Samuel “Makis” Matsas was born in Athens, Greece to an old Sephardic Jewish family from Ioannina. He grew up during the harsh era of Nazi occupation. At the tender age of 3, he walked with his family to the mountains of central Greece to escape arrest, seeking shelter from the Germans with other partisans. Matsas experienced a hard two-year adventure away from his loved ones in the rugged mountains and ultimately returned to Athens in 1944 after the liberation.

Matsas’ father, Minos Matsas, was considered one of the pioneers of music recording and production in Greece. In 1960, at the age of 23, Makis signed an important deal that founded “Minos Matsas and Son” and started an ambitious effort to restructure and reorganize the company. Matsas transformed the company. Over the course of his long and successful career, he discovered and supported numerous promising artists in their early steps who would later become top performers in Greece.

In 1990, the company joined forces with its main domestic competitor, the multinational EMI Group. Matsas was appointed the CEO and took the reins of the new “Minos-EMI.”

Since 1977, Matsas has been one of the members of the Greek Jewish community who envisioned the foundation of a Jewish Museum in Greece. In 1989, Matsas was elected President of the Association of the Friends of the Jewish Museum of Greece. In 1998, the Jewish Museum of Greece was inaugurated at the very center of Athens and in 2006, Matsas assumed the duties of Chairman of the Board of Directors.

Matsas has dedicated his life and his strength to the development and the promotion of the Jewish Museum of Greece and combating anti-Semitism. He contributed to the enlargement of the Jewish Museum’s collaboration with the Greek Ministry of Education and was the Chairman who financed the first pilot group of Greek students and their teachers to visit the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum.
Matsas is married to Zafeiria Nachman and has two children, Margarita and Minos.