Who Owns Graceland?

Graceland is owned by Elvis Presley’s family — but the business built around it mostly is not. The house and grounds belong to the Promenade Trust, of which Riley Keough, his granddaughter, is sole trustee. 85% of Elvis Presley Enterprises, which runs the visitor operation and the name, was sold to outside investors years ago; the family kept 15%. In 2024 a court blocked a fraudulent attempt to foreclose on the estate. Ownership verified 6 September 2026.

Who owns Graceland today?

Two things must be separated, and almost every account of Graceland conflates them.

The property — the mansion on Elvis Presley Boulevard in Memphis, its grounds and the graves — is held by the Promenade Trust, a family trust. Riley Keough became its sole trustee after her mother Lisa Marie Presley died in January 2023.

The business — Elvis Presley Enterprises, which operates the tours, the exhibits and the licensing of Elvis’s name and image — is 85% owned by outside investors, with the family holding 15%. Authentic Brands Group is the principal owner; the operation is run in partnership with the family and with the businessman Joel Weinshanker.

So a visitor buys a ticket from a company the family does not control, to see a house the family does own.

Ultimate parent and corporate structure

Nothing here appears at Companies House. Graceland is American real property held in an American trust, and the business is a private American company.

The structure separates an asset from a rights business — the same shape this site sets out on the Beatles catalogue page, where the songs, the recordings and the band’s business belong to three different owners.

Authentic Brands Group is a licensing company rather than an operator. Its model is to buy the intellectual property of famous names and license it, and its portfolio spans Marilyn Monroe, Muhammad Ali, Shaquille O’Neal and, in Britain, retail brands including Ted Baker and Reebok. Elvis’s name sits in that portfolio.

The family’s remaining 15%, and its ownership of the house itself, is what keeps Graceland from being purely a licensing asset.

Major shareholders or controlling persons

Riley Keough controls the property as trustee. A trustee is not a beneficial owner: she holds the estate for the trust’s beneficiaries under duties enforceable in court, which is a materially different position from owning it outright. Trusts recur throughout this site — JCB’s Swiss trustee-controller, boohoo’s Guernsey trustee company — and they are consistently the point at which ownership becomes hardest to state simply.

The 2024 episode showed what that protection is for. A company calling itself Naussany Investments and Private Lending claimed Lisa Marie Presley had borrowed against Graceland and defaulted, and moved to sell it at foreclosure auction. Keough sued, alleging the documents were forged. A judge halted the sale, the claims were found to have no validity, and there was no foreclosure.

An attempt to seize one of the most recognisable houses in the world on fabricated paperwork is an unusually stark illustration of a general point: public property records can be exploited, and a filed document is not proof of a debt any more than a Companies House entry is proof of ownership. In both systems, someone must challenge a false filing for it to be corrected.

Official records and evidence

This page rests on no UK register evidence. Graceland is in Shelby County, Tennessee, and American title is recorded county by county rather than in a national register.

That is why the 2024 fraud was possible in the form it took: a deed of trust filed against a property enters the public record, and the burden falls on the owner to prove it false. England and Wales are not immune — HM Land Registry has its own history of registration fraud — but a national register with identity checks makes it harder.

The ownership facts here come from court filings in the 2024 case, from Elvis Presley Enterprises’ and Authentic Brands Group’s own statements, and from reporting of the 2005 and 2013 transactions. None of it is checkable against a public ownership register in the way a UK company’s PSC entry is.

Ownership history and changes

Elvis Presley bought Graceland in 1957, aged 22, for a reported $102,500.

• 1977 — Elvis dies; the estate passes to his daughter Lisa Marie Presley, held in trust during her minority.
• 1982 — Priscilla Presley opens Graceland to the public to meet the estate’s running costs, turning a liability into a business.
• 2005 — Lisa Marie sells 85% of Elvis Presley Enterprises to Robert Sillerman’s CKX for a reported $100m, retaining 15% and the house itself.
• 2013 — that majority stake passes to Authentic Brands Group.
• January 2023 — Lisa Marie dies; Riley Keough becomes sole trustee.
• May 2024 — the fraudulent foreclosure attempt is blocked.

The 1982 decision is the one that determined everything after it. Graceland was costing more than the estate could sustain; opening it to visitors made it self-funding and created the business that was later sold. Around 600,000 people visit each year.

Related companies and brands

Elvis Presley Enterprises holds the rights to Elvis’s name, image and likeness alongside the Graceland operation. Authentic Brands Group’s wider portfolio includes many other estates and retail brands.

The music is a separate question again. Elvis’s recordings are owned by Sony Music through RCA, and his estate sold its remaining royalty interests decades ago — so the family’s connection to the records is far weaker than its connection to the house.

Graceland is not connected to Neverland Ranch, covered elsewhere on this site, though the two make an instructive pair: both are famous musicians’ homes, and in each case the family’s actual ownership at the point of death was narrower than the public assumed.