How to Read These Numbers
Dying without a will is called dying intestate, and it hands the decision about who gets what to a court applying a statutory formula. The cost is not theoretical and it shows up in three places: years of delay, professional fees, and tax valuations argued from scratch because nobody left instructions. Every figure below is drawn from court records or contemporaneous reporting.
1. Prince – Six Years, and an $81 Million Disagreement
Prince died in April 2016 leaving no will. Six half-siblings were declared his heirs under Minnesota law, and the estate then had to be valued for tax before anything could be distributed.
The administrator, Comerica Bank & Trust, put it at 82.3 million dollars. The IRS assessed 163.2 million – almost exactly double – and added a 6.4 million dollar accuracy penalty (Forbes). The two sides settled in January 2022 at 156.4 million dollars, with the penalty dropped (Variety), and a judge closed the matter that August, six years after his death (Billboard).
Read our full profile of Prince for how that estate was assembled.
2. Aretha Franklin – Three Handwritten Wills, One Under a Couch Cushion
Franklin died in 2018 and was believed to have left no will at all. In 2019 her niece found three handwritten documents around her home in suburban Detroit. One, dated 2014, was under a couch cushion (NPR).
Two sons argued the 2014 note should govern; a third argued for a 2010 document found under lock and key. The difference was not trivial: the 2010 version required her sons to obtain a business qualification before inheriting, and the 2014 one did not. A Michigan jury ruled in July 2023 that the couch document was a valid will (Variety), and a judge distributed the properties that November (NPR).
Five years of litigation, and the deciding document was a scribbled note in the furniture (CBS News).
3. Bob Marley – No Will, and More Than a Decade of Litigation
Marley died in 1981, four years after a cancer diagnosis, without making a will – a decision usually attributed to his Rastafarian beliefs about mortality. The absence of instructions opened the estate to years of expensive proceedings, including misconduct by advisers (Forbes).
It took until the early 1990s for the Jamaican Supreme Court to rule that his widow and eleven heirs should control his name and image (Billboard). The family business built since has been substantial, but it was built after the courts settled who owned what.
4. Pablo Picasso – Six Years, Seven Heirs, $30 Million in Costs
Picasso died in 1973 at 91, with one of the largest bodies of work any artist has left, and no will. Settling it took six years and roughly 30 million dollars in costs, distributed among seven heirs (Forbes).
The cost is the point. A 91-year-old with an enormous, hard-to-value estate is the clearest possible case for leaving instructions, and none were left.
5. Jimi Hendrix – Three Decades of Litigation, and a Dispute That Outlived Everyone
Hendrix died in 1970 at 27, with no will. Under intestacy his estate passed to his father, Al Hendrix, a landscaper who had seen relatively little of his son since he left Seattle in 1961 – inheriting the master tapes, the song copyrights and the rights to his image (NPR).
Control was not settled for close to thirty years. Al sued the lawyer administering the estate and only regained direct control through a settlement in 1995 (Forbes). When Al died in 2002 he left the estate, reported at around 80 million dollars, to his adopted daughter Janie, and Hendrix’s brother Leon has been in dispute with her ever since; a licensing case between them ran for years before the family settled (Billboard).
Fifty years after the death, the estate was still generating litigation. That is the longest-running consequence of intestacy on this list.
6. The Longer List
These four are not unusual. Forbes has catalogued a much longer list of people who died intestate, including Tupac Shakur, Sonny Bono, Howard Hughes and Abraham Lincoln – a lawyer and a president among them.
What It Actually Costs
The pattern across all of these is consistent enough to state as a rule. Without a will you get delay measured in years rather than months; professional fees that scale with the size of the estate and the number of claimants; a tax valuation fought from first principles, because no figure was ever agreed; and family disputes conducted in public.
Prince’s case is the cleanest illustration: two professional valuations of the same assets differed by 81 million dollars, and it took a federal settlement to choose between them (Forbes).