#1. MJ Has His Father’s Name, And Yet He Fired Him!
His full name is Michael Joseph Jackson. We know his father’s name.

In 1979, while still living under the same roof with his dad, Michael Jackson quietly handed new attorney John Branca his first assignment: fire Joseph Jackson as manager (their father-son relationship wasn’t a candy). Branca sent a single fax to the family home.

When Joe and Michael finally met to discuss it, Michael refused to be alone in the room with his father. Joe was blindsided and hurt. “The fact you can’t even talk to me unless you have this guy here,” Joe said. Michael later confessed, “It’s not easy firing your father.”

#2. Michael Jackson Owned the Beatles’ Catalogue
You know the fact, but not the story! Well, Paul McCartney (a member of the Beatles alongside John Lennon) himself taught Michael about music publishing, and lived to regret it. McCartney casually explained to his visitor, Michael, that whoever owns the publishing rights to a song gets paid every single time it’s used. Michael listened carefully, then joked: “One day I’m gonna own your songs, Paul.” McCartney laughed it off. He shouldn’t have.

In 1985, Michael Jackson paid $47.5 million for ATV Music Publishing, a catalogue of 4,000 songs including 251 Beatles classics. A decade later, Michael merged ATV with Sony for $95M. The catalogue eventually sold for $1.5 billion, a 3,000% return on his investment.

“He won’t even answer my letters.” – Paul McCartney, 2001.

#3. Eminem Dissed Him. Michael Bought His Catalogue
In 2004, Eminem released “Just Lose It,” mocking Michael’s nose, his 1984 Pepsi fire accident, etc. The timing was brutal: Michael was in the middle of a molestation trial and was in sweet revenge mode. Three years later, in 2007, Sony/ATV, the company Michael co-owned, bought Famous Music LLC for $370 million, which included Eminem’s entire back catalogue. Every song. Every royalty.

#4. The Neverland Ranch Was a Real Zoo
Neverland wasn’t just Michael Jackson’s home, but also an amusement park, petting zoo, and private cinema rolled into one 2,700-acre estate. Michael Jackson’s personal menagerie included his famous chimpanzee Bubbles (who travelled internationally with him and who would show up during recording sessions), snakes that would be wrapped around his neck occasionally, giraffes, elephants, and many others.

He spent $20 million buying the property and then poured another $35 million. Michael believed that because he never had a childhood, Neverland was his way of reclaiming one. He kept it open to sick and underprivileged children free of charge.

#5. Michael Jackson’s Love, Marriages & Children
Michael’s sexual life was interesting to everyone. Some thought he was asexual and only dated girls for bonding and company. Michael Jackson’s mother, Katherine Jackson, a Jehovah’s Witness, emphasised “no sex before marriage,” and since Michael was a witness too, he must have been keeping by the book. Oprah Winfrey once asked him in an interview, “Michael, are you a virgin?” He was in his late thirties then.

MJ was married twice. First to Lisa Marie Presley. They later divorced. He then married Debbie Rowe, a nurse who had been his friend for years, and had two children with her: Michael Joseph Jackson Jr. (Prince) and Paris-Michael Katherine Jackson. They divorced. Michael was such a sweet and generous man that his ex-wives remained friends with him even after their divorces. They remained present and supportive. This drives many to conclude that they only left him because of ‘lack of sex in the relationship,’ and not because he was a bad person.

When Prince was born, Michael snatched him from the hospital just moments after he came, and off he went with him to Neverland. Same for Paris. The moment she arrived, Michael was in motion, wrapping her, holding her close, and running away with her, with her umbilical cord still intact. He wanted his children home. His home. Neverland. Rowe later relinquished custody, and the children remained ‘motherless.’

His third child, Prince Michael II, famously known as “Blanket,” now going by Bigi, was born to a surrogate mother whom MJ himself never met. He is the one Michael Jackson dangled from a Berlin hotel balcony. Though Bigi’s mother was said to be black and Michael himself black, the child was white as snow, as are all his other children.

All three children were raised in masks and disguises in public. Reason? He wanted them to have a childhood free from the fame that had consumed him since age five.

#6. The King of Pop Was Also the King of Prank Calls
For two to three years, actor Russell Crowe received mysterious prank calls at hotels all over the world. The caller would put on different voices and ask, “Is Mr Wall there? Is Mrs Wall there? Are there any Walls there? What’s holding the roof up?!” Crowe always knew it was Michael Jackson, and was baffled that a global superstar was giggling through classic schoolboy jokes.

Michael Jackson also recruited Home Alone actor Macaulay Culkin as a partner in crime. The two would call people together, with Michael deploying a rotating gallery of disguised accents and voices. According to reports, these calls came from Michael’s deep loneliness, phoning the world in the only way that felt safe and fun. He’d always give himself away at the end with a telltale giggle. Michael Jackson was also into the habit of calling celebrities at random, and they would be star-struck!

#7. The leaked Telephone Tapes: A Different Michael
Michael became friends with some families and would call them late in the night for chat (he had a sleeping problem…he couldn’t sleep). Sadly, one family was recording him, and they sold the tapes to the media. The leaked tapes revealed a Michael Jackson almost unrecognisable from his stage persona. His voice was deeper and more relaxed, flirtatious, funny, and intensely human.

In those tapes, Michael joked freely, teased, and spoke in a way that stripped away the mystique entirely. The tapes also had him confess to things that he denied in public, like the face surgeries. In one of the tapes, Michael Jackson confessed to having been trained to professionally lie to the public, with softness and emotion, as a young star!

#8. The Pepsi accident: Michael Jackson ran from the hospital
We all have heard of that Pepsi commercial accident.  Here’s what the cameras didn’t capture: once treated at the Brotman Medical Center (which renamed its burn unit the Michael Jackson Burn Center), Michael, reportedly overwhelmed by the crowd and chaos, sneaked out of the hospital to recuperate at the home of one of his child-friends. Imagine MJ showing up at your doorstep by virtue of your 6-year-old son! The boy’s name was Emmanuel Lewis.

#9. He Gave Away Hundreds of Millions
Michael Jackson quietly donated to 39 charities, more than virtually any entertainer in history. He co-wrote “We Are the World” in 1985 and helped raise over $63 million for African famine relief. He funded hospitals, children’s wards, and schools around the world, often anonymously.

His father, Joe Jackson, despite their fractured relationship, once said, “He’d donate so much money to the sick. He helped the blind. He helped everybody that needed help.” The Guinness World Records officially recognised Michael Jackson as the most charitable pop star in history. He even set up the Heal the World Foundation.

#10. Cripplingly Shy. Obsessively Polite.
People who met Michael Jackson offstage were consistently stunned by how soft-spoken, gentle, and almost impossibly polite he was. He’d whisper. He’d thank staff by name. He’d send handwritten notes of gratitude to crew members.

Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross, Oprah Winfrey, etc have described Michael Jackson as a man who was deeply empathetic and generous in person, profoundly uncomfortable with confrontation. His shyness wasn’t a performance. It was a survival mechanism developed over decades of being watched, judged, and reduced. He reportedly struggled to look strangers in the eye and would sometimes hide behind sunglasses and an umbrella even indoors. Fame never made him bold; it made him smaller. In 2003, when he was 44, he told Martin Bashir in an interview, “Oh boy, I am shy!” when the journalist asked him to show him some dance moves.

#11. Michael Jackson Used a Body Double
To move safely in public, Michael employed a body double, a man who would wear his signature fedora, red jacket, and single white glove to create decoys and allow the real Michael to slip away undetected. The double would be spotted in hotel lobbies or entering cars while Michael exited elsewhere. It was one of the more surreal aspects of being the most famous person on Earth.

#12. Michael Jackson Invented the Music Video Film
Before Michael Jackson, music videos were promotional clips. After him, they were cinematic films with a story and characters. Thriller was a 14-minute horror short film, the first music video to receive a theatrical release. So was Bad, Ghosts, Speed Demon, You Rock my world, name them.

#13. Invincible: The $30 Million Album Sony Buried
Invincible, Michael Jackson’s last album, is officially the most expensive album ever recorded, costing over $30 million and taking four years to make with 10 producers and over 100 musicians. But Sony pulled the plug on all promotion. No tour support. No singles push. Why? Michael had privately told Sony CEO Tommy Mottola he wasn’t renewing his contract, and he owned half of Sony’s publishing arm, which Mottola desperately wanted. So, as a way to drown Michael in debt, they didn’t promote the album, so he would not repay the invested $30 million, thus he would be forced to sell his shares in Sony’s publishing arm. In 2002, Michael called Mottola “a devil” and a “racist.”

“The record companies really do conspire against their artists. They steal; they cheat.” – Michael Jackson, 2002.

#14. Eight Grammys. Almost Walked Out
At the 1984 Grammys, Michael Jackson made history, winning eight awards in a single night, a record that drew 51.67 million viewers, and remains the highest-rated Grammy telecast ever.

What many people do not know is that he almost did not attend. Even though he had 12 nominations, Michael first refused to go. He felt the Grammys had overlooked him for years. The Jackson 5 had never won a Grammy, and his groundbreaking 1979 album Off the Wall was not even nominated for Album of the Year.

Grammy producers were so concerned that they held an emergency private meeting at Michael’s home to persuade him to attend. He eventually agreed to show up, but he did not perform. In fact, Michael Jackson performed at the Grammys once in his entire career, in 1988.

#15. Michael Jackson forgot a Grammy at the Grammys
This one comes straight from someone who was there. Emmanuel Lewis, the child star and one of Michael’s closest friends, and the same kid from whose home Michael recuperated after the Pepsi burn, went with him to the Grammys.

In an interview Lewis gave years later, he said, “Mike handed me some Grammys to collect some more as he was being announced on stage. It was too heavy for me, so I placed it under my seat.” They almost drove away after the night before Lewis screamed, “I left that Grammy under my seat!”

“He was just Michael to me.”- Emmanuel Lewis

#16. The Giving Tree
Michael Jackson had a tree, a special oak at Neverland that he called his Giving Tree. On that tree, melodies came to him like answered prayers. Heal the World, Will You Be There, Black or White, and Childhood were written in those branches.

And hahaha, to think of the name of the tree… his naming of things was interesting. Michael Jackson’s chimpanzee was called Bubbles, his snake Muscles, his youngest child Blanket, and his rat Ben. Producer Quincy Jones called MJ Mike Smelly.

Clearly, MJ was a man who moved through the world with a child’s instinct to name everything he loved, to make everything personal, to find the holy in the simple.

Compiled by Mwesigwa Joshua.