13 Richest Dead Celebrities

These guys make more money dead than most of us will ever make in our whole lives.

When your life comes to an end, how much money do you think you'll make the year after you die? That might seem an odd question - pointless, one would think, not just because you wouldn't be alive to have the money but you also wouldn't have done anything to earn it. Well, that works slightly differently for celebrities. If they're still successful when they pop their clogs, they can still earn an astonishing amount of money while doing nothing other than slowly decomposing due to marketing deals, record sales and the auctioning off of their prized possessions. And it's not just recently-dead actors or musicians either; there are celebrities who've been dead over 40 years who are still cleaning up, and that's either a testament to their talents and keen business savvy or just to the unstoppable modern consumer mindset. Thanks to info from Forbes, the following 13 celebrities are all deceased, but all earned more in 2013 than most people will ever see in their lifetime altogether. We'll let you decide just how insane that is and whether or not it's a great injustice, but first take a look and see how much the top earners made from beyond the grave:

13. Jenni Rivera

Despite having died in a plane crash in December 2012 at the age of 43, Mexican-American singer and entrepreneur Jenni Rivera made $7 million dollars last year. It might sound morbid, but Rivera's estate has benefited greatly from having sold more than 880,000 records since her death - almost as many as she had moved when she was alive - and almost half a million copies of her autobiography Unbreakable: My Story, My Way. She was also the star of her own reality TV show, I Love Jenni, which ran for three seasons, and had just began an acting career making her feature debut in Filly Brown, which was released posthumously in 2013.
In this post: 
Bruce-Lee
 
Posted On: 
Contributor

Film history obsessive, New Hollywood fetishist and comics evangelist.