Oprah Winfrey is leaving WeightWatchers’ board and will donate her stake in the company to “eliminate any perceived conflict of interest around her taking weight loss medications,” according to the firm, also known as WW International.
Shares of WW International fell by 27% in extended trading following the news, the BBC earlier reported.
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.
The move ends the 70-year-old former talk show star’s nine-year tenure on WeightWatchers’ board.
Her current 1.4% stake in the New York-based weight loss program — reportedly worth about $12 million — will be donated to the National Museum of African American History and Culture during the company’s open trading window next month.
As part of Winfrey’s agreement when she joined the die-hard weight loss company in 2015 — which uses a points system rather than calories or other nutritional metrics to track what a user eats throughout the day — her name and image were plastered all over the company’s marketing and advertising efforts.
Winfrey, who has famously battled weight issues over her long career, had touted that she shed as much as 42 pounds on the program, and shared her experience getting her blood sugar and blood pressure back into healthy ranges while using WeightWatchers’ points system.
However, it was recently revealed that Winfrey has tapped 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.”
