Zygmunt Solorz

Zygmunt Solorz (Polish: [ˈzɨɡ.munt ˈsɔ.lɔʂ]; born Zygmunt Józef Krok, August 4, 1956 in Radom) is a Polish businessman and a media tycoon known for launching Polsat, one of the largest private television channels in the country. As of 2024, he is the fifth richest person in Poland and has repeatedly appeared on Forbes' ranking of the world's billionaires, with an estimated net worth around €5.77 billion. He ranked #688 on the Forbes 2016 with a net worth of US$2.5 billion. The companies controlled by him include Cyfrowy Polsat, Polkomtel, Netia, Elektrim and Interia.

Biography

Early life

According to the media, Zygmunt Solorz was born in Radom, a city to the south of Warsaw, and originally had the surname Krok. In 1977 he escaped the Polish People's Republic while on a holiday trip and settled in Munich, in the then West Germany. In the 1980s, he took the surname Solorz after his first wife for feminist reasons. Several years later, after the second marriage, he added the hyphen and became Solorz-Żak. He currently uses just Solorz as his only surname.

In his early twenties, he managed to escape closed-off Poland and got to Germany, where he founded a transport company.

Businesses

His first major investment on the Polish media market was purchasing the majority stake in the Kurier Polski daily newspaper in early 1992. The same year, Solorz launched the free-to-air commercial TV channel Polsat, broadcast through satellite, and obtained a national commercial television license in 1993. Since the middle of the 1990s, Polsat has remained one of Poland's biggest television stations. His key assets also include the pay TV platform Cyfrowy Polsat.