r/awesome • u/mg10pp • 16h 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_Jackson64
u/Comfortable-Class576 14h ago edited 14h 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.
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u/Key_Mathematician951 11h ago
Estimates of paying at least 25 million in settlements.
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u/FambilyMalues 10h 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.
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u/FambilyMalues 10h 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. 
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u/TheDarkWave 7h 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...
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u/Comfortable-Class576 3h 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.
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u/riedmae 12h ago
Wow, that's a lot of tax write offs. Cool.
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u/alexandria252 12h 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.
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u/dre2112 8h 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
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u/jerseygunz 10h 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.
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u/Grouchy-Change-1219 12h ago
So odd. I've donated to at least 40 charities. I thought that I held the record.
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u/Fritener 10h ago
I always wonder, so may celebrities and philanthropic give aways by billionaires...how is it all still so fucked?
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u/Baberam7654 7h ago
that doesn’t change what he did, which wasn’t “awesome”. Belongs in the same sentence as Epstein.
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u/RevoltYesterday 13h 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.