The infamous Oprah Car Giveaway

Day 52 / 365

Have you heard about Oprah’s famous car giveaway? It happened on her show back in 2004, and it was a huge deal at the time. Oprah gave away a brand-new car to every single audience member that day, and the crowd went wild. That clip of Oprah shouting “You get a car!” is now popular as a meme.

It seemed like an incredibly generous and kind gesture, but as it turned out, there were some unintended consequences to the giveaway that ended up making it a little less amazing than it first appeared.

The thing is, you can’t simply give away stuff. People received the cars as “Prizes” and not “Gifts” which meant that they had to pay taxes on them. As soon as the shoot got over, the audience members were given tax forms to fill, to determine the amount of taxes they would owe.

And we’re not talking about a small amount of money here — the taxes on these cars were pretty steep. Some people ended up owing thousands of dollars in taxes, which they may not have been prepared for.

The worst part, Oprah had asked the producers to handpick the audience for that show, so that they were families that were in desperate need of a car. This meant that these financially struggling families would now have to somehow come up with thousands of dollars in taxes.

In the end, most of the people ended up selling the car and paying the taxes with that money.