Globo (Grupo Globo)

Who owns Globo?

The Marinho family owns Globo through a private holding. The principal shareholders are the sons of Roberto Marinho: Joao Roberto, Roberto Irineu, and Jose Roberto Marinho.

Is Globo publicly traded?

No. The group is entirely family-owned and publishes no public financial statements.

When was Globo founded?

The group traces to the O Globo newspaper founded in 1925 by Irineu Marinho. Its television flagship, TV Globo, launched in 1965 under Roberto Marinho.

How large is Globo?

It is Latin America's largest media group, with estimated annual revenue of BRL 15 to 18 billion and around 15,000 employees across TV, streaming, news, publishing, and production.

What happened to Som Livre?

Globo sold its record label Som Livre to Sony Music in 2021 as part of a portfolio refocus on video content and digital platforms.

Irineu Marinho founded the newspaper O Globo in Rio de Janeiro in 1925. After his early death, the paper passed to his son Roberto Marinho, who spent the following decades building it into a national institution and expanding into radio with Radio Globo in 1944.

Roberto Marinho's defining move was television: he won a broadcast concession in 1957 and launched TV Globo on April 26, 1965. Through owned stations and affiliates the network covered Brazil by the 1970s, and the 'Padrao Globo de Qualidade' production model, combining nightly telenovelas, national news via Jornal Nacional, and slick entertainment, made Globo the country's cultural center of gravity. By the 1980s it regularly held more than half the national TV audience.

The group's dominance intertwined with politics. Globo benefited from and largely supported Brazil's 1964 to 1985 military dictatorship, a relationship the company itself acknowledged in a 2013 editorial as a mistake. Post-democratization, its telenovelas and news remained powerful enough to shape elections and national debates, a role documented extensively by Brazilian and international scholarship.

Diversification followed: pay-TV channels under what became Globosat, publishing through Editora Globo and Infoglobo (O Globo, Extra, Valor Economico, Epoca), the Som Livre record label, and the Estudios Globo production complex. Roberto Marinho died in 2003 at age 98, passing control to his sons.

The digital era required reinvention. Globoplay launched in 2015 and grew into Brazil's leading domestic streamer; G1 became the country's most-visited news site; and the group rebranded corporately as Globo in 2021 to 2022, dropping the Organizacoes Globo name. Som Livre was sold to Sony Music in 2021. As of 2026, the family-led group continues to pivot investment toward streaming and digital advertising while TV Globo retains its ratings leadership.