Complicated guy. Public perception has changed over the years.
He was the #1 musician in the world for about a decade, then in the late 80s/early 90s people started paying attention to the weird stuff going on in his personal life. He became friends with McCauly Culkin, a famous child actor from the then new hit movie Home Alone, and they'd go to each other's houses and play like kids. People started to suspect he was a pedophile, and at the same time his new album wasn't very good, and the music videos had some weird, off-putting stuff in it. His popularity declined a lot. He was just a freak show by that point and nobody knew why he was turning white; they knew he was a secretive liar so that's why some people didn't believe him about the skin condition. Claiming those three kids were his when he clearly wasn't the father didn't help his credibility or public image either, especially dangling one of them from a balcony. But someone whose reputation is already that bad can't get much worse.
Then some of his child friends and their parents sued him for child abuse, but he was able to beat the charges. This helped him a little bit because the pedophelia thing was what hurt him more than anything by far.
Then he died in 2009 and everyone loved him again for a while, until a documentary came out that showed a lot of new evidence of his inappropriate behavrior towards children. That hurt his image, but not that much because he was already dead and a lot of people still believed he was a pedophile despite his victory in court. It's just about the music at this point.