Oprah Winfrey has traded most of her stake in OWN for a small property in Discovery, home of TLC’s trashy hit reality series, “90 Day Fiancé.”
According to an SEC filing Tuesday, Winfrey has snatched less than 1 percent stake of the $ 35 million plus Discovery as part of a deal that increased the company’s stake in OWN.
Known for Oprah Winfrey’s Master Class, Tyler Perry’s House of Payne and The Haves and the Have Nots, OWN is a joint venture between Discovery, owner of Food Network, TLC, HGTV and other channels, and Winfrey’s Harpo .
Discovery and Harpo’s original deal to form OWN in 2008 included options for Harpo to sell its stake in the network, and since then Discovery has slowly increased its stake in OWN. According to Discovery’s 2008 annual report, the billionaire’s media mogul had entered into an agreement that would require Discovery to buy some or all of its stake in OWN that would expire in late 2020.
The new deal increases Discovery’s ownership in OWN from 73 percent to 95 percent, and it allows Winfrey to exchange most of Harpo’s stake in OWN for voting Series A shares in Discovery, a source told The Post .
Winfrey will continue to serve as OWN’s chief executive officer and chief creative officer, although she now only owns a 5 percent stake in it. A Winfrey representative did not comment.
Now, Harpo owns approximately 1.34 million shares of Discovery, less than 1 percent of the company’s Class A common stock, and registered 670,477 of them for possible sale, the filing said Tuesday.
“Oprah Winfrey has voting rights and control over the Series A Common Stock shares owned by Harpo,” of which she is the sole shareholder, the filing said. It added that Harpo doesn’t have to sell all or even any of its shares. Obviously, the sale of stock would cover the tax costs of the deal.
At Monday’s Discovery stock closing price of $ 27.37, the 1.34 million shares were worth approximately $ 36.7 million.
In 2017, Discovery paid $ 70 million to purchase an additional 24.5 percent stake in OWN to boost its ownership to 73 percent, but that deal also took into account the net debt to the network, the companies said at the time. Winfrey had then agreed to continue her role as CEO of OWN with her exclusivity commitment to the network running through 2025.
Since the launch of OWN in 2011, it has been Winfrey’s main home on television. In 2018, however, Winfrey entered into a multi-year content partnership with Apple that would allow the mogul to host and produce TV shows, movies and specials for the tech giant’s new streaming service, AppleTV +.
Tuesday’s news comes as Discovery gears up to launch its own international streaming service Discovery + next month. While Discovery + will focus on non-scripted shows such as food, home and reality shows, it will compete directly with Apple TV +.