Silvio Santos

Silvio Santos was born Senor Abravanel in Rio de Janeiro in 1930 to a family of Greek Jewish immigrants who ran a small shop. Money was tight, and as a boy he sold combs, pens and other small goods on the street and in the crowds outside football stadiums, learning early how to hold a stranger's attention long enough to make a sale.

As a young man he became a door-to-door and market salesman, and later talked his way into radio and television work as an announcer, where his relaxed, folksy style on air, honed by years of street selling, made him popular with audiences unused to such an informal presenter. He began hosting variety and game shows that combined entertainment with direct sales pitches for household goods, a format that blurred broadcasting and retail in a way few had tried before in Brazil.

In 1976 he founded his own network, SBT, which grew into one of Brazil's largest television broadcasters, and alongside it built Baú da Felicidade, a savings and retail scheme selling goods on credit to working class Brazilian families who had little access to formal banking, a business built explicitly around customers like the ones he had grown up among.

He remained a fixture of Brazilian popular culture for over six decades, hosting his flagship programme into his nineties, and was regarded as one of the country's shrewdest and most enduring self-made businessmen until his death in 2024.