Whoopi Goldberg’s shocking confession about why she’s still on ‘The View’ sparks debate across social media.NH
Whoopi Goldberg, the EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony) winner with an estimated net worth between $30 million and $60 million, says she can’t afford to retire from The View.
Goldberg, who turns 70 this fall, isn’t planning to hang up her microphone anytime soon, she told Entertainment Tonight. “Who can afford to do that? If you don’t marry well, you’ve got to keep working,” she lamented. “I’ve got to keep paying those bills, baby.”
It’s not the first time the wealthy entertainer, who makes $8 million a year as The View’s highest-paid host, has complained about her need to keep cashing those checks. As she turned 69 last year, she told a View audience she wouldn’t be in the studio if she didn’t need the money.
“I appreciate that people are having a hard time. Me, too. I work for a living,” she said during a Hot Topic segment about voting, according to Entertainment Weekly. “If I had all the money in the world, I would not be here, okay? So, I’m a working person, you know?”
“My kid has to feed her family,” she continued. “My great-granddaughter has to be fed by her family. I know it’s hard out there.”
It is hard out there, but less complicated for Goldberg than for most fans of The View. The median income for an American worker is just shy of $40,000, with median household income around $78,000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. By my calculator, that means Goldberg makes approximately 102 times the salary of most American families.
In other words, the grandkids are eating pretty well.
Goldberg’s annual working-person lament recalls Meghan McCain’s 2024 podcast rant about her time on The View. “I was in a particularly heated Hot Topics meeting,” she said on Meghan McCain Has Entered the Chat. “I remember yelling at the meeting that, ‘Some of you’ or ‘All of you are going to have to start interacting with people who don’t make $100,000 a year or more.’ You have to interact with someone who makes minimum wage on some level or another.”
It’s hard to say how many working stiffs are hanging out with McCain, whose own reported net worth is in the $10 million range. But at least she has the good sense not to paint herself as a “working person” trying to make ends meet.
Goldberg likely does need those View checks. She reportedly owns several historic homes around the world, and those property taxes aren’t going to pay themselves. Unless she sells some of that lavish real estate, she needs the millions to maintain her current lifestyle.
But spare us the tone-deaf cries of “Who can afford to retire?” Most people would love to suffer through Whoopi’s version of “hard times.”
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