Prince died without a will. It took six years to sort out.

What happened

Prince was found unresponsive in an elevator at his Paisley Park compound in Chanhassen, Minnesota on April 21, 2016. He had died of an accidental fentanyl overdose. He was 57, in active touring shape, and had performed concerts within the previous week. He had no known major health crisis. Within days of his death, his sister Tyka Nelson filed paperwork with the Carver County District Court stating that to her knowledge, Prince had not left a will.

He had not. Subsequent investigation by the court-appointed administrator, Bremer Trust, confirmed it. Prince had built a global music career, accumulated extensive real estate in Minnesota and elsewhere, retained or recovered the master recordings to most of his catalog (a notable accomplishment in itself), and stored thousands of hours of unreleased music in the Paisley Park vault. He had also evidently decided not to document, in any binding form, what should happen to any of it.

Under Minnesota intestacy law, when someone dies without a will and without a spouse or children, the estate passes to their surviving siblings, divided equally. Prince's biological full sister was Tyka. He had five half-siblings: Sharon Nelson, Norrine Nelson, John R. Nelson, Alfred Jackson, and Omarr Baker. (John and Alfred died during the course of probate, complicating things further.) All six were ultimately recognized as legal heirs.

The probate process became a long, public, and expensive event. Major issues included:

• Heir verification. Dozens of people came forward in the months after Prince's death claiming to be his children, grandchildren, or otherwise entitled. All such claims were tested and eventually dismissed, but each one cost legal time.
• Asset valuation disputes with the IRS. The estate initially valued Prince's assets at roughly $82 million. The IRS, in a 2020 audit, valued them at around $163 million — a difference of approximately $80 million, with corresponding tax implications. The dispute took years to resolve and ended with the estate paying an additional ~$3 million in penalties on top of substantial tax adjustments.
• Catalog and unreleased recordings. Decisions about whether to release unreleased recordings, license the catalog, and approve biopic projects had to be made by court-appointed administrators rather than by people Prince himself had designated. The administrators eventually approved a 2021 deal selling a large portion of the catalog rights to Primary Wave for an undisclosed sum.
• Heirs selling shares. Several of the recognized heirs sold portions of their inheritance interests to entertainment investment firms before final distribution — meaning the people who ultimately benefited from Prince's life work include institutional investors who had nothing to do with him personally.

Final distributions to the recognized heirs began in August 2022, more than six years after Prince's death. Total legal and administrative fees during the probate period have been reported at over $40 million. That is not a typo. Roughly a quarter of the initial estate value went to professionals managing the absence of a will.

"It's a really crazy thing to think about... how much has been spent. There's no reason for it. This is exactly what he would have hated."

— Sharon Nelson, half-sister of Prince and recognized heir, in a 2019 court filing.

Where it went wrong

Prince was famously private, famously controlling of his own image, and famously attentive to the business side of his career. He had spent years in legal battles with Warner Bros. to regain control of his masters. He was not someone who treated business matters carelessly. And yet, on the single most consequential business question of his life — what happens to the catalog and the masters after I die — he left no documentation.

• No will, despite known opportunities to write one. Prince had used attorneys throughout his career. He had been involved in major contract negotiations as recently as months before his death. The absence of an estate plan was not the result of being unable to access legal help. It was a choice — active or passive — to defer the question.
• No designated beneficiaries on relevant accounts. Some financial accounts allow you to bypass probate entirely by naming a beneficiary directly. Prince had not done this for the accounts in question, meaning every dollar flowed through probate by default.
• No succession framework for the catalog. Beyond the legal question of who would inherit, there was no framework — trust, business entity, designated manager, anything — for who should make business decisions about the music in the interim. The court had to invent one, which is rarely as good as one designed by the person who actually knew the business.

"He probably wouldn't have wanted any of this"

A recurring theme in coverage of the Prince probate is that almost no one believes the final outcome resembles what he himself would have wanted. He had complicated relationships with his half-siblings — close with some, estranged from others. The intestacy framework treats them all identically. He had been outspoken during his life about ownership of his work, about who should benefit from it, and about his discomfort with institutional ownership of art. Several of those institutional outcomes ended up happening anyway, because the people who could have prevented them — his designees — didn't exist on any document the court could honor.

This is the deepest cost of intestacy. It is not that the wrong people inherit. It is that no one's preferences inherit. The state's defaults take over, and those defaults are designed to be administrable, not personal.

"He just hadn't gotten around to it"

The most quoted theory about why Prince didn't have a will is that, at 57 and in active touring shape, he simply hadn't expected to need one yet. That is the same theory that applies to almost everyone who dies intestate. According to the most recent Caring.com survey, only about 32% of American adults have any kind of estate planning documents in place — a figure that has actually declined slightly over the last decade despite increasing public attention to the issue.

The reason isn't that people don't believe wills are important. The reason is that wills are unpleasant to think about and easy to defer. Compared to refinancing a mortgage or rebalancing a portfolio, writing a will requires confronting your own mortality in concrete terms. It is the financial task most universally postponed.

What makes the deferral particularly costly is that mortality is genuinely unpredictable at any age. Prince was healthier than most 57-year-olds. He died on a Thursday. The same week he had given a small concert. There is no notice period before the worst case fires.

What the math says

The Prince estate spent more than $40 million on legal and administrative fees during probate. The cost of an estate plan that would have prevented most of that — a will, a trust, beneficiary designations, a documented succession framework for the catalog — would have been somewhere in the low six figures. That is a return on investment of well over 100x, available the moment you write the documents.

The math is not as dramatic at smaller estate sizes, but the structure is identical. Estate planning is one of the few financial decisions where the cost of inaction is nonlinear: small estates pay small probate costs, but a few specific events (a contested will, a disputed asset, an heir search) can push that cost into "consumes a significant fraction of the estate" territory at any size. Documenting your wishes cheaply, in advance, is among the highest-leverage financial decisions a person makes.