Oprah Winfrey only woman among Hawaii’s top 10 biggest billionaire landowners

Oprah Winfrey is one of the most renowned media personalities, not only in the U.S. but across the globe. She started her career in media as a teenager and eventually cemented her position as the queen of talk shows.

She overcame challenges and trauma to reach a height where she became a global idol, icon, and entrepreneur with a net worth of over a billion dollars. In 2018, she hit a record net worth of $4 billion courtesy of the performance of Weight Watchers International Inc., with which she partnered in 2015. The weight-loss company increased her fortune by $427 million that year.

Winfrey owns other businesses including The Oprah Winfrey Show and the cable network OWN. She partnered with Apple to produce original content and programming for the tech company. The media mogul is also a real estate investor.

In 2023, she featured among a group of wealthy Americans who have been snapping properties around the U.S. and the world. She was featured in Forbes’ publication on “billionaires who own the most properties.”

Forbes found at least five billionaires with 10 or more homes and plenty of others who own at least half a dozen. They included Larry Ellison, Eric Schmidt, Jeff Bezos, Ron Burkle, Mike Bloomberg, Ken Griffin, Jeff Greene, Stan Kroenke & Ann Walton Kroenke, Russ Weiner, Winfrey, Dagmar Dolby, Robert Kraft, Gerald Ford, Josh Harris, Peter Thiel, Nancy Walton Laurie and Charles Zegar.

Forbes uncovered six different LLCs appearing to belong to Winfrey, through which she owns some 2,000 acres of property and an undetermined number of homes in Hawaii. For some years, she has been a part-time Maui resident and she was recently seen hiking with her celebrity TV friend, Gayle King, on Kauai, Hawaii. She recently acquired 870 acres of land in Kula for nearly $6.6 million. According to Maui Now, the acquisition adds to hundreds of acres of real estate she already owns in Kula and Hāna. 

With an estimated net worth of more than $2 billion, Forbes noted that Winfrey has at least 10 residences with the primary one located at Montecito, Calif.

Today, Forbes is reporting that the media mogul is among American billionaires who collectively own approximately 11 percent of Hawaii’s private land. She reportedly holds a noteworthy 2,130 acres, making her one of the top owners of private land in the island state of the United States. She joins the likes of Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, and Tadashi Yanai.

Forbes said it spent months going through thousands of property records on Hawaii’s six largest islands and discovered that 37 billionaires possess a total of at least 218,000 acres, representing 5.3 percent of the state’s total land and 11.1 percent of all non-government-owned land.

Forbes wrote that “Winfrey’s hilly pastures in Hawaii feature ancient stone walls, grazing cattle, a bed-and-breakfast operation for hosting friends and an (unprofitable) organic farm. Intent on preserving the land, she’s committed to keeping it vacant and planting native species to help restore lost watershed.”

Winfrey’s land was not touched following the Maui wildfires last August that killed about 100 people. She set up the People’s Fund of Maui after the disaster and contributed $25 million to it.