Lirio A. Parisotto is a Brazilian billionaire worth an estimated $2.7 billion as of August 2026, according to Forbes. Born in Nova Bassano, Brazil, the eldest of 11 children in an Italian immigrant family, he briefly studied for the priesthood and pursued medicine before turning to business, starting with an electronics retail venture in the 1970s. He founded Videolar in 1988, scaling it into a manufacturer that once produced 1.5 million media units a day and controlled roughly 90% of Brazil's home video and music market. He later pivoted into petrochemicals, acquiring Innova Petroquímica from Petrobras for $500 million in 2014 to form Videolar-Innova. A disciplined value investor known for favoring dividend-paying stocks over IPOs, Parisotto shared his perspective with us on wealth, risk, and opportunity below.
- What is the #1 most costly mistake you have made, or seen many investors/business owners make that could be avoided?
The #1 mistake is, and will always be, to get into a business and invest without deep and broad information about the market you are entering. In practice: without knowledge. The comment may seem obvious, but a required impetus cannot be confused with pure impulsiveness. There is a big difference: never skip research, and work to prepare for the terrain.
In fact, there is a big gap between our wishes and reality itself. Only deep information can mitigate risks, without ever eliminating them. Searching for qualified information, in every possible way, is what I have been doing all my life.
- What is the most valuable strategy, worth far more than $1 million, that you wish someone provided you with early on that you can share here?
What I am about to recommend is not always possible, but it is worth mentioning: in addition to getting qualified information, as a principle, it is important to have, for each dollar invested, three dollars available. You will inevitably sail through rough seas. It turns to be another obvious but little-taken advice, maybe due to the enormous difficulty to put it in practice.
- What was the major turning point, point of increased momentum, or strategic choke point, that once you acquired or completed, made everything you were doing surge forward?
This brings us to a key question: how did the person get the first million? What's the story, how was the beginning, from scratch, how much sweat and struggle in order to reach it? No matter the currency considered, the first million represents a huge volume of efforts, risks, and creativity: that story tells you a lot about the person and indicates his or her future possibilities, even though there is effectively no guarantee for anything at all. Most people are interested in the present life of billionaires, but the real jewel is there: on the way to the first million.