Oprah Winfrey leaving WeightWatchers board after admitting she used weight-loss drug — shares sink nearly 25%
WeightWatchers shares plummeted nearly 25% Thursday after slimmed-down media mogul Oprah Winfrey announced she was leaving the diet company’s board to “eliminate any perceived conflict of interest around her taking weight-loss medications.”
Winfrey, who had admitted to using a weight-loss drug as a “maintenance tool” a few months ago, said she would donate her 1.4% stake in the company — – reportedly worth about $12 million — to the National Museum of African American History and Culture during the company’s open trading window next month.
The move ends the 70-year-old former talk show queen’s nine-year tenure on WeightWatchers’ board.
WeightWatchers made the announcement in a press release shared with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday, which said that Winfrey won’t be standing for reelection at the May 2024 shareholder meeting.
On Thursday, the company’s stock traded at $2.90 a share, down 91 cents, or 23.75%.
Winfrey’s name and image have been plastered all over the company’s marketing and advertising efforts. agreement since she joined the weight-loss company — which uses a points system rather than calories or other nutritional metrics to track what a user eats throughout the day.
She has famously battled weight issues over her long career, and had touted that she shed as much as 42 pounds on the program — sharing her experience getting her blood sugar and blood pressure back into healthy ranges while using WeightWatchers’ points system.
However, Winfrey recently admitted to turning to popular weight-loss drugs as a “maintenance tool.”
After shocking fans in a form-fitting dress for the December premiere of “The Color Purple” — where onlookers reveled that she looked “thinner than ever” — Winfrey revealed to People that she’s been taking a prescription weight-loss drug “as a tool to manage not yo-yo-ing.”
She declined, however, to confirm whether she was taking popular options like Ozempic or Wegovy.
Months prior, Winfrey said that those who use Ozempic to lose weight were taking an “easy way out.”
She swiftly walked back on the comments after it was revealed that the telehealth subscription service, Sequence, that WeightWatchers paid $106 million to acquire prescribes Ozempic and other drugs used for weight loss.
Winfrey’s moves away from WeightWatchers come at a time when the company is battling stiff competition as a major shift in the weight-loss industry has made diabetes-turned-weight-loss drugs like Novo Nordisk-made Ozempic and Wegovy so mainstream, that there’s a nationwide shortage of the once-weekly injections.
The change within the industry was evident in WeightWatchers’ latest earnings report, released Tuesday, which posted a net loss of $88.1 million for the three-month period ended Dec. 31 — more than twice the losses it suffered in the year-ago period.
As the company has suffered, Winfrey has pared back her stake.
Over the summer, Winfrey reduced her stake in the company from roughly 10% to just 1.4%.
She now owns 1.1 million shares of WeightWatchers stock, according to The Wall Street Journal — a move Winfrey told the outlet was to “rebalance my overall portfolio.”
