Today is Oprah Winfrey's birthday. Believe it or not, the queen of all media just turned 61 years old. And boy has she done a lot during those 61 years! How do you even begin to describe Oprah? She's a TV star, film actor, producer, journalist, philanthropist, media tycoon… Honestly, there probably aren't enough adjectives in the dictionary to fully describe the breadth of her career successes to date. Let's put it in a way most Celebrity Net Worth fans will appreciate: Oprah's net worth is $3 billion. At the peak of her Talk Show, she earned $300 million per year, mostly from syndication fees. Today, she still earns at least $100 million every year.
Thinking about Oprah's birthday and her net worth gave me a totally random (and slightly morbid) thought. Let's assume that Oprah lives to be 82 years old. That's the average lifespan of an American female (FYI – the average American male lifespan is 77). She may live way longer, or she might die tomorrow. Who knows. But just humor me for a moment, and pretend she lives for exactly 21 more years. Let's also pretend that Oprah suddenly decided that she was going to live out the rest of her years spending all of her $3 billion fortune…sort of a different twist on Brewster's Millions (which is a great movie, if you haven't seen it). Oprah would stop working and donate all of her future income to charity. She'd live solely off her current $3 billion. I realize this is a slightly silly exercise, but I did the math anyway, because it shows you just how insanely rich this woman is.
Oprah Winfrey / Scott Barbour/Getty Images
If she did that, how much money could Oprah Winfrey spend every year/day/hour/minute/second and still never go broke? With my calculations, I wanted to see how much money Oprah could spend every day over those 21 years, and still have $1 in her bank account the day after she died. Here are the answers:
$142,857,142 per year
$11,904,761 per month
$396,825 per day
$18,896 per hour
$314 per minute
$5 per second
