SAO PAULO (Reuters) – Brazilian media mogul Silvio Santos, who went from street vendor to owner of a business empire that includes one of the country’s biggest television channels, has died at the age of 93, Brazilian broadcaster SPT said on Saturday.
“Today the sky is happy with the arrival of our beloved Silvio Santos,” SPT said on Channel X. “Rest in peace, you will always be in our hearts.”
According to his medical report, Silvio Santos died of pneumonia in the early hours of Saturday morning, after being hospitalized in Sao Paulo with H1N1 influenza since early August.
Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva expressed his condolences over the death of Silvio Santos on Saturday, calling him “the greatest figure in the history of Brazilian television and one of the country’s greatest communicators.”
Silvio Santos, the stage name Mr. Abravanel adopted for his media career, founded SBT TV in the 1980s, one of the most watched TV channels in Brazil and for several years the only real competitor to TV Globo, one of the largest media conglomerates in the Americas.
Unlike other media moguls, Silvio Santos was also a showman, regularly hosting his own TV shows until around 2022.
He successfully hosted game shows that became very popular among low-income families. One of his tricks was to throw paper airplanes made of banknotes to the audience, who would fight to get them.
Abravanel, the son of Sephardic Jewish immigrants from the former Ottoman Empire who settled in Rio de Janeiro’s Lapa district, started working as a teenager selling plastic protection for cards on the streets.
He was spotted by a radio station and hired as a radio announcer. He then moved to television and hosted shows on local channels during the 1960s and 1970s, including TV Globo, before founding SBT TV in 1981.
Forbes magazine valued his business empire, which included a cosmetics company, a financial firm and real estate assets, at more than $1 billion in 2016.
In 2001, he made headlines when he was kidnapped for seven hours by someone who had taken his daughter hostage a few days earlier. The kidnapping was broadcast live on local television stations.
Abravanel had six daughters, two from his first marriage, including one adopted, and four from his second marriage to Iris Passaro Abravanel.