SAO PAULO (Reuters) -Brazilian media mogul Silvio Santos, who went from street vendor to owner of a business empire including one of the country's largest TV channels, died at the age of 93, his broadcaster SBT said on Saturday.
"Today heaven is happy with the arrival of our beloved Silvio Santos," SBT said on X. "Rest in Peace, you will always be eternal in our hearts."
According to his medical report, Silvio Santos died of bronchopneumonia in the early hours of Saturday, after he had been hospitalized in Sao Paulo with a case of H1N1 flu since the beginning 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 name that Senor Abravanel adopted for his media career, founded in the 1980s the SBT TV channel, one of the three most watched TV stations in Brazil and for years the only real competitor for audience to TV Globo, one of the biggest media conglomerates in the Americas.
Unlike other media moguls, Silvio Santos was also a showman, regularly hosting his own TV shows until about 2022.
He successfully hosted game shows that became very popular with lower-income families. One of his gimmicks was to throw paper planes made of money bills into the audience, who would battle for them.
The son of Sephardic Jewish immigrants from the former Ottoman Empire who settled in Rio de Janeiro's Lapa district, Abravanel began working as a teenager selling plastic protections for cards in the streets.
He was spotted by a radio station and got hired as radio announcer. He later switched to TV and hosted shows on local channels during the 1960s-1970s, including TV Globo, before founding SBT TV in 1981.
His business empire, which included a cosmetics company, a financial firm and real estate assets, 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 few days earlier had taken his daughter hostage. The kidnapping was broadcast live by local TV stations.
Abravanel had six daughters, two from a first marriage, including one who was adopted, and four from his second marriage with Iris Passaro Abravanel.