Oprah is a woman who needs no introduction. She is known and loved by hundreds of millions all around the world, mostly for her record breaking daytime TV talk show, The Oprah Winfrey Show. She has consistently topped lists like “the world’s most powerful women”, and “the most influential people of the 20th century”, and has a long list of firsts as the first African American, first woman, and/or first Black person to accomplish numerous things.
Oprah Winfrey’s net worth is $3.1 billion, and she is completely self-made. Her back story is fascinating in contrast with her incredible wealth and success.
Winfrey (whose legal name was actually Orpah, but changed to Oprah after being mispronounced so often) was born to an unwed teenage mother in dire poverty in rural Mississippi. Her mother went to Wisconsin to work, and Oprah stayed with her grandmother. They were so poor that Winfrey literally wore dresses made from potato sacks. She would later be bounced back and forth between inner city Wisconsin with her mother and Tennessee with her putative father, suffering sexual abuse and becoming pregnant at age 14 (the baby boy was born pre-term and died shortly after birth). She miraculously overcame all of this adversity and excelled in school, both academically and socially.
She got her start in communications on a local Black news radio station at age 19, and as they say, one thing led to another. Her hit talk show premiered in 1986, and was not only the most successful program of its genre in history (and still is), but completely revolutionized television and the media.
Remembering her humble roots, Winfrey is very generous to charity. She is the first (and only, to date) Black multi-billionaire in North America, male or female, and she became the first Black person on the list of the 50 most generous Americans, and has given hundreds of millions of dollars to different charitable causes.
