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Published · transcript-backed

David Rosenthal: belief

25 Jun 2020 Acquired Oprah (Harpo Studios)

“The crazy thing is we'll get into this in a sec, but I think the way Forbes values her wealth is dramatically undervaluing her.”

— David Rosenthal

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Speaker
David Rosenthal
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
belief
Recorded
25 Jun 2020
Publisher
Acquired

Transcript context

…But yeah, she's exclusively on screen with The Oprah Winfrey Network as part of the Discovery relationship these days. Yeah. We'll see how that plays out in Oprah's many many iron still on the fire. To wrap it up here in the history and facts, Oprah achieved her goal. Today, Forbes ranks Oprah as the sixth wealthiest black person in the world. The wealthiest black woman and the 10th wealthiest self- made women in the world. The crazy thing is we'll get into this in a sec, but I think the way Forbes values her wealth is dramatically undervaluing her. I suspect it's a lot higher than that. 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.…

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