Former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, who died at the age of 86 on Monday, had a net worth of $7.56 billion and was the world’s 303rd-wealthiest person, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
However, business magazine Forbes estimated his personal wealth to be worth $6.9 billion. He shares his fortune with his five children.
Berlusconi first appeared on the political scene in 1993, running for prime minister under his newly formed political party Forza Italia.
He served more than nine years as prime minister between 1994 and 2011, Bloomberg said.
He became a billionaire for the first time in 1988, according to estimates by Forbes.
One of the most influential figures in Italian politics in the past three decades, Berlusconi was born in 1936 in Milan.
After graduating from law school in 1961, he became a door-to-door salesman and then a cruise-ship entertainer.
The property industry brought him his first successes in the early 1960s. A decade later, he started Italy’s first private TV network. This eventually became Mediaset, the nation’s biggest private broadcaster, which later evolved into MFE.
Italy’s longest-serving prime minister also invested in publishing, buying the country’s main publisher Mondadori in 1990, and in cinema with the production company Medusa.
He invested in Mediolanum Bank and football, owning AC Milan for 31 years, before selling his stake to Chinese investors in June 2017 for $630 million, according to Forbes.
In 2018 he became the owner of Serie A side Monza.
Berlusconi's investments were grouped under the umbrella group, Fininvest.
The Milan-based family holding company, led by his eldest daughter Marina, reported revenue of €3.8 billion ($4.4 billion) for the 2021 calendar year and has more than 15,000 employees, its website says.
Berlusconi was at the centre of a series of investigations and trials, almost all of them opened after he entered politics in 1994. In all, he faced 35 criminal court cases but clocked up only one conviction.
The three-time prime minister was convicted of tax fraud in 2014 and was initially banned from running for political office until 2019.
But an Italian court lifted the ban in May 2018, and Berlusconi won a seat in the European Parliament the following year, Forbes reported.
He had been suffering from leukaemia and was recently treated for a lung infection.
Berlusconi had suffered ill health for years, having heart surgery in 2016 and being admitted to hospital for Covid in 2020. He had also suffered from prostate cancer.
