SAO PAULO (Reuters) -Brazilian media mogul Silvio Santos, who went from road vendor to proprietor of a enterprise empire together with one of many nation’s largest TV channels, died on the age of 93, his broadcaster SBT stated on Saturday.
“Today heaven is happy with the arrival of our beloved Silvio Santos,” SBT stated on X. “Rest in Peace, you will always be eternal in our hearts.”
In accordance with his medical report, Silvio Santos died of bronchopneumonia within the early hours of Saturday, after he had been hospitalized in Sao Paulo with a case of H1N1 flu because the starting of August.
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 great communicators.”
Silvio Santos, the stage identify that Senor Abravanel adopted for his media profession, based within the Eighties the SBT TV channel, one of many three most watched TV stations in Brazil and for years the one actual competitor for viewers to TV Globo, one of many greatest media conglomerates within the Americas.
In contrast to different media moguls, Silvio Santos was additionally a showman, repeatedly internet hosting his personal TV reveals till about 2022.
He efficiently hosted recreation reveals that grew to become highly regarded with lower-income households. One in every of his gimmicks was to throw paper planes made of cash payments into the viewers, who would battle for them.
The son of Sephardic Jewish immigrants from the previous Ottoman Empire who settled in Rio de Janeiro’s Lapa district, Abravanel started working as a teen promoting plastic protections for playing cards within the streets.
He was noticed by a radio station and received employed as radio announcer. He later switched to TV and hosted reveals on native channels in the course of the Nineteen Sixties-Seventies, together with TV Globo, earlier than founding SBT TV in 1981.
His enterprise empire, which included a cosmetics firm, a monetary agency and actual property belongings, was valued by Forbes at over $1 billion in 2016.
In 2001, he made headlines when he was kidnapped for seven hours by a kidnapper who a number of days earlier had taken his daughter hostage. The kidnapping was broadcast reside by native TV stations.
Abravanel had six daughters, two from a primary marriage, together with one who was adopted, and 4 from his second marriage with Iris Passaro Abravanel.
