Lisa Marie Presley: what will her children inherit after the death of Elvis’ daughter, including Graceland

The death of Lisa Marie Presley, the only child of Elvis Presley, has left several questions regarding what will happen with the Elvis estate, and prompted discussions about how much money might be left to Lisa Marie’s children (Riley Keogh, Harper and Finley Lockwood) after divorce settlements and claims of money mismanagement.

The daughter of the King of Rock inherited the Graceland estate after Elvis’ death in 1977 alongside the sum of $100 million USD (around £81.6 million) on her 25th birthday, but rumours circulated around the time of Lisa Marie’s death over how much of that fortune she still had after a string of bad investments.

Couple those bad decisions with acrimonious splits with former husbands Michael Jackson, Nicolas Cage and Michael Lockwood. The latter as late as 2021 tried to contest alimony payments as part of his divorce from Presley, leading to a court order for a monthly payment of $4600 USD (£3,755) in child support.

However, Rolling Stone reports that the three remaining children of Lisa Marie Presley will inherit the Graceland home, now a museum dedicated to Elvis Presley, which is worth an estimated $400 to $500 million (just shy of £410 million) in tourism and appreciated land value. This includes all of Elvis’ personal items and the 13 acres the property resides on.

The thorny issue though comes down to who owns the rights to use Elvis’ music for licensing purposes. Sony BMG owns Elvis’ recordings and they continue to use the RCA Records label for issuing Elvis releases, having bought RCA after the Sony and BMG merger in 2004.

Therefore, while the master copies of the music are held by Sony BMG, the rights to use the music fall instead upon Authentic Brands Group, which also works with the estates of Marilyn Monroe and Muhammed Ali. So while Sony BMG and ABG have the authority to licence and exploit the music, they have no claim to Graceland and the inventory of items that, should they go to auction, are set to fetch millions of dollars.

The money made from tourism through Graceland though looks to be going first to CKX Inc, a publicly traded company that absolved Lisa Marie’s mounting debts with a lump sum in 2005. CKX Inc, therefore, owns 85% of the business holdings of the Elvis estate, except for Graceland itself and the property within it.