Short answers, pulled from the story.
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi was an Indian guru born Mahesh Prasad Varma on the 12th of January 1911, who created the Transcendental Meditation technique. He taught that practicing TM twice daily would create inner peace, and that group meditation sessions could reduce violence and conflict in society. He trained more than 40,000 TM teachers and taught the technique to more than five million people before his death on the 5th of February 2008.
The Maharishi became spiritual advisor to the Beatles in 1967, after George Harrison and his wife Pattie Boyd brought the band to his lecture at the Hilton on Park Lane in London. The band traveled to Rishikesh, India, in February 1968, where Ringo Starr stayed 10 days, Harrison and Lennon 16 days after that, and McCartney five weeks. The visit ended with the band publicly renouncing the association in June 1968, though both Harrison and McCartney later reconciled with the Maharishi, with McCartney visiting him in the Netherlands in 2007.
From 1990 onward, the Maharishi lived at a former Franciscan monastery in Vlodrop, the Netherlands, known as MERU, Holland. He died there peacefully in his sleep of natural causes on the 5th of February 2008. His cremation and funeral rites were conducted at his Allahabad ashram in India, overlooking the confluence of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers.
In 1941, Mahesh Prasad Varma became administrative secretary and disciple of Swami Brahmananda Saraswati, the Shankaracharya of Jyotir Math in the Indian Himalayas. He later recalled that his life truly began at the feet of his master, where he learned the secret of swift and deep meditation. After Brahmananda Saraswati died in 1953, the Maharishi spent two years in seclusion at Uttarkashi before beginning public teaching in 1955.
Yes. A U.S. federal court in New Jersey ruled in 1977 that Transcendental Meditation was a religion, halting its teaching in public schools on grounds that it violated the constitutional separation of church and state. The ruling came after critics noted that TM initiation included a Hindu puja ritual and that the Maharishi had characterized his movement as non-religious in order to allow its adoption by publicly-funded institutions.
At the time of his death in 2008, the Maharishi's organization placed the value of its U.S. assets at about $300 million. Global real estate holdings had been valued in 2003 at between $3.6 and $5 billion. The movement operated nearly 1,000 TM training centers worldwide and had founded thousands of teaching centers, hundreds of colleges, universities, and schools across multiple countries.