The politician, entrepreneur, real estate and insurance tycoon, bank and media proprietor, and sports team owner. He is the third longest-serving Prime Minister of the Italian Republic (President of the Council of Ministers of Italy), a position he has held on three separate occasions: from 1994 to 1995, from 2001 to 2006, currently since 2008. He is the leader of the Forza Italia political movement, a centre-right party he founded in 1993. Before the 2008 Italian general elections he announced his intention to establish a new political party, People of Freedom (Popolo Delle Libertà), to be formed by the merging of Forza Italia with the National Alliance party (Alleanza Nazionale), and other right wing parties later in 2008. His victory in the 2008 general elections paved the way for a fourth term in office.

Berlusconi was born 29 September 1936 in Milan and raised there in an upper middle-class family. His father Luigi (1908–1989) was a bank employee, his mother was Rosa Bossi (1911–2008). Silvio was the first of three children; his siblings are Maria Francesca Antonietta Berlusconi (born 1943) and Paolo Berlusconi (born 1949), now both entrepreneurs.

Berlusconi’s business career began in the building construction business in the 1960s. In the late 1960s, he had the idea of developing Milano 2, a garden city of around 3,500 flats, which he eventually built at Segrate on the eastern outskirts of Milan. How Berlusconi managed to finance the project is unclear. From the outset, in September 1968, his name disappears from all relevant legal documents, replaced by nominal proprietors of humble means, and only resurfaces in 1975. The financing is lost in a series of offshore company transactions and financial Chinese boxes that investigating journalists, magistrates and historians have never managed to untangle. It remains unclear where his money came from.

He first entered the media world in 1973 by setting up a small cable televisionTelemilano to service units built on his Segrate properties. It began transmitting in September the following year. After buying two further channels, Berlusconi relocated the station to central Milan in 1977 and began broadcasting over the airwaves.

In 1978 Berlusconi formed his first media group, Fininvest, which in the five years leading up to 1983 earned 113,000,000,000 lire (the equivalent of about 260,000,000 euro at 1997 values). The funding sources are still unknown because of the complex system of holding companies that makes them impossible to trace, despite investigations conducted by various state attorneys.

Berlusconi’s main company Mediaset comprises three national television channels, which hold approximately half the national viewing audience, and Publitalia, the leading Italian advertising and publicity agency. He also owns Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, the largest Italian publishing house, whose publications include Panorama, one of the most popular news magazine in Italy. He has interests in cinema and home video distribution firms (Medusa and Penta), insurance and banking (Mediolanum) and a variety of other activities. His brother, Paolo Berlusconi, owns and operates Il Giornale, a centre-right newspaper which provides a strong pro-Berlusconi slant on Italy and its politics.