Twitter Dragged Oprah For Her Quotes About The Odds Of Winning An Emmy

There’s no one better at giving inspirational speeches than Oprah Winfrey, and she did just that at the start of the 2022 Emmys. Well, mostly. Her opening speech also included a bit of math about how statistically unlikely it is for someone to win television’s most prized award. Except... the math wasn’t really mathing. It didn’t take long for Twitter to blow up with tweets fact-checking Oprah’s math at the 2022 Emmys.

At the top of TV’s biggest night, host Kenan Thompson kicked off the show with one of TV’s biggest stars by bringing Oprah Winfrey to the stage. In typical Oprah fashion, she roused the audience by delivering an inspirational speech about how incredible it is to win an Emmy Award. But one part of her speech in particular stuck out to viewers. In her speech, Oprah broke down the so-called nearly impossible statistics of a person winning an Emmy: “There are 8 billion people on this planet but only 25 Emmys to be given out tonight,” she said. “Your chances of winning 300 million to one.”

Those 300 million to one odds certainly sound pretty accurate considering how difficult it is to snag an Emmy, but viewers were quick to point out that the math wasn’t super solid. For one thing, using Earth’s entire 8 billion population to calculate who will win an Emmy was called out (alas, most people in the world don’t work in the television industry).

On top of that, viewers called out Oprah using only 25 Emmys per year in her calculation, when there are actually so many more Emmys handed out each year that aren’t televised.

Well, the math may have been off, but Oprah’s message still rang true. Winning an Emmy is still a pretty phenomenal feat, even if the odds of taking one home isn’t exactly as steep as 300 million to one. And hey — we don’t turn on our TVs for math anyway; this is supposed to be our escape! So, even if Oprah’s speech didn’t exactly add up, it still totally hit everyone in the heart, which is really what counts.