Cathy Hughes is one of America’s most successful media moguls.
But what is the story of her rise to success and what is her net worth?
Who is Cathy Hughes?
Cathy Hughes was born in Nebraska, US on April 22, 1947.
She is the daughter of a trombonist who played in the first integrated all-women’s band in America, and of the first African-American to earn an accounting degree from Creighton University.
The family had little money, with Hughes lying about her age when she was 14 years old in order to get her first job.
Even from an early age, she was always interested in music.
She joked in an interview in 2016: “I grew up in a household where there was six of us – one bathroom.
“I did my radio show every morning in the mirror with a toothbrush, and everyone thought at that time there was something wrong with me.
“I mean, there are no black people in radio, particularly no black women.”
She attended the University of Nebraska Omaha and Creighton University to study business administration but dropped out when she became pregnant.
Instead, she started a career in media, working for an African American newspaper called the Omaha Star before working for KOWH radio station in Omahain in 1969.
In 1973 she became General Sales Manager of Howard University’s radio station, WHUR-FM, in Washington DC. It was here that Hughes’ career really took off. In her first year in the job she increased the station’s revenue from $250,000 to $3 million. By 1975 she was the first woman vice president and general manager of a station in the capital.
In 1979 during a meeting with the radio station’s commercial team, one person present made a flippant comment that would project Hughes’ career to a new level.
Hughes gave her input on the commercial direction she thought that station should take.
“One of the members said to me, if you think that you’re smart enough to own a radio station, you should do it for yourself,” Hughes recalls.
“He was being facetious, but I took it verbatim, seriously. I was like, oh, my goodness ‘I should do it for myself’.”
In 1980 Hughes and her then husband became entrepreneurs and set up Radio One. They got a bank loan after being denied finances 32 times, and bought AM radio station WOL 1450.
Over the decades that followed, Hughes turned Radio One into one of the most successful stations in America, with a mix of R&B music and talk formats.
It owns 70 radio stations in nine major markets in the US and was listed on the stock market in 1999.
In 2019 she set the record for being the first black woman to be inducted into the National Association of Broadcasters’ Hall of Fame.
Despite her success, in 2022 Hughes said she was far from done. Asked about being compared to other media heavy-weights, she said: “I’m not a mogul. I hate that title because I’m still very much a work in progress.”
What is Cathy Hughes net worth?
Cathy Hughes is thought to have a net worth of $460 million. The he sum makes her the second-richest Black woman in the US, after Oprah Winfrey.
Her wealth comes largely down to her success in building Radio One. She made millions when the station was listed on the US Stock Exchange in 1999.
The company’s initial public offering was for 6.5 million shares at $24 per share.
As of August 2023, Urban One has a market cap of $269 million.