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20 Things You Didn’t Know About Michael Jackson

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The King of Pop hid stranger truths behind the sequined glove than most fans ever guessed.

Michael Jackson spent 45 of his 50 years on Earth under a spotlight so intense that almost nothing about him should have stayed secret. Yet a new rundown of twenty lesser-known facts about the singer proves otherwise, digging into his childhood in Gary, Indiana, his menagerie of exotic pets, and the business deal that cost him a friendship with a Beatle. The video traces Jackson from a cramped bedroom he shared with five brothers to the Super Bowl stage, and the gaps between those two points are where the strangest stories live.

• Jackson grew up a practicing Jehovah’s Witness who preached door-to-door in disguise even at the height of his fame, after sharing a single bedroom in Gary, Indiana with five of his brothers.
• He held a registered U.S. patent for anti-gravity shoes built to create the 45-degree forward lean in the 1988 “Smooth Criminal” video, and separately composed uncredited music for Sega’s 1994 game “Sonic the Hedgehog 3.”
• His 1985 purchase of the ATV Music Publishing catalogue — which included the Beatles’ song library and was originally suggested to him by Paul McCartney — later fractured his friendship with McCartney.

A Childhood Built on Discipline

Long before Motown came calling, Jackson’s home life in Gary, Indiana ran on strict routine. He and five brothers shared one bedroom, and the family’s Jehovah’s Witness faith shaped his habits well into adulthood — including door-to-door preaching runs he continued, in disguise, even after “Thriller” made him one of the most recognizable faces on the planet. That instinct for concealment in public would follow him for the rest of his career.

Bubbles, Muscles, and a Strict Vegetarian Diet

Jackson’s private world at Neverland was stocked with animals that became almost as famous as he was. His chimpanzee Bubbles traveled with him and appeared at public events, while his boa constrictor Muscles gave the singer’s eccentric reputation a literal bite. Away from the menagerie, Jackson kept to a strict vegetarian diet, and when he ventured outside his gates he relied on elaborate disguises — wigs, fake features, full costume changes — specifically engineered to dodge the paparazzi that camped outside his properties. Anyone curious how other musicians hide wildly different private personas behind their public image can find more in Musicians That Are Nothing Like They Seem.

The Inventor Behind the Lean

The forward-leaning stunt in “Smooth Criminal” wasn’t a special-effects trick — it was hardware. Jackson co-held a registered U.S. patent for shoes with a heel slot that locked into a peg on stage, letting him tilt 45 degrees without falling. It’s one of the rare instances of a pop performer holding actual intellectual property tied to a specific piece of choreography, and it shows how deliberately engineered his most famous stage moments really were.

The Beatles Deal That Broke a Friendship

In 1985, Jackson bought the ATV Music Publishing catalogue, which controlled the rights to the bulk of the Beatles’ songbook. Paul McCartney had actually pointed Jackson toward music publishing as an investment strategy in the first place — advice Jackson took literally when he outbid McCartney and Yoko Ono for the catalogue itself. The purchase, worth an estimated $47.5 million at the time, drove a lasting wedge between the two men. It’s the kind of falling-out that echoes elsewhere in the industry, detailed in Celebs Who Started Out Friends And Ended Up Enemies. Separately, Jackson also contributed uncredited composition work to the soundtrack of Sega’s 1994 title “Sonic the Hedgehog 3,” a video game connection few fans link to the King of Pop.

Records That Outdrew the Main Event

Jackson’s cultural footprint shows up in numbers that dwarf most of his peers. Director Bob Giraldi recruited real Los Angeles Crips and Bloods members alongside trained dancers for the 1983 “Beat It” video, staging a truce on camera between gangs that were actively feuding off it. In 1991, the premiere of “Black or White” drew an estimated 500 million viewers worldwide. Two years later, his Super Bowl XXVII halftime show pulled a larger television audience than the football game it interrupted.

Elizabeth Taylor was the one who first called him the “King of Pop,” crowning him on stage at the 1989 Soul Train Music Awards.

Taylor and Jackson stayed close for decades after that night, and the nickname stuck so completely that most fans assume it was a label invented by the press rather than a gift from a friend standing at a podium.