The “thriller jacket,” which is just one of many celebrity items being sold at Julien’s Auctions in Beverly Hills, is expected to fetch at least $400,000 but according to auction house president and founder Darren Julien, could possibly reach the 7 figure mark.

“It is a conservative auction estimate,” Julien said. “This jacket is not only the most iconic piece of Michael Jackson, but the most iconic piece of pop-culture history.”

If you think that $1 million is outrageous, remember that someone previously paid $420,000 for a single one of Jackson’s gloves.

Considering that wearing one glove was MJ’s trademark, and that the glove in discussion was the white one he wore when the world saw him perform the moonwalk for the first time at the Motown 25 special, maybe the price was right.

The auction, which started on Saturday June 25th, will begin presenting the King of Pop’s memorabilia — which, besides the “Thriller” jacket, will include the fedora worn in the Smooth Criminal music video, personal notes and sketches done by the musician, and a black wig that Michael wore at the 2009 press conference where he announced his final farewell tour — at 10am PST today.

The bid on the jacket, lot 493, is currently at $180,000.

You can watch the auction and bid on any of the items by visiting Julien’s live stream.

According to the website, A portion of the proceeds from the sale of this item will benefit The Shambala Preserve, where Jackson’s two Bengal tigers, Thriller and Sabu, have been living since 2006, when Jackson left Neverland Ranch.

Watch the iconic Thriller video and Michael wearing that famous red jacket below:

Michael Jackson Thriller Jacket Bid Already up to $180k, Watch it Live is a post from: The Inquisitr

As news broke of Michael Jackson’s heart attack and subsequent death yesterday, thousands of sites buckled under the load of millions of people coming online to search for the latest news.

The world’s number one search engine, Google.com, was so inundated with searches for the star’s name that it started serving error messages on some searches. Google news took automated preventative measures under the weight of the traffic and started forcing visitors to enter a captcha to view news.

Twitter.com traffic doubled almost instantly, the amount of tweets per second doubled, and peaked at a point higher than during the U.S. presidential election. Sites in Australia saw increases in traffic up to 2000% and celebrity mega-blog, TMZ.com which broke the Michael Jackson death news went offline after being crushed by the load of people trying to access the site. The Daily Mail, one of the biggest tabloid sites in the U.K., doubled their traffic after reporting the news.

And the Inquisitr, the site you’re reading now, being one of the first to report on Michael Jackson’s death after the news broke, experienced traffic spikes that caused intermittent outages and database errors.

It wasn’t just the traffic spikes and outages that were prevalent: Within hours of his death, Michael Jackson’s 1982 album, Thriller, became the number one item on iTunes and Amazon.com saw several of his works hit the top most purchased items on it’s site.

Will there ever be another performer more popular online?

Michael Jackson Death News Causes Widespread Internet Chaos is a post from: The Inquisitr