Oprah Winfrey: Queen of all media

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1:09BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Before we begin, just to warn you, this episode contains brief discussions of sexual assault and may not be suitable for all audiences.

1:27Welcome to Good Bad Billionaire, the programme where we pick billionaires and find out just how they made their money, and then we judge them. So every episode will tell the story of how they went from zero to a million, then a million to a billion, and then we'll decide if they're good, bad, or just wealthy. I'm Simon Jack, the BBC's business editor. I'm Zing Zing, and I'm a journalist, author and podcaster. And I'm interested in billionaires because sometimes they embody what really seems like the American dream. You know, this whole idea of rags to riches, you know, from coming from absolutely nothing to having everything.

2:03And to my mind, there's nobody who really exemplifies that more than Oprah.

2:10OK, let's do Oprah in numbers. 69 years old, at one point worth$2.5 billion. She was the richest African-American of the 20th century. And in fact, the first black female billionaire ever in the United States and dubbed the queen of all media. 25 seasons of the Oprah Winfrey show viewed in 150 countries. And you may have been among the 61 million viewers around the world of her recent interview with a little sweet couple called Harry and Meghan. A little modest, shy and retiring couple called Harry and Meghan. She's also, as far as I can remember, the only billionaire on our list who bought a$42 million private jet after a woman came up to her in an airport and demanded a hug.

2:54We'll never know whether she would have bought that jet anyway, right? We know she is a fan of fluffy towels, though, because with her first jet, she bought fluffy Ralph Lauren towels. There's something quite touching about the purchase of a homespun pleasure like a nice fluffy towel. I mean, it's hard to beat straight out of the dryer. Oh, yes. Nice and warm. Let's have a listen to her on BBC's Woman's Hour in 1999. This is her at the age of 45 discussing her goal for 50 and the fact she is not nice. I think for me the goal is to become more of myself, to fully own myself. My whole life was always defined outside of myself on terms of everybody else because I thought if I don't do it, they're going to think I'm not nice.

3:38They're going to think, oh, gee, this TV show's gone to her head. So I have to run myself crazy so that everybody will think I'm a nice person. One day, Stedman said to me, why do you do that? Why do you do that? And I say, because if I don't, then people are going to think I'm not nice. And he said, well, you're not nice. You are not nice and you need to get over it. It's interesting, isn't it? Because that is her persona. But her start is, well, I mean, this is a Rags to Richard story on steroids. It makes Oliver Twist look like the famous five for Swallows and Amazons. You really don't get more cinematic than that.

4:14So let's set the scene. It's 1954 rural Mississippi and there's a little girl called Oprah, which is actually a biblical name which no one can pronounce, hence she becoming Oprah. And she grows up wearing potato sacks for dresses. Come off it. Is this for real? Oh yeah, just wait till you get to the fact that she grows up playing with a corn husk for a doll. Come on. If I was a director, I'd say, you know, maybe leave the Cornhusk. It's a little bit over-egging the point. We're going a little far here. Exactly. It's incredible. And it's not just kind of chocolate box poverty picture here. There's some really serious hardship.

4:48Yeah, exactly. Well, I mean, if you go back to that period, I mean, we're talking about America pre-civil rights movement, the segregated South. Her parents were unmarried teenagers. Her mother was a housemaid and her dad was a soldier. And she was raised by her grandma on a farm. The very fact that her grandmother taught her to read by the time she was three is a miracle in and of itself. Yeah, so she's smart and she does well at school. On the other hand, she also has to deal with a lot of neglect and sexual abuse. So she moves to Milwaukee with her mother when she's six, but she's abused by a cousin, an uncle and a family friend starting from when she's nine.

5:25And she actually runs away and becomes pregnant when she's 14. But the baby is born and stillborn. She keeps coming up against all these obstacles. I mean, like you say, you couldn't make it up. I mean, it's sort of breathtakingly tough, this backstory. And you just wonder whether there's some seeds here about her inner strength that she, you know, toughness we just heard about. Some of that is born here. I think they talk about resilience now, resilience, building resilience in kids. And, you know, you really don't get to survive a childhood like that without an enormous amount of resilience.

5:56So this is an incredibly tough backstory. At that point, at 14, she goes to live with her father in Nashville, becomes a good student. But meantime, she's working in a grocery store. She's babysitting for 50 cents an hour. And her dad really pushes her. I mean, you know, probably by this time you could see the seeds of Oprah forming. You know, she's enormously intelligent and she's resilient. And at 17, she gets scouted by this local radio station in Nashville as a part-time newsreader for$100 a week. That sounds like, I mean, probably a lot of money in those days. That must have felt like a great job.

6:27Oh, yeah, 100%. And, you know, Oprah says, I would have done that job for free. And she famously goes on to say, if you can get paid for doing what you love, every paycheck is a bonus. Trite, but true. In a way, she specialises in these things which kind of life lessons and these little pearls of popular wisdom, things like that. Chicken soup for the soul kind of style. Chicken soup, exactly, exactly. Exactly. At 19, she moves from radio to TV. Youngest person and first African-American woman. A number of records that she'll set to anchor the news at Nashville's WTVF TV. So WTVF TV. I always love like RBKC Wisconsin.

7:09There are all sorts of TV programmes which are set in this WYKP kind of things like that. Because you lived in America for a bit, right? And this is kind of standard regional television. We don't really get that much of it in the UK. That's exactly right, because obviously it's a huge country. It's got a very regionalised media landscape. And of course, don't forget, it's got three time zones. So the idea that everyone watches the same TV or the same radio that we consider normal here, it's a very different place in the US, which is important to her success later. So just because she's made it on TV and she actually ends up quitting college to relocate to Baltimore and anchor the six o 'clock news, it doesn't mean she's made it.

7:48You know, it's very much the equivalent of being on, I don't know, not college radio, but, you know, it's definitely not the big leagues, right? And in fact, she wasn't an instant success, which is very encouraging for any would-be journalists out there, any budding billionaires. You don't hit the big time immediately. In fact, she got demoted after seven months. Yeah. And interestingly, I was reading that the bosses thought she was a little bit too casual, too open, showed her feelings a little bit too much. And famously, she refused to interview mourners at a funeral, which, you know, I kind of like it kind of shows a backbone.

8:22Well, it's also interesting that when you break the mould, the first voices that you hear, the loudest ones, are the naysayers because you don't fit into what we've traditionally been used to. But I think if we look across the series that we're doing right now, that it's often the way with trailblazers that people tell them they're stupid or they're wrong until they think they're brilliant and they're right. And it just is a matter of how long they take to get to that point. That's right. And so in 1978, having taken her off the six o 'clock news, they put her on a smaller talk show called People Are Talking just to run out her contract.

8:56And in fact, that was the best thing that happened to her. She actually took to it like a duck to water. And actually, she goes on to say, you know, my entire body told me this is what I was supposed to do. That day, my job ended and my calling began. I mean, she talks like a church preacher, doesn't she? Yeah, and we have had that from even someone like Jeff Bezos, for example. He said, I've got a calling. It's one of those things that billionaires think that it may be a kind of arrogance or a kind of megalomania gone mad. Well, of course, megalomania is mad. It kind of means mad. But anyway, it's a thing that basically there's a kind of messianic complex that they feel possessed by a higher calling.

9:34Like a spiritual calling. Yeah, exactly. Some people would say, I don't know, we'll just leave it at that. Yeah, we'll just leave it at that. Spiritual calling to create Amazon is slightly different from a spiritual calling to journalism. Yeah. So in 1984, she moves to Chicago and this becomes her power base. In fact, she's a sort of famous Chicago resident during the 80s and 90s, recruited to host a morning show. This was the morning show that was set up to try and rival the dominance of a show called The Phil Donahue Show, which I have to admit I'm not particularly familiar with. It kind of has faded into obscurity compared to Oprah.

10:10It lasted a while and I do remember being in the US sort of during the 90s and Donoghue was still a big deal but Oprah Winfrey had taken over that time. But if you're trying to think about what kind of shows these were, in a way they were kind of a sanitised version of Jeremy Kyle. They were sort of bring your problems, teen pregnancy, drug addiction. They would look at the issues of the day and sort of slightly feast on some people's misfortune. And they were all in front of live audiences, right? So that people could react and speak out and respond to what was going on in front of them in the stage.

10:46This programme that she was hired in Chicago to do eventually was renamed The Oprah Winfrey Show. She gets a deal of$230 ,000 a year plus$30 ,000 extra for the next three years. So she's on her way to her first million right now. And I actually found the first episode of the time she launches the show. And it's pretty amazing because, you know, she's like a young black woman. She's relatively unknown at this point, especially to a Chicago audience. And she kind of goes on stage and says, hey, I'm really nervous. This has been so hyped. I've actually broken out in hives under my armpits. You could not imagine someone like that, even on TV.

11:23I don't think you could get someone on Love Island to announce to people they've broken out in hives. But that was the kind of secret sauce of Oprah, wasn't it? It was exposing her own vulnerability, channeling some of her own weaknesses or what have you. And this is, I think, sometimes we can come back to this authenticity bit because actually we'll see throughout this story, she's just tough as nails, but this willingness to sort of show her feelings, to let the audience into how she's feeling, that creates this bond between the studio audience and the wider television audience, which becomes so fundamental to her success.

11:57So she's on her way to becoming a millionaire, but she actually has a very pivotal moment in her life where she meets the film critic Roger Ebert on a date and he goes, you know, I think you could do better. You know, why don't you meet this Chicago lawyer called Jeffrey Jacobs? You know, he can give you some business advice. And this proves to be the making of her, right? This guy, Jeffrey Jacobs, looks at her contract and says, I think we could do a lot more. We can do a bit better. And in particular, he was someone who was looking at the idea of syndication. Now, that is something that doesn't really happen in the UK.

12:32It's where one network makes a TV show and then they sell it to be shown on other networks around the country. And there's plenty of them. So you make one show, then you distribute it to lots of others. Now, of course, that increases your revenue and increases your profit. And King World Productions, who also incidentally make Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune, some shows you may have heard of. Jeopardy is massive in the US. I can't tell you what a big programme. When Alex Trebek, the host, died, that was national news. It was like he was a national treasure, this guy. So King World Productions, it's brought in as a distributor for the Oprah Winfrey show.

13:07And, you know, Oprah is kind of making these moves that will set her up for the long term, especially considering that Jeffrey Jacobs is still her business partner. I mean, these kind of long lasting business partnerships, they either make you or break you. Right. And Oprah describes him as a piranha, which is interesting. Right. Because maybe if you're not a piranha yourself, you have to get people into your life who can be the piranhas for you. And she actually goes on to say that Geoffrey really takes the roof off her thinking and helps her get rid of what she calls a slave mentality, which I think means, you know, this idea that you're working for other people and not for yourself.

13:42Yeah, and that's really important in this series, I think, because it's very rare, you know, whether you're a sports person or an actor or whatever, very rarely will you get to a billion because it's such a big number by just someone writing you, you know, paying you wages or giving you X amount of appearance fee for a movie. And another thing happens around this time, which raises Oprah's profile. She goes into the acting profession and does incredibly well. It takes to it like a duck to water. She is cast in The Colour Purple, which is directed by Steven Spielberg. Still a massive director, but, you know, at the time, coming off of things like E.T., for instance.

14:19And she gets nominated for Best Supporting Actor on the first go, not bad. And the film goes on to be nominated for 11 Oscars. So it's a pretty big deal for her. Yeah. And also, of course, raises her profile. There she is now as a Hollywood name. And that gives a great boost to her TV profile. So by the age of 32, she is the first African-American TV host to be nationally syndicated. And it earns her$10 million that year. So she is officially not just a millionaire, but a millionaire 10 times over. Yeah. And she said she bought fluffy towels by Ralph Lauren. Other towels are available, of course.

14:55But I'm trying to think, what would you buy with your first$2 million check? I was curious to know how much those towels cost. So I looked it up. And I think the going rate for them nowadays is about 70 quid. And I find that quite sweet, actually. Like you get a million, I mean, if I got a million,$10 million check, I would buy£100 towels. I would buy a Gibson 1959 Les Paul Custom Sunburst, which would cost me about a quarter of a million pounds nowadays. I like how you know exactly what you want. I know exactly what. And I had a chance to buy one for$10 ,000 in 1998. And I thought that's way too much money.

15:30Now they're a quarter of a million bucks. So there we are. Missed out on a good investment choice there. Anyway, so there we are. She is a millionaire. Part one of this journey done.

15:50So we know Oprah's on 10 mil, but she's still quite far off from being a billionaire. And this is the point where Harpoor Studios comes in. Harpoor Productions. Yeah, exactly. Oprah's belt backwards. Which I did not realise at first. Didn't you? I just thought it was about Harpo Marx. Okay. So they want to create their own studio. And once again, if you look back to the golden age of Hollywood, you had highly paid actors and actresses, the Clark Gables of this world. But the people who really made the money, whether Sam Goldwyns or the Louis B. Mayers of this world, they own the studios. The Svengali's.

16:25The Svengali's, the people who actually own the lot. And this is them trying to own their own studio. Right. And the split goes, Oprah's a chairwoman. She's 90 % of the company and Geoffrey's the president, but he only owns 10%. So Geoffrey's big deal is he wants to pledge the future profits of the show for the first three years as collateral to set up the studio. So they had to go out and find investment funds to do this because it takes a lot of money to set up a studio. And although she had$10 million by this stage, that's not enough to build your own studio. So they had to pledge their future earnings in order to get the investment in.

17:01Same as we've seen when people were trying to raise money to start tech companies or other billion-making enterprises. Do you know how common this kind of setup is in the media? Because that seems like quite a risky investment to me. It's not common to start a new studio from scratch, but then Oprah is anything but common. So this is a bold move. She's only the third American woman ever to own her own studio. So ambitious for sure. Especially considering that she has to literally build the studio, right? Which I didn't realise at first until I started looking into it. She literally physically has to build the set.

17:33So 88 ,000 square feet, three sound stages. Obviously, you've got the live audience, which is really important to Oprah. So you've got to create the space for them to sit as well. I mean, it's a whole production. OK, you've got the stages literally set on their brand new studio. What happens next? It is a runaway success. So the Oprah Winfrey show starts averaging 40 million viewers a week in the US. It becomes the top rated talk show. It's licensed to 150 countries internationally. And again, talking about owning the company, Harpo produces other shows like Dr. Phil. There are TV movies. She has a new long form interview thing, which includes a blockbuster interview with Michael Jackson.

18:19And that draws in 100 million viewers worldwide for that interview alone. Yeah, that was quite a TV event, wasn't it? The Michael Jackson interview. You're probably too young. I can tell you about it. It was a very big event at the time in the early 90s. And it just sort of solidified her position that if somebody massive wanted to say something massive at a massive moment in their lives, the place to do it was with Oprah. And you saw that happen with Harry and Meghan. You saw it happen with Tom Cruise. It became the place where people would open up in a forum that they knew would be viewed globally.

18:57She was the high priestess, if you like, of television generally, not just talk shows. And crucially, the kind of persona she brought on stage with her was one who was empathetic and warm. You know, that famous quote from the Harry and Meghan interview, were you silent or were you silenced? You know, she's quite perceptive, but, you know, she lets people speak. You know, I think that's why people, especially celebrities, are attracted to that, because she's not going to be a Jeremy Paxman type and just try and nail them on the cross. Yeah. But at the same time, she's quite mischievous and provocative in her little side.

19:30It kind of almost leaves a little grenade there for people to walk into. It's quite a skillful interview technique. Yeah, because you can do it only insofar as you don't piss the other person enough to make them want to walk out. But then by that point, nobody wants to walk out on Oprah, do they? Exactly. She's a bigger star than the people she's interviewing. No one walks out on Oprah. That's a great asset to have as an interviewer. So by 1993, she's the highest paid entertainer, according to Forbes, and is worth$250 million. In fact, she surpasses Bill Cosby, currently in the Where Is He Now category, as the wealthiest African-American.

20:05And Bill Cosby was, again, you're too long to remember this, but the Cosby show was this groundbreaking American show. And it was a very high profile African-American. So to surpass him was actually a big milestone. I mean, and at this point, you know, she upgrades from spending her money on towels and she buys a$42 million private jet. After a single encounter with a fan who's a little bit rude to her. Oh, gosh. I can never do this again. Buy me a$42 million jet. Amazing. So she's riding high now. She's almost at the height of her fame. But there's more to come. In fact, the corporate money-making machine is not done yet by a long chalk.

20:43Geoffrey Jacobs tells Fortune that the strategy for the studio is to multi-purpose our content. And this is in the 90s, which at the time, you know, multi-purposing your content sounds like a very 2020 thing to say. I'm not sure I understand quite what it means. But what I think it means is that you use it as a vehicle to sell lots of other stuff and important content. And in 97, they renegotiate this deal with ABC to include books, movie productions, a magazine, other TV shows. So it's really Oprah, the brand, becoming Oprah, the corporation. Yeah, sprinkling that magic dust of the Oprah brand onto all sorts of things.

21:21For example, the Oprah Book Club becomes, you know, that becomes one of the biggest things in the book publishing world. One of the most fascinating things I found out about the Oprah Book Club is that when she recommended Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, that had more of an effect for the sales of that book than Toni Morrison winning the Nobel Prize. Wow, okay, so she's more important than the Nobel Prize for Literature. That is incredible. And actually, that was replicated all over the world. Richard and Judy didn't come up with their book club. That wasn't their own idea. Dua Lipa's got her own book club now.

21:53That's down to Oprah. So important is Harpo now that they're given a stake, an equity stake, that means a share, in King World Productions, which, as we say, does Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy. So they've got a slice of a very big pie. Not content with that. she also even co-found a women's cable television network called Oxygen. She launches her own magazine, the Oprah magazine. That was with the Hearst Corporation, but she had complete control over the content. And also, by the way, if you are wondering to yourself, why is it that the old magazine always says Oprah on the cover? That is the whole point.