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Silvio Santos, the iconic Brazilian TV host, passed away this Saturday (17th) at the age of 93. The legendary presenter had been hospitalized at Albert Einstein Hospital since the beginning of August. The news was confirmed by SBT on their social media channels.
A TV host who threw paper planes made of money to the audience. A street vendor who became one of the biggest communication entrepreneurs in the country. A communicator who nearly became president. These are just a few highlights of the journey that transformed Senor Abravanel into Silvio Santos.
Present on Brazilian television every Sunday for six decades, Silvio established himself as a businessman and owner of a conglomerate that, in addition to the SBT television network, includes a capital management company, a hotel chain, and a cosmetics brand.
Over his lifetime, Silvio Santos became one of the most prominent figures in Brazilian television. As an entrepreneur, he was a rare kind: one who distributed gold bars, which, as he liked to joke, “are worth more than money.”
Born in Rio de Janeiro on December 12, 1930, Senor Abravanel, known to the world as Silvio Santos, was the son of immigrant parents (a Greek father and a Jewish mother) and had five siblings.
Even as a child, the future TV mogul used his school breaks to sell sweets and buy more treats, but his life as a street vendor truly began at 14 when he started selling simple items in downtown Rio to help support his family.
One afternoon in 1945, Silvio was struck by the sight of a street vendor on Avenida Rio Branco: the man was loudly selling plastic wallets for voters' ID cards, and he sold out in minutes. The choice of product was no accident. At that time, Brazil had just emerged from the Estado Novo era, and with the return to democracy, there was a high demand for this symbolic accessory.
In addition to plastic wallets, Silvio sold pens, jewelry, dancing dolls, and even callus medicine, but he had a different style. His salesmanship was accompanied by a real show, complete with jokes and even magic tricks.
Life as a Street Vendor and Artist
Despite all his charisma, Silvio Santos couldn't avoid the challenges that came with being a street vendor. But the future TV host wasn't intimidated when he lost his goods; he fought back with communication.
“I’m underage, you can’t arrest me. You should be arresting criminals and thieves who are out there, not me, who’s working,” he would say, according to his brother Léo, who accompanied him on the streets of Rio and saw him stand up to the authorities.
In an account to biographer Arlindo Silva, published in the book “The Fantastic Story of Silvio Santos,” Léo recalled that his brother’s speeches often swayed the public to the point that bystanders would ask officials to return the boy’s items. However, this tactic didn’t always work, and Silvio eventually ended up in the police station—an event that played a crucial role in what would happen next.
“One day, the head of municipal enforcement, Renato Meira Lima, wanted to take me to the district so that I wouldn't continue as a street vendor,” Silvio recalled in his testimony for Arlindo Silva’s book. “He was arresting street vendors for loitering in Rio de Janeiro, but when he saw me working, he changed his mind about me.”
Lima handed him a card of a friend who worked at Rádio Guanabara and suggested that Silvio get in touch. Whether by coincidence or not, the day Silvio chose to visit the radio station also happened to be the date of a voice-over competition, which included strong competitors like Chico Anysio.
Despite the competition, Silvio took first place and was hired, but the experience was short-lived. The young announcer claimed he made much more money as a street vendor than behind the radio microphone. “Thinking it all over, I made my decision: I stayed at Rádio Guanabara for only a month. Then I went back to being a street vendor,” he said.
Military Service
When he came of age, Silvio Santos had to shift part of his focus from business to another activity: mandatory military service. At 18, he was drafted into the Army and served at the former Parachutist Training and Development Center between 1947 and 1948.
“I had to ‘ease up’ on my street vendor activities for a while. Imagine the trouble I’d be in if I were caught selling trinkets?” Silvio said when speaking to biographer Arlindo Silva.
In the broadcaster's memory, this period included “five jumps considered good.” However, a Ministry of Defense newsletter from January 20, 2008, provided more details on his brief military stint and contradicted part of this.
According to the document, the school was still being established at that time, so the presenter might not have made the jumps—at least not from a moving military airplane.
During his time in the Army, Silvio Santos used his Sundays off to dedicate himself to unpaid work at Rádio Mauá. When his military service ended, he was determined to return to radio but with an entrepreneurial spirit still intact.
Return to Radio
Silvio moved from Rádio Mauá to Tupi, but in 1951, he transitioned to Rádio Continental. He began commuting to work using the Rio-Niterói ferries and noticed a large audience waiting to be tapped, yet no one was trying to turn this potential into a business.
Seeing this opportunity, Silvio decided to resign, used his severance pay to invest in a loudspeaker system on the ferry, and began presenting himself as an ad broker. “It was at this moment that the spirit of the street vendor died within me,” he declared to Arlindo Silva.
He was also responsible for introducing a bar and a bingo hall on the ferries and even implemented a promotion to increase profits: a contest with prizes—much like what he would later do with Baú da Felicidade and Tele Sena.
At 24, young Senor decided to try his luck elsewhere. After passing an audition at Rádio Nacional (now Rádio Globo), he moved to São Paulo.
By then, the future SBT owner had already adopted the stage name that would make him famous among Brazilians. The reason for the choice: he thought Senor was too complicated and liked that his mother called him Silvio.
In addition to his work as an announcer, the new communicator began hosting circus shows and the famous Caravana do Peru que Fala.
The success of the caravan led to an invitation for him to participate in a segment on Manoel de Nóbrega’s show on Rádio Nacional, which boosted audience ratings and attracted more attention to this young man with Rio de Janeiro roots.
The Man Behind Baú
In the late 1950s, Nóbrega invested in the idea of Baú da Felicidade, but the main partner lost the money and left the business on the brink of disaster.
Nóbrega asked Silvio for help to wind down the venture, address customer complaints, and ensure the end of the project was as smooth as possible. However, after getting a closer look at the business, Silvio realized he could make it profitable.
In 1958, the young announcer and Nóbrega became partners in Baú da Felicidade, and the Silvio Santos Group began to take shape. Three years later, Silvio acquired his partner’s stake and became the majority shareholder of the company.
In the early 1960s, the presenter decided to invest his first earnings from the business into TV time, transitioning from radio to television, where he hosted “Vamos Brincar de Forca” and “Prá Ganhar é Só Rodar.” Both of Silvio’s programs aired on TV Paulista, which was later acquired by Organizações Globo (now Grupo Globo) in 1966.
Already popular and well-established in front of the cameras, the presenter hosted the “Programa Silvio Santos,” which aired on Sundays, lasted six hours, and became one of the most-watched shows on Brazilian TV.
The Emergence of SBT
Years later, a restructuring proposed by Organizações Globo for TV Paulista aimed to eliminate variety shows. This prompted Silvio to seek his own channel.
In the 1970s, Silvio Santos bought 50% of TV Record shares, which had been put up for sale by the station’s owners. He then obtained the concession for Rio de Janeiro's TVS, channel 11, which went on air in 1976, but the major step came after the collapse of TV Tupi when the government opened bids for the concessions.
From the bidding process, Silvio emerged with the concessions of Tupi in São Paulo (channel 4), TV Continental in Rio de Janeiro (channel 9), TV Piratini in Porto Alegre (channel 5), and TV Marajoara in Belém (channel 2). Thus, SBT was born, making its first broadcast on August 19, 1981, and becoming the official home of the “Programa Silvio Santos.”
Over time, SBT grew and, at times, even threatened TV Globo’s dominance in the battle for Brazilian audiences. In 2011, the eternal “Homem do Baú” commented on the rivalry with the competitor in open TV. Jokingly, Silvio stated that he believed “fighting Globo, in my opinion, is impossible.”
In the fight for good ratings, Silvio Santos lost Gugu Liberato to Globo in late 1987. The presenter did not have a contract with SBT, so the Rio-based network offered him a Sunday show. Gugu accepted but never made his debut.
In a move to keep the presenter, Silvio made a multimillion-dollar counteroffer and met with Globo's directors to convince them to back off the offer.
In February 1988, an agreement was reached, and Gugu remained at SBT until 2009, when he signed with TV Record.
The Man Who Almost Became President
In 1989, Silvio’s name emerged as an alternative in the presidential race, even if he hadn't fully embraced the idea.
It was Adhemar de Barros’s party, the PMB (Brazilian Municipalist Party), that approached the communicator with the proposal to run in the elections. According to political scientist and USP professor José Álvaro Moisés, the idea was to present a “clean” name that could benefit from the collapse of traditional politics and the discredit of government parties. If elected, the charismatic and enterprising businessman would serve as the party’s puppet.
After Silvio's approval, the party turned in record time from one that was hardly mentioned to the second most voted-for party in São Paulo.
A journalist and Silvio’s former press officer, Arlindo Silva described that period in his book “The Candidate Who Never Existed.”
The campaign “vote 26” reached great proportions, leading to intense media coverage, but despite a whirlwind of plans, Silvio Santos’s candidacy was rejected by the Superior Electoral Court (TSE) due to a legal formality.
Two days after the candidacy was barred, the businessman appeared on his TV show and addressed the public: “I want to say one thing to all the candidates. Just relax because I’m out, but I don’t know who is going to take my votes. And now you don’t have to worry anymore.”
After announcing the news, Silvio tore up a paper with the number 26 in front of the camera.
A Complicated Decade
Silvio Santos’s career wasn't just marked by triumphs. The businessman and TV host also faced complicated times in his history.
In 1990, the founder of SBT and Grupo Silvio Santos decided to acquire a financial institution to have greater autonomy in his business dealings. At that time, he bought PanAmericano and invested millions in its capitalization.
Years later, in 2010, PanAmericano became the center of the biggest fraud scandal in the history of the Silvio Santos Group. Due to a sequence of fictitious loans and transactions, the former owner was forced to sell the company to Caixa Econômica Federal.
PanAmericano was saved by a rescue package led by the Brazilian Central Bank and the FGTS fund. In addition to the businessman and SBT owner, this event impacted thousands of small investors.
The following decade also presented another obstacle for Silvio Santos: a malignant nodule in his right forehead. In 2013, at 82, he underwent surgery to remove it.
The Legacy of a Phenomenon
Silvio Santos is considered one of the most talented TV presenters in the world. He spent decades on air, on Sundays, and was considered the biggest rival of Globo, his primary competitor.
In addition to television, Silvio left a legacy in communication by building the third-largest media group in Brazil. The SBT owner is survived by his wife, Iris, and his six daughters: Silvia, Cíntia, Daniela, Patrícia, Rebeca, and Renata.
As his daughters took on more prominent roles at SBT, especially in recent years, there was an attempt to soften the imminent farewell to the presenter who defined the last six decades of Brazilian Sundays. A TV phenomenon, Silvio was also a man who lived and worked intensely for his passion: Brazilian television.
