Oprah Winfrey, who tops Forbes’ list of the 250 Greatest Self-Made Americans, retraced the distance from a Mississippi farm with no plumbing where she was born to amassing a media fortune Forbes estimates at $3.4 billion.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK - JANUARY 13: Oprah Winfrey takes part in a panel on January 13, 2026 in New York City. (Photo by Michael Loccisano/Getty Images)
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Winfrey, who earned the number one spot on Forbes Self-Made 250 list—ranking the 250 greatest living self-made Americans in honor of the country's semiquincentennial—said Wednesday that her keys to success were lessons learned from her challenging early years.
Winfrey, who was raped and sexually abused starting at age 9, gave birth to a son at 14 who died soon after: “I thought my life was over, and I had tried to actually harm myself, to do whatever I could because I had so much shame about it,” Winfrey told an audience at Forbes Self-Made 250 Celebration.
Winfrey would’ve been pulled out of school if she had had to raise her child, so she recalls the tragedy as a second chance for her to go back to school, where she discovered her talent in debate and public speaking—which led to a radio job, a scholarship to Tennessee State University and eventually her national media brand.
Winfrey said she shared 29 meals with Nelson Mandela, who helped shape the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls—a project she calls her hardest philanthropic lesson after early efforts taught her that "just writing checks doesn't do it."
She also credited Maya Angelou with reframing how she thinks about legacy: When Winfrey told Angelou her Leadership Academy would be her greatest legacy, Angelou countered that "you have no idea what your legacy will be" because legacy isn't tangible like a building or a dollar amount but "every life you have touched.”
$3.4 billion. Forbes' estimate of Winfrey's net worth, built over five decades from "The Oprah Winfrey Show," Harpo Productions, OWN (the Oprah Winfrey Network) and film projects including the 2024 remake of "The Color Purple."
"The best thing in the world for me as a Black woman has been being underestimated. Those white guys, those King World boys, they would have never given me 50% if they believed that I would be where I am today,” Winfrey told the audience.
Winfrey shared stories about her upbringing, reflecting on the distance she traveled to where she is today:
“My grandmother used to say, ‘Baby, I hope you grow up and get yourself some good white folks like we have good white folks.’ My grandmother was a domestic worker, and so good white folks were people who allowed her to bring food home, who allowed her to use their old clothing, who allowed her to have hand-me-downs. She would not even believe that I grew up to get good white folks working for me. She wouldn't believe it. She wouldn't even understand what that would be, that I was able to flip that paradigm.”
Winfrey, born in Kosciusko, Mississippi, in 1954, built her fortune after taking over a struggling Chicago morning show in 1984 and syndicating it nationally as "The Oprah Winfrey Show,” which ran 25 seasons from 1986 through 2011. Her lawyer's advice during her role in "The Color Purple"—for which she says she was earning $235,000 and gave up her vacation to film—pushed her to found her own company Harpo Productions. With her own production company, she took ownership of “The Oprah Winfrey Show” (Before, the company handling sales from her show, King World, collected the proceeds and paid Winfrey a salary). She has since expanded into OWN, her cable television and media brand, and film. In 2007, with input from Nelson Mandela, she built a residential boarding school in South Africa named Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls for academically gifted girls from impoverished backgrounds. She shared her hardest learned lesson after decades of philanthropic efforts: “I made a lot of mistakes in the beginning because I thought that if you gave people money and you try to help them out of poverty or help them out of bad situations, that would be the answer to it… I learned this the hard way: never give anybody more money than they've already earned.”
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