O Guarany

About Silvio Santos

Business Person

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 third largest television network in the country. His net worth is $1.3 billion.

He is also the only celebrity in the country on the list of billionaires by Forbes magazine and an article by the same magazine states that no one else is more famous than Silvio Santos in Brazil.

History

 Senor Abravanel is the son of Sephardic Jewish immigrants. His father, Alberto Abravanel, born in Thessalonica, in Macedonia, in 1897 and died in Rio de Janeiro in 1976, his mother, Rebecca Caro, born in Smyrna, Ottoman Empire in 1907 and also died in Rio de Janeiro in 1989. Both are buried side by side in the Cemitério Comunal Israelita do Caju, in Rio de Janeiro.

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.