Prince could break down a $20 million record deal on live TV in under a minute. He died without a will. His bank said the estate was worth $82.3 million. The IRS said $163.2 million. In the video below, he's on a late-night talk show and the host brings up Mariah Carey's $20 million deal. Prince asks what everyone thinks is good about it. Then he does the math out loud. An $18 album, half to him. "If I sell a million copies, I'm gonna have ten million dollars." Three million copies, thirty million. By the end, Mariah "kind of got screwed." This was a man who wrote "slave" on his face to fight his own label for his music. He died in April 2016. No will, no plan for who would own any of it. So a bank ran the estate, and six siblings waited. Lawyers and consultants were paid tens of millions of dollars while the case dragged on. The estate and the IRS spent years fighting over what his music was worth, because the gap decided how much tax was owed at 40%. In 2022 they settled at $156.4 million, close to what the IRS had said. By then two of the siblings had died. Half the estate ended up with a music company that had bought out three of the heirs. My take: he understood a contract better than anyone in that room, and the one document he never signed was the one that cost his family the most. Most people with a fraction of his money are in the same spot right now. Was it on Prince to leave a will, or on a system that took six years and tens of millions to divide what he left?