Silvio Berlusconi
Italian media tycoon and politician (1936–2023)
Silvio Berlusconi ( BAIR-luu-SKOH-nee; Italian: [ˈsilvjo berluˈskoːni] ; 29 September 1936 – 12 June 2023) was an Italian media tycoon and politician who served as the prime minister of Italy in three governments from 1994 to 1995, 2001 to 2006 and 2008 to 2011. He was a member of the Chamber of Deputies from 1994 to 2013; a member of the Senate of the Republic from 2022 until his death in 2023, and previously from March to November 2013; and a member of the European Parliament (MEP) from 2019 to 2022, and previously from 1999 to 2001. At the time of his death in 2023, he had a net worth of US$6.8 billion according to Forbes, making him the 352nd-richest man in the world and the third-wealthiest person in Italy.
Berlusconi rose into the financial elite of Italy in the late 1960s. He was the controlling shareholder of Mediaset and owned the Italian football club AC Milan from 1986 to 2017. He was nicknamed Il Cavaliere ('The Knight') for his Order of Merit for Labour; he voluntarily resigned from this order in March 2014. In 2009, Forbes ranked him 12th in the list of the World's Most Powerful People due to his domination of Italian politics throughout more than fifteen years at the head of the centre-right coalition.
Berlusconi was prime minister for nine years in total, making him the longest serving post-war prime minister of Italy, and the third-longest-serving since Italian unification, after Benito Mussolini and Giovanni Giolitti. He was the leader of the centre-right party Forza Italia from 1994 to 2009, and its successor party The People of Freedom from 2009 to 2013. He led the revived Forza Italia from 2013 to 2023.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Silvio Berlusconi” as italian media tycoon and politician (1936–2023). Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as italian media tycoon and politician (1936–2023). Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q11860. VIAF identifies the subject as 84210432. The Library of Congress control number is n88025039. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1936, 2023, 1994 and 1995.
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This entry incorporates text from “Silvio Berlusconi” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.