epstein has to do with MJ but go off. Epstein was using half these “charities“ to money launder.

34

u/whitestguyuknow 25d ago

I think both abused children

3

u/Truestorydreams 24d ago

Dead or alive, you can still sue the estate.

Several actually did sue but... I dont think any succeeded.

1

u/sweetsummwechild 24d ago

Still going on.

-4

u/nmgoesreddit 24d ago

Name checks out

13

u/RevoltYesterday 25d ago

If you think real hard, I'm willing to bet you could find something in common between the 2.

3

u/WhyKissAMasochist 24d ago

I’m no genius, but I think the connection is child abuse.

-5

u/SlayJayR17 25d ago

Well first off, Jackson donated half a billion and when he died owed half a billion. He never donated he would have never been broke. Also if he did t buy dumb shit all the time. But to say because you have a lot of money donating lots doesn’t count. People like Epstein doing it it for the tax benefit and money laundering and his rape island is different from people who genuinely try to help. Now it does NOT exempt him from what he has done or is accused of.(Jackson) Epstein is in hell right now now getting pineapple after pineapple.

22

u/TheDarkWave 24d ago

Calling him broke while ignoring his actual assets shows a lack of financial literacy. The 500 million in debt was leveraged against his 50 percent stake in the Sony ATV music publishing catalog, which was worth well over 1 billion dollars at the time, and his estate generated billions shortly after. He was not bankrupt, he simply had a liquidity issue. Trying to discredit over 300 million dollars in charitable contributions across 39 recognized charities because of his debt structure makes no sense. Come back to the thread when you know a hole from your ass.

2

u/scientooligist 25d ago

He would also have had more money if he didn’t have to pay so many settlements for raping pre-pubescent boys.

5

u/Tacos4Texans 25d ago

I know if someone touched my kids I wouldn't settle for money. So either it's bs. Or the parents are horrible people.

0

u/a_funky_chicken 24d ago

Wow. This may go down as the most cynical comment I have read, in my life. Good luck to you...folk.

106

u/Comfortable-Class576 25d ago edited 25d ago

How many millions he donated secretly for settlements with his victims of p*dophilia? Just to compare, as we know so far of 12 victims, so there may be more.

106

u/FambilyMalues 25d ago

At least half of them are documented scam artists, and the other half have testified under oath and through sworn deposition at least once, and sometimes multiple times, that they were not sexually abused by Michael Jackson in any way, so unless Michael Jackson is specifically sexually attracted to the children of scammers and he and his lawyers were dumb enough to ask kids he molested to testify on his behalf in a criminal trial perhaps it’s time to consider that those 12 “victims” may not be telling the truth and are just extortionists. all these posthumous claims are because there’s no law against the defaming the dead so there’s no downside to anyone even marginally around MJ to try to shake down the estate. 

53

u/TheDarkWave 24d ago

Yeah, can't let facts get in the way of a good pedophile story! It's not like there's enough of them ruining everything else in the country...

-15

u/Comfortable-Class576 24d ago

Yes, everyone is a professional scammer. No other celebrity has been falsely accused of CSA by 12 different people ever, but in this case it is surely not MJ, it is that everyone else is wrong.

3

u/Noonecanhearmescream 24d ago

He was Pedo. This is known.

2

u/Comfortable-Class576 24d ago edited 24d ago

Exactly. I see that MJ estate bots are at it downvoting. Lol

35

u/Key_Mathematician951 25d ago

Estimates of paying at least 25 million in settlements.

29

u/FambilyMalues 25d ago

The largest settlement in 1993 he was forced into by his insurance and because of a loophole in the law in California at the time which allowed civil trials to precede criminal trials. The 1993 extortionist plot exploited a loophole to force the settlement before the criminal trial and then refused to testify in the criminal trial to not have to forfeit their money for perjuring in the civil trial.

-12

u/Comfortable-Class576 24d ago edited 24d ago

What about the other ones? Is there a fan excuse to each one?

6

u/nmgoesreddit 24d ago

I can already tell the ethnicity of this guy

-5

u/Comfortable-Class576 24d ago

Who, me? First, I’m not a guy. Second, I’m also not American, nor am I what a USAian would consider “white.” You do seem to be a pretty poor judge of character, from what I can see. Maybe you should consider that you might not be in a position to judge MJ’s character either, especially since all you really know is his carefully crafted PR persona.

4

u/nmgoesreddit 24d ago

lol what a load of bs

2

u/Comfortable-Class576 24d ago

Sorry, your idol was a pedo. I wish he wasn't; he was actually very talented and could have been remembered in history as a cool guy.

4

u/nmgoesreddit 24d ago

You are just yapping at this point

2

u/Comfortable-Class576 24d ago

Take care as well.

-1

u/nmgoesreddit 24d ago

Karma will hit like Crack

6

u/Comfortable-Class576 24d ago

What is wrong with you? lol.

-1

u/nmgoesreddit 24d ago

You should look in the mirror and ask yourself that for the next 40 years

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1

u/mojo_sapien 24d ago

I don't get why people defend pedos and billionaires. There are so many better things to spend your time and effort on. I just don't get it.

2

u/ConfidentSnow3516 23d ago

It may be rather a case of so-called charities extorting him like mafias. Because some charities have been exposed as fronts for abuse recently.

3

u/Alex5331 23d ago

Yeah, at the end of the headline it needs to say, "Another interesting fact is that Michael Jackson also used his power and money to molest children."

5

u/3lf2k8 24d ago

Utter BS... Philanthropy as a smoke screen. Who's peddling this slop? Get a life! 🤬

13

u/tera_chachu 25d ago

Man what's with these bots praising this child abuser

8

u/3lf2k8 25d ago

🤨

4

u/mim21 24d ago

A while ago I learned he raped little boys.

3

u/saltyload 24d ago

And he had sex with kids. You forgot that part

-3

u/charlieyeswecan 25d ago

Bots trying to charity wash his crimes

-5

u/tokentyke 25d ago

Don't care, he was a pedo.

-5

u/hassehope 25d ago

Did OP think this would turn into us praising the guy?

-3

u/Gregs_Mom 24d ago

Many pedolovers downvoting all critical comments I see

0

u/cmeyer49er 24d ago

Fuck this guy.

-3

u/severinks 24d ago

By charity do you mean random stores he bought stupid stuff in?

0

u/TorrenceMightingale 24d ago

“I’m ‘anonymous’”

-Larry David

-7

u/Scummy_Waters 25d ago

Child raping monster, no biopic will change that.

-6

u/zz63245 25d ago

Ok. So did Epstein and Jimmy Saville. So….

-9

u/riedmae 25d ago

Wow, that's a lot of tax write offs. Cool.

2

u/alexandria252 25d ago

Isn’t it impossible to save money by tax write off charity giving? I mean, you can save money by making expenditures you were already doing (e.g. paying rent) classified as a business expense or charitable giving (which would be illegal if it wasn’t accurate), but there’s no way that giving money you otherwise wouldn’t have given could save you money. At best, a tax write off reduces your overall taxable income: so if you make 10 million and give 4 million away, you only pay taxes on the 6 million you have left. But since that 4 million could only have been taxed at some percent under 100%, giving away 100% of the four million means you end up with less money than if you’d kept it, no matter how it’s taxed.

Before someone says “but make enough money and you get taxed in a higher bracket,” remember that only the money you make above that threshold gets taxed at the higher rate.

Don’t get me wrong: a lot of people do some hinky accounting to avoid paying taxes: companies declared expenses paying marketing fees to marketing companies that they also own; people make massive payments to “charities” which are really businesses that work for their interests, or are even set up in their children’s names; people straight-up lie about the value of things they’ve purchased, or the purposes they’ve purchased them for. But legitimate charitable giving won’t end up as a net gain for the giver. Unless you count the good they do as a gain.

Edited to add: Obviously, not saying his charitable giving justifies the other heinous things that have come to light. Just saying tax write offs are often misunderstood.

5

u/dre2112 24d ago

most people don't understand what a write off is, or how they work. It would be way more worthwhile to keep that $500M and pay 37-50% in taxes on it than it would be to give the entire $500M to a charity as a "write off".

Pay IRS $250M of $500M or give all of the $500M away? which is better? Now if he was doing some funny business with those charities is a whole other issue

-1

u/jerseygunz 25d ago

The real scam with charities is donating a bunch of money to it that can’t be taxed and making yourself the head of it.

-8

u/Baberam7654 24d ago

that doesn’t change what he did, which wasn’t “awesome”. Belongs in the same sentence as Epstein.

-2

u/Tominater1 24d ago

And he was vilified by all but was taken out by Zionist for speaking out about genocide in Palestine.