Italy: Rags to riches banking billionaire Ennio Doris dies at 81

Rome: Armed with a high school degree and plenty of ambition, Ennio Doris went from poverty to the ranks of the world’s richest.

Doris, an Italian banking billionaire, died on Wednesday at age 81. Forbes estimates that he was the country’s 17th-richest person, with a $3.6 billion fortune at the time of his death, largely thanks to his 40% stake in Banca Mediolanum, the publicly traded financial services firm he founded in 1982.

He is survived by his wife, Lina Tombolato, and his two children, Sara, 51, and Massimo, 54. His cause of death has not been disclosed.

Born in the small town of Tombolo in the marshy countryside of northeastern Italy in 1940, Ennio Doris grew up in poverty as World War II raged, sharing a six-bedroom house with the other 14 members of his family. After earning a high school diploma, he found work as a door-to-door insurance salesman in a nearby town and then spent two decades working at banks and financial services providers in northern Italy.

His big break came in 1982, when he came up with an idea to offer financial and insurance advice to Italian families seeking to invest their savings. After a chance encounter with Silvio Berlusconi—then a successful real estate and TV mogul, four years older than Doris—at the seaside resort of Portofino, Doris convinced Berlusconi to bet on his idea and the two launched Programma Italia, Mediolanum’s predecessor, with the backing of Berlusconi’s investment conglomerate Fininvest.

Programma Italia grew quickly, launching investment funds in 1985 and listing on the Milan Stock Exchange in 1996. The next year, in 1997, Mediolanum converted to a full-fledged bank and expanded into investments and savings, becoming the first Italian bank with a website. By 1998, the 16-year-old institution had grown to become one of Italy’s 30 largest firms by public market capitalization. (While Mediolanum expanded in the 1990s, Doris’ business partner, Berlusconi, went in a different direction, entering politics: He served his first of three terms as Italy’s prime minister beginning in 1994).

Doris was also the face of Mediolanum’s popular TV advertising campaigns until he stepped down as CEO in 2008, handing over the reins to his son Massimo. (His daughter, Sara, serves as Mediolanum’s vice president.) Doris’ largest asset at the time of his death—the family’s 40% stake in Mediolanum, which made up the vast majority of his fortune—is expected to pass to his wife and children. He also held 3% stakes in investment bank Mediobanca and Berlusconi’s media giant Mediaset, as well as agricultural land in northeastern Italy and a 197-foot superyacht, Seven, built in 2017.

Doris’ longtime associate (and fellow billionaire) Berlusconi commemorated his life with a post on Twitter: “Ennio Doris, a great man, businessman and Italian, has left us. He was generous, altruistic, always attentive to others and close to those in need. A great friend of mine. We will miss him dearly.”