The Wealth Edit

I went to see Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis last week. God it’s good.

Elvis is a good movie not only because of the subject matter (Elvis was, and still is, THE biggest selling solo recording artist of all time), but because it shed light on the unfortunately common occurrence of financial abuse in the entertainment industry.

I’m not giving anything away here, but at the time of Elvis’s death he was not a wealthy man. It’s estimated that Elvis was five million dollars in debt and owned no ongoing revenue streams (i.e., royalties) from his music. It didn’t seem like there was any way to repay that debt without Elvis around to turn on the income faucet with a performance. This left his child and former wife in a precarious financial situation.

Elvis’s lifetime earnings would have been in the billions, yet he died with nothing. How did it go so wrong?

He lived a rich life rather than a wealthy life. The two are very different.

It’s easy for people who were never educated about money to f