Flashmag! Edition 174 Juillet 2026

Michael Jackson

On June 25, 2009, at 2:26 p. m., an ambulance pulled away from a rented villa in Holmby Hills carrying a 50-year-old man in cardiac arrest. Twenty minutes later, before any major network had confirmed the news, the website TMZ published the story that would send the internet reeling: Michael Jackson was dead. Within hours, Wikipedia’ s servers would buckle under the weight of edits. The world, which had turned this man into an almost mythological creature, watched its dream collapse all at once.

Seventeen years later, in this year of 2026, the silence everyone expected never came. If anything, the opposite happened. This spring, a blockbuster biopic— Michael, directed by Antoine Fuqua and starring Jaafar Jackson, the star’ s own nephew, in the lead role— propelled the artist back to the top of global streaming charts, overtaking Justin Bieber and BTS. Billie Jean once again became, forty-three years after its release, the most-streamed song on the planet.