Arnold Palmer Is Second In Most Money Earned By “Dead Celebrities”

Arnold Palmer (or actually his estate) was the 2nd largest earner among Forbes’ “dead celebrities” list. He trails only Michael Jackson.

Michael Jackson tops our Halloween-spooky list of the 13 highest-paid dead celebrities for the fifth year in a row–with earnings of $75 million. His postmortem empire is going strong, boosted by the Halloween special and new album Scream joining a list of ventures that include a Cirque du Soleil show in Las Vegas and a stake in the EMI music-publishing catalogue.

Golf legend Arnold Palmer claims the No. 2 spot with $40 million. Barely a year after his death, more than 400 stores still sell Palmer-branded apparel in Asia, and AriZona Beverages produces 400 million cans of its Arnold Palmer line annually. Peanuts creator Charles Schulz ranks third with income of $38 million—MetLife recently retired Snoopy and Charlie Brown from its ad campaigns, but the cartoonist’s contract does not expire until 2019. 

Elvis Presley finishes fourth with $35 million, up from last year’s $27 million sum thanks to the new $45 million Elvis Presley’s Memphis entertainment complex and recently opened hotel The Guesthouse at Graceland.

As for the King of Pop, his 2017 earnings pale in comparison with last year’s $825 million haul—the highest annual total for any entertainer dead or alive—mostly from the sale of his half of the Sony/ATV catalogue. But his $75 million tally this year still places him on par with the seventeenth-best-paid living entertainer, Bruce Springsteen.