He’s said to own the world’s largest record collection, but he still can’t stop buying vinyl.
Most collectors dream of owning a few holy-grail LPs. Brazilian bus magnate Zero Freitas tried to own everything.
The quest started with a single childhood stereo and now fills an airplane-hangar-sized warehouse in São Paulo.
Therapy sessions, failed relationships, and countless shipping containers later, Freitas is working to turn a private fixation into a public gift.
How a Spark Became a Wildfire
The obsession lit up early. In 1957, five-year-old Zero Freitas watched his father wheel a brand-new hi-fi into their São Paulo home, sweetened with 200 LPs. A week later, he discovered his mother’s own 500-album stash. Music was everywhere, and he wanted all of it.
His first personal buy came at age 14, December 1964: Roberto Carlos Sings to the Children. By the time he finished high school in the early ’70s, he’d cracked about 3,000 records.
College should have slowed him down, but instead, he spent more time digging through flea-market crates than writing scores.
In the late ’70s he got clever. Freitas began slipping tiny classified ads into local papers: BUYING RECORD COLLECTIONS, ANY STYLE. Sellers called, and he showed up in a beat-up VW Beetle, driving away with whole living-room libraries.
Turning 30 in 1982, he already owned roughly 30,000 LPs.
Buying Stores, Warehouses, and Even Radio Station Vaults
Money wasn’t what changed the scale of Zero Freitas’s hunt—it was infrastructure. After his bus business exploded in the early 2000s, he poured the profits into a global scavenger network.
Allan Bastos, his first scout, phoned in deals from New York. Then, another agent in Havana rounded up almost 100,000 Cuban LPs, prompting Freitas to joke that the island “must be rising in the Caribbean” now that so much vinyl weight is gone.
A good lead could set real-life caravans in motion. Between June and November 2013 alone, more than a dozen 40-foot shipping containers rumbled toward Brazil, and each one carried around 100,000 records.
Those loads land in a 25,000-square-foot warehouse in Vila Leopoldina, São Paulo. Inside, shelf stacks reach the ceiling, and forklift drivers snake through canyons of boxes marked “PW #1425” or “CUBA #11.”
A dozen university interns—mostly history majors because “music students talk too much about music,” Freitas says—log about 500 records a day.
At that clip, finishing the catalogue would stretch well past mid-century.
The buying targets whole inventories, not random gems.
Freitas took the bulk of Paul Mawhinney’s three-million-record archive in Pittsburgh, then swept up Colony Records’ Times Square stock and Music Man Murray’s legendary Los Angeles store. Back home, he rescued local history, too.
In Fortaleza, he learned a retiring broadcaster named Carneiro Portela had been gifted his radio station’s library. Freitas bought the lot—25,000 LPs, of which nearly 20,000 were titles his team had never seen.
He almost never walks away, though he does laugh at himself. Offered 15,000 polka albums, he accepted without a blink—then teased his scout for not asking about the obscure bandleaders he still lacked.
To keep the containers flowing, he even lobbied Brasília for a change in trade rules. And since 2014, Brazil has formally allowed the import of used vinyl, which is a loophole written with his name on it.
The result: eight million records, miles of shelves, and a purchasing engine that treats the world like one giant closing-down sale.
The Psychological Toll of Owning “Everything”
As Freitas’s collection grew to unprecedented proportions, so did the weight it placed on his mental well-being. Freitas began therapy in his late twenties, just after his marriage fell apart, and it never stopped.
The strain shows in small, raw moments.
One afternoon in his basement stash, he pulled out a Duke Ellington LP signed “With affection, Duke.” He turned the sleeve over, eyes glassy, barely speaking. Another day, an aide told him that as much as 80 percent of mid-century Brazilian music has never been digitized.
Freitas slumped in his chair, covered his face, and let out a low groan—eight million records suddenly felt too light for the job.
He has tried to balance the weight with spirit.
Upstairs in his house, he and his second wife built a quiet meditation room, then traveled to India and Egypt to study Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, and Christian mystic teachings. Still, the practice of “letting go” collides daily with forklifts loading yet another pallet of vinyl.
Friendships are tricky, too. He keeps other collectors at arm’s length and spends long stretches alone in the Vila Leopoldina warehouse, filing records while the city sleeps.
“I have no contact with other collectors. In general, they are crazy people,” he shared.
“I do not belong to a collectors’ club. I made friends with some, mainly through theatre, but I don’t talk to them about records and music, because they talk about it all day, and I find it kind of a sickness.”
The work feeds him and drains him in the same breath, a private tug-of-war that no shipping container could ever hold.
His New Life Goal
Freitas no longer measures success by how many records he owns but by how many survive him.
In 2014, he filed papers to turn his warehouse into Emporium Musical, a nonprofit listening library.
Inside the warehouse, he imagines rows of turntables where visitors can drop a needle and time-travel.
Up to 30 percent of the stash is duplicates. And once catalogued, those extra copies will be loaned out like library books. The rarities stay on fireproof, climate-controlled shelves, guarded for the long haul.
Freitas has already boxed 10,000 Brazilian LPs for the ARChive of Contemporary Music in New York in a swap that traded duplicates for expert advice on preservation.
He also shipped in a 20,000-album haul from Ceará—all titles his team had never seen before—and set them at the front of the queue for digitisation.
Progress is slow but steady. Yet, his scout still doubts they’ll ever truly finish—especially if Zero keeps buying.
He still can’t resist a promising phone call, but the mindset has flipped. Every crate that lands in Vila Leopoldina now arrives with a silent question: How can this music live beyond me?
Answering it, day after dusty day, is how the hoarder is teaching himself to become a historian.