How Much Is Oprah Worth?
Talk show host-turned-media and business mogul Oprah Winfrey has amassed a net worth of $2.5 billion, according to Forbes. In addition to her talk show earnings, Winfrey has added to her wealth through her cable network, OWN, as well as her stake with Weight Watchers and a variety of deals through her production company. In honor of Winfrey’s 69th birthday, take a look at how she became a billionaire.
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Oprah Winfrey’s Net Worth: $2.5B
Winfrey has been able to parlay the success of her long-running talk show into a media empire. According to Forbes, she turned the reinvested profits from “The Oprah Winfrey Show” into $2 billion.
In 2011, she launched OWN and maintains a 5% stake in the network. In 2020, she sold over 25% of her ownership in the company to Discovery channel for more than $36 million in stock, according to Forbes. She is also a brand ambassador for Weight Watchers and has a 4.8% stake in the company. In 2018, she signed a multi-year partnership deal with Apple to create original content for its streaming platform, but it ended in 2022 and turned into a project-by-project agreement, Variety reported.
In addition to these income streams, Winfrey has had success and helped to build her fortune as a producer through her company, Harpo, which has developed several long-running syndicated talk shows that include “Dr. Phil,” “The Dr. Oz Show” and “Rachael Ray.” She has also produced several Academy Award-winning features through Harpo Films, including “Selma.” Winfrey also has appeared in front of the camera in a number of notable films, including “The Butler” and “A Wrinkle in Time.”
On top of all of that, Winfrey runs her own magazine — O, The Oprah Magazine — and has published several books, including The New York Times bestselling cookbook “Food, Health and Happiness.”
In 2020, Forbes placed Winfrey No. 24 on its list of Power Women and No. 10 on its America’s Self-Made Women list.
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Oprah Winfrey’s Real Estate
Winfrey’s main residence is in Montecito, California, a coastal community outside of Santa Barbara. In 2001, she purchased her home — which she nicknamed “The Promised Land” — for $50 million, Realtor.com reported. The estate includes six bedrooms, 14 bathrooms and 40 acres of land that house a pool, stables, vegetable gardens and a pond. In 2015, she added to her estate with a $28.85 million purchase of an additional 23.26 acres that include a home dubbed Seamair Farm Estate, a property with a four-bedroom, home, pool, tennis court, lake and stables, Velvet Ropes reported. Most recently, she purchased Jeff Bridges’ former Montecito home for $6.85 million, bringing her total acreage in the area to almost 70 acres.
Dirt reported that Winfrey acquired a 2.1-acre site for $10.5 million that included a main house and two cottages in Montecito in an off-market transaction in early 2021. In mid-2022, she divided the properties and sold them to friends. Jennifer Aniston bought the parcel with the main house for $14.8 million, per Dirt. Her longtime personal trainer, Bob Greene, purchased the cottages for $2.3 million.
She has also purchased over $40 million worth of real estate in Maui, Hawaii, several properties in Chicago, a $10.85 million property in Mountain Village, Colorado, and an $8.2 million property on Orcas Island, off the coast of Washington State.
Oprah Winfrey’s Philanthropy
Winfrey has concentrated much of her charitable giving on education. After a 2000 visit to South Africa, she contributed more than $40 million toward the creation of the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls. It opened in South Africa in January 2007 and now serves grades 7 through 12. Forbes reported that Winfrey has donated $425 million to charitable causes, with more than $100 million of it given to the academy.
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Gabrielle Olya contributed to the reporting for this article.
This article originally appeared on GOBankingRates.com: How Much Is Oprah Worth?
