Silvio Santos
| Silvio Santos | |
|---|---|
Silvio Santos in 2010
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| Born |
Senor Abravanel December 12, 1930 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil |
| Nationality | Brazilian |
| Occupation | TV host, businessman |
| Known for | Brazilian media personality |
| Net worth |
 US$ 2.3 Billion (2013) |
Silvio Santos, real name Senor Abravanel (born December 12, 1930) is a Brazilian TV show host and entrepreneur. He is the owner of Grupo Silvio Santos, whose holdings include SBT, the second largest television network in the country. His net worth was US$2.3 billion in 2013. He is the presenter of the second oldest Brazilian program: Programa Silvio Santos (1963–present).
He is also the only celebrity in the country on the list of billionaires by Forbes magazine. The magazine also states that "there is no one more famous than Silvio Santos in Brazil.
Senor Abravanel is the son of Sephardic Jewish immigrants. His father, Alberto Abravanel, was born in Thessaloniki, Kingdom of Greece in 1897, and his mother, Rebecca Caro, was born in İzmir, Ottoman Empire in 1907. Both died in Rio de Janeiro (in 1976 and 1989 respectively) and are buried side by side in the Cemitério Comunal Israelita do Caju.
On his paternal side, Silvio Santos is a descendant of Isaac Abravanel.
Silvio Santos worked on the streets of Rio de Janeiro as a street vendor at the age of 14. During this period, he was invited to work in a radio station, but as he made more money as a camelô, a Brazilian name for a street vendor, he left the broadcaster job a month later.
Later he went to São Paulo and after taking several different jobs that included prizes raffling, Silvio Santos got a part on a TV show that was a major success. At the same time, he bought the company Baú da Felicidade, which later would become part of Grupo Silvio Santos.
With a net worth of 3.2 billion BRL (around 800 million USD), Silvio Santos is the single biggest individual/natural person taxpayer in Brazil.
In 1976, he started to fight for the rights of having his own television network, as he wanted to expand his prizes raffling.
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Wikipedia