From real estate to the media… What are the most important stations of Silvio Berlusconi’s career?

Despite the scandals that surrounded Silvio Berlusconi’s career, he excelled in building his real estate and media empires, even if he was late in catching up with the digital revolution.

“Silvio Berlusconi created commercial television in Europe, together with the British, when the continent was still under the monopoly of national public television,” Carlo Alberto Carneval Maffei, professor of strategic sciences at Milan’s Bocconi University, told AFP.

He added that he had established a television channel that was “very popular, in the style of the English newspaper, bringing daily life to the small screens.”

His TV channel gave plenty of space to nude young women, games and light talk shows.

But to achieve his goals, Al-Fares showed his ingenuity. In the 1970s, there was only public television “Rai” and local channels on the peninsula, and a private national network was banned.

“His trick was to broadcast the same program simultaneously on all local channels, as if it were a national television channel, which allowed him to attract more advertisers,” noted Umberto Bertelli, professor emeritus at Milan’s Polytechnic School of Economics.

He was able to achieve his goals thanks to the serious political support of the Italian Socialist Party and the government of Bettino Craxi, as well as the banks.

Thanks also to this support, he was able to launch huge real estate projects near Milan (North).

After a few experiences as a singer on cruise ships and as a traveling salesman, he began his real estate career in the early 1960s.

Among his successes is the “Milano 2” residential area, which he built in the 1970s, on an area of ​​approximately 700,000 square meters.

Milano 2 was very innovative at the time, as it was designed to be an integrated residential area with wide green spaces, triple transport paths (for pedestrians, vehicles and bicycles) and basic services (banks, shops, schools…).

“He had a great intuition, he made + smart city + 50 years before anyone else,” Carnival Maffei added.

He noted that “Berlusconi was truly innovative: he gave the best of himself as an urban planner, and he has an extraordinary perception of urban space. It is a somewhat forgotten aspect.”

Then he dabbled in television, and from the eighties of the last century he tried to internationalize by establishing “La Cinque” (the fifth), closed since 1992, in France and channels in Germany and Spain.

Berlusconi also invested in publishing, through the purchase of the Italian publishing house “Mondadori” for books and magazines in 1990, in cinema (production company “Medusa”), banking (Mediolanium) and football (AC Milan for 31 years and then Monza).

He consolidated all these contributions in the holding company “Fininvest”, which was on the verge of bankruptcy in 1993 due to huge indebtedness linked specifically to the “Milan 3” project, before it recovered, according to Bertelli.

Carneval Maffei noted that one of Silvio Berlusconi’s greatest talents was that he was a “great salesman”.

And so he reversed the logic by setting up an advertising agency called “Publicalia 80” and an associated TV channel group, Mediaset, which became “Media for Europe”.

“He was among the pioneers in Europe who established the concept of convergence between advertising and editorial content, by broadcasting programs that adapt to advertising, and not the other way around,” he explained.

Bertelli said that when he first got into television, he had a “great idea” when he said, “To the contractors, don’t pay me now, you’ll pay me a percentage of the increase in your sales.”

His successes in business led him to become in 2004, according to Forbes, the richest person in Italy and the 169th in the world, with an estimated fortune of about $12 billion.

But his wealth and that of his family shrank to $6.8 billion, to be ranked third in Italy in 2023 and 352 in the world.

Carnival Maffei noted that his “big flaw is that he never caught up to digital TV or pay TV like Sky and Netflix” and missed a crucial opportunity.