Lisa Marie Presley's Daughters Set to Inherit Graceland

After the sudden death of Lisa Marie Presley's in January of 2023, her three daughters appear to be set to inherit their grandfather's legendary Memphis, Tennessee estate, Graceland.

Lisa Marie died at the hospital after experiencing a cardiac arrest at her home in Calabasas, California two days after attending the Golden Globes. She was only 54 years old. 

Lisa Marie is survived by three children who will become the current beneficiaries of a trust that was established to hold title to the Graceland property of their late grandfather Elvis Presley. Lisa Marie had two children from her marriage to Danny Keough, 33-year-old Riley and Benjamin Keough. However, Benjamin died by suicide in July of 2020. Lisa Marie later was remarried to Michael Lockwood in 2006 and had 14-year-old twin girls, Harper and Finley, with Lockwood.

Elvis Presley's 120-acre Graceland home was left to Lisa Marie following his death in 1977 along with a reported $100MM in a trust. At that time, Lisa Marie was only 9 years old. The trust had an outright distribution provision to Lisa Marie at the age of 25 and the trust thereafter dissolved. It has been reported that the $100MM outside the of the Graceland estate had been squandered over the years. However, Lisa Marie later formed “The Elvis Presley Trust” to help manage the Graceland property along with her mother, Priscilla Presley, and the National Bank of Commerce. Now that Lisa Marie has passed, her three surviving daughters will now be the current beneficiaries of that trust.

Why is all this important? Giving outright distributions from a trust to a beneficiary at the age of 25 may be too young, as was probably true for the assets Elvis left his daughter Lisa Marie. In our practice, we counsel clients around this very issue and nine times out of ten, our clients talk it through and decide to create continuing trusts for their children and allow them to serve as a Trustee of their trust at a mature age, most typically not until they are 30 or 35 years old (and that is with much more modest estates than compared to the $100MM estate that Elvis left his daughter).

Another issue that Lisa Marie would have faced with the outright distribution is the loss of any form of creditor protection over the assets that her father left her in trust when she reached the age of 25 and the trust allowed her to remove the assets from the trust. And not to mention the loss of the ability to pass a portion of the inherited property to her children estate tax free that could have grown in value over the years outside the estate tax system.