Oprah Winfrey – CEO, Oprah Winfrey Network and Founder
United States of America
Oprah Winfrey, (born January 29, 1954, Kosciusko, Mississippi, U.S.A.), American Television star, model, and entrepreneur whose syndicated daily talk show became perhaps the most popular in the genre. She’s become one of America’s wealthiest and most powerful people.
Winfrey has participated in various philanthropic activities, including the creation of the Oprah Angel Network, which sponsors charitable programs all around the world. In 2007 she opened a $40 million school in South Africa for poor children. She was a prominent crusader against sexual violence and received numerous honors and prizes from organisations in political, philanthropic and culture. She was elected an honorary Kennedy Center in 2010, and received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences the same year. Winfrey received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013. She received the 2018 Cecil B. DeMille Award (a lifetime achievement Golden Globe), and her impassioned speech— in which she called for racial and gender equality— was generally regarded as one of the most memorable moments of the ceremony.
Winfrey was the first black person to be among the 50 most charitable Americans in 2004 and remained in the top 50 until 2010. In 2012, she gave away over $400 million for educational purposes.
Winfrey had given more than 400 scholarships to Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, as of 2012. Winfrey was recipient of the first Bob Hope Humanitarian Award for tv and film coverage at the 2002 Emmy Awards. Throughout the summer of 2006, Winfrey took her employees and their families (1,065 people in total) on holiday to Hawaii to celebrate two decades on national Television, and to thank her employees for their hard work.
In 2013 Winfrey donated $12 million to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. Earlier that year President Barack Obama gave her the Presidential Medal of Freedom.