How Oprah Winfrey Built A Multibillion Dollar Fortune

How did Oprah Winfrey become the only female African-American billionaire on the Forbes list of America’s richest? Decades of hard work, building her daytime Oprah talk show into a must watch for her core audience.

Forbes has been tracking Winfrey’s fortune since 1995, when she joined The Forbes 400 list of richest Americans with a net worth of $340 million. Today she’s worth an estimated $2.8 billion.

Here’s a guide to her assets:

Weight Watchers

Winfrey bought 10% of the weight loss firms’ shares in October 2015 for a total of $43 million, paying $6.79 a share. Looks like she bought in at the right time. As of late Tuesday January 9, the shares are worth more than 8 times what she paid for them – a total of $365 million.

Real Estate

Winfrey’s 42 acre estate in Montecito, just south of Santa Barbara, is assessed at $95 million. Other properties she owns in Santa Barbara, Maui, Colorado and Nashville are worth another $117 million combined, at least. Total estimated real estate holdings: $210 million.

OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network

In 2011, Oprah bid goodbye to her daytime TV show and launched the cable channel OWN in partnership with Discovery Communications. In December 2017, Discovery purchased 24.5% of OWN from Oprah, leaving her with 25.5%. Forbes estimates that Oprah’s share of OWN is worth about $75 million.

Profits from 25 Years Of The Oprah Show, Reinvested

Forbes estimates that profits from over 25 years of the successful Oprah show, plus profits from films like The Color Purple, Beloved and Selma (which her Harpo Productions coproduced) add up to nearly $2 billion, after taking out estimated taxes and assuming that the funds have been invested over time. Harpo itself is likely worth another $150 million.