Ben Gilbert: uncertainty

Transcript context

…On the back of that, actually, it was a little before. In 1987, I believe it was the last year of the original contract with King World. I think it was originally a two-year contract, or maybe it was a three-year and it went into 1988 but they negotiated in 1987. She earned $31 million in royalties and salary from the King World contract in 1987. That's when she and Jacobs decide all right, it's time to put the mogul plan into action. Think about when she was just employed by the station, she was making $200,000. Then she got, I don't know how much more but hundreds of thousands of dollars more with a better agent when it was still just the station. The syndication deal, obviously, that's when you get that one maybe even two orders of magnitude jump into this $31 million that year from being in 100 and however many markets. What next? What’s next is, all right, it's time to own the production, it's time to start a company, and it's time to build a studio. They buy the show from WLS—they buy The Oprah Winfrey Show or at least the rights to it. They negotiate directly with King World. They invest $16 million of Oprah's own money to build a state-of-the-art production studio in Chicago, and they're going to produce. They're going to make not only The Oprah Winfrey Show but a lot more media content, too, and they're going to sell it.…

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