David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…There's an interesting thing where in 2009, it was estimated that she was worth $2.3 billion. It's sort of easy to understand how she got there where she basically had this ramp from making $35 million in 1988 all the way up to making $200 million-plus a year by 2008. That was every time she gets to re-negotiate a deal a little bit more in her favor, her audience continued to grow until it plateaued in the late 90s. But she got better and better terms each time all the way until the show ended. It's easy to understand how she/Harpo accumulated over $2 billion. What is not clear is in all these deals that she's doing now, almost all of them are impossible to know the terms other than the Discovery deal. So in the last 10 years, you don't really know. Forbes certainly doesn't know exactly how to estimate Harpo Enterprise's value, Oprah's net worth so we're still in the same mid two's number that everyone's guessing at. I think we saw in the methodology for Forbes, they said they added up all the after-tax profit cash flow to Oprah that they estimate Oprah had gotten from Harpo over the last 20, 30 years. Well, that doesn't make any sense. Anybody who knows how to value a business is you value them based on the discounted stream of future cash flows. All that to say, there are all these properties now that Harpo has their hands including a massive cable network of which they own a quarter, 25%. Also in 2015, Weight Watchers, the company was struggling. Did you find this, Ben? Didn't Oprah buy 10% when it was really struggling at nice terms.…

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