SAO PAULO (Reuters) – Brazilian media magnate Silvio Santos, who rose from street vendor to owner of a business empire including one of the country’s biggest TV channels, has died at the age of 93, his broadcaster SBT said on Saturday.
“Today heaven rejoices with the arrival of our beloved Silvio Santos,” SBT said on X. “Rest in peace, you will always be eternally in our hearts.”
According to his medical report, Silvio Santos died of bronchopneumonia in the early hours of Saturday after being hospitalized in Sao Paulo since early August with a case of the H1N1 flu.
Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva shared his condolences on X on Saturday, calling Silvio Santos “the greatest personality in the history of Brazilian television and one of the country’s greatest communicators.”
Silvio Santos, the stage name that Senor Abravanel adopted for his media career, founded the SBT TV channel in the 1980s, one of the three most watched TV stations in Brazil and for many years the only real competitor for audiences of TV Globo, one of the largest media conglomerates in America.
Unlike other media moguls, Silvio Santos was also a showman and regularly hosted his own TV shows until about 2022.
He successfully hosted game shows that became very popular among lower-income families. One of his gimmicks was throwing paper airplanes made of banknotes at the audience, who would compete for them.
The son of Sephardic Jewish immigrants from the former Ottoman Empire who settled in the Lapa district of Rio de Janeiro, Abravanel began working as a teenager selling plastic card protectors on the street.
He was noticed by a radio station and was hired as a radio announcer. He later moved into television, presenting shows on local channels in the 1960s and 1970s, including TV Globo, before founding SBT TV in 1981.
His business empire, which included a cosmetics company, a financial firm and real estate assets, was valued at more than $1 billion by Forbes in 2016.
In 2001, he made headlines when he was kidnapped for seven hours by a kidnapper who had taken his daughter hostage a few days earlier. The kidnapping was broadcast live by local TV stations.
Abravanel had six daughters, two from a first marriage, one of which was adopted, and four from his second marriage to Iris Passaro Abravanel.
