Oprah’s Winfrey’s investment portfolio shrunk a few sizes on Tuesday after she saw that her WW program (formerly Weight Watchers) had dropped somewhere between $39 million and $48 million.
According to Fox News, the stock dropped from $103 a share in June 2018 to $22 per share late on Tuesday. Oprah owns more than 5 million shares in WW, according to CNBC, more than 8% of the company.
“The drop followed WW Chief Executive Mindy Grossman’s disclosure to analysts that WW would have fewer members in 2019 than in 2018,” reports the outlet. “Grossman blamed the company’s winter advertising efforts, saying they ‘did not drive consumers in the way we had hoped.'”
In a statement on Tuesday, Mindy Grossman said that Oprah will be featured in WW’s future advertising.
“Our marketing … needed to be more weight-loss focused, especially in the January season,” Grossman said. “Looking ahead, I’m happy to say that Oprah Winfrey will play a central role in our upcoming TV and digital marketing campaign for spring, bringing to life a clear message on how WW is the program that works.”
“Together with Oprah, we are also working on an initiative to galvanize and bring together communities through a series of digital and live experiences and events to accelerate WW’s impact and allow us to reach new and diverse audiences,” Grossman said.
Despite the hit, Bloomberg estimates Oprah’s net worth at $3.4 billion.
As 2019 presses on, the likelihood of Oprah Winfrey fulfilling leftist hopes by entering the 2020 race looks to be increasingly on the wane. In 2018, calls for her to run against President Trump reached a fever pitch, following her rousing “Time’s Up” speech at the Golden Globes. In August of last year, she told British Vogue that running for President would be too taxing.
“In that political structure — all the non-truths, the bulls***, the crap, the nastiness, the backhanded backroom stuff that goes on — I feel like I could not exist,” Winfrey told British Vogue. “I would not be able to do it. It’s not a clean business. It would kill me.”
Perhaps as a trial run, Oprah waded heavily into political waters in the 2018 midterm elections when she campaigned for Georgia Gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, who lost to her GOP opponent by a fairly substantial margin. As The Daily Wire’s Emily Zanotti noted at the time, her failure to propel Abrams to victory was perhaps proof that Oprah does not deliver for the Democrats, especially in swing states:
The race should have been tailor-made for Winfrey, who has been seeking an in road to public politics since retiring from her daytime television show several years ago, but even Oprah’s star power couldn’t close the deal. Tuesday night, Abrams lost by at least 2%, and despite calls for a recount, is unlikely to survive to a runoff election.
That’s a tough blow to Oprah’s political future, which might have included a 2020 Presidential run, but it was only one celebrity loss in a night of high-profile Democratic disasters.