Richard Branson

Sir Richard Branson left school at sixteen, dyslexic and unimpressed by exams. He named his first real business Virgin because he knew nothing about business, and went on to put that name on record shops, a record label, an airline, trains, mobile phones, gyms, hotels and a spaceship. Few people have turned their own personality into a brand so completely.

A Barrister’s Son

He was born on 18 July 1950 in Blackheath, south-east London. His father, Edward Branson, was a barrister, and his mother, Eve, had been a ballet dancer and an air hostess. She was the driving force of his childhood, and famously once made him find his own way home across the countryside at the age of about five, to teach him independence.

He had severe dyslexia, which was little understood at the time, and did badly at school. He went to Stowe School in Buckinghamshire. His headmaster reportedly told him when he left that he would either end up in prison or become a millionaire.

Student

At sixteen, in 1966, he left school to run a magazine called Student, written for and by young people. He persuaded celebrities to give interviews and sold advertising from a phone in a basement, often pretending to be his own secretary. The magazine never made much money, but it taught him how to sell, and how to get attention.

Virgin

In 1970, noticing that record shops charged high prices, he started selling discounted records by mail order through the magazine. When the group chose a name, one of them suggested “Virgin”, because they were all new to business. In 1971 they opened their first record shop, above a shoe shop on Oxford Street in London.

That year he was arrested for avoiding purchase tax by selling records meant for export in Britain. He settled with the customs authorities, paid the money back, and avoided a criminal record. He has said it frightened him into being honest in business for the rest of his life.

Tubular Bells

With the profits he bought a country house in Oxfordshire and turned it into a recording studio, the Manor. In 1972 he founded the record label Virgin Records. Its first release, in 1973, was Tubular Bells by a young musician called Mike Oldfield, which other labels had rejected. It became one of the best-selling albums in British history.

In 1977 Virgin signed the Sex Pistols after other labels had dropped them, and later signed the Rolling Stones, Genesis, Janet Jackson and Culture Club. Virgin became one of the biggest independent labels in the world.

The Airline

In 1984, after a flight was cancelled and he chartered a plane to get the stranded passengers to their destination, he decided to start an airline. Virgin Atlantic began flying between London and New York in June 1984 with a single leased Boeing 747. It offered cheaper fares, better service and a sense of fun, and quickly became a serious competitor to British Airways on long-haul routes.

British Airways fought back, including through what became known as its “dirty tricks” campaign, in which its staff tried to poach Virgin’s passengers and spread damaging stories about Branson. Branson sued for libel, and in 1993 BA settled, paying him and his airline damages and costs and apologising publicly.

By then the airline had nearly broken him. In 1992, to keep it going, he sold Virgin Records to Thorn EMI for about £500 million. He has said that he cried when the deal was done.

The Brand

Instead of building one big company, Branson built the Virgin Group as a collection of separate businesses sharing a brand, often run with partners who put up much of the money, with Virgin taking a licence fee and a stake. Virgin moved into trains, mobile phones, financial services, soft drinks, gyms, hotels, holidays, broadband and much more. Some, like Virgin Mobile, succeeded; others, like Virgin Cola and Virgin Brides, did not.

He publicised everything personally, with stunts: driving a tank down Fifth Avenue, dressing as a bride, and attempting to cross oceans by powerboat and hot-air balloon. In 1987 he and Per Lindstrand made the first crossing of the Atlantic by hot-air balloon. He was knighted in 2000.

In 1979 he bought Necker Island in the British Virgin Islands, which became his home. He married Joan Templeman in 1989, on the island. They have two children, Holly and Sam, who both work with the Virgin Group.

Space

In 2004 he founded Virgin Galactic to fly paying tourists to the edge of space. It took far longer than he promised. In October 2014 a test flight broke up over the Mojave Desert, killing co-pilot Michael Alsbury.

On 11 July 2021, aged seventy, Branson flew to the edge of space on Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity, days ahead of Jeff Bezos’s flight on Blue Origin. The company flew a small number of commercial flights before pausing in 2024 to build a new generation of spaceplanes, which it aims to fly from 2026. Another space company, Virgin Orbit, went bankrupt in 2023.

The Covid-19 pandemic hit his travel businesses hard. In 2020 he sold Virgin Galactic shares and offered Necker Island as security to raise money for Virgin Atlantic, which survived after a private rescue.

Wins and Losses

The list of Virgin businesses is long, and so is the list of those that closed or were sold. Virgin Blue, launched in Australia in 2000, became Virgin Australia, went into administration in 2020 and was taken over by a private equity firm. Virgin Trains ran the West Coast line in Britain for more than twenty years before losing the franchise in 2019. Virgin Money bought the nationalised Northern Rock bank in 2012 and was later sold to a rival banking group in 2018. Branson has said that he would rather try and fail than never try.

Causes

In 2004 he set up Virgin Unite, the group’s charitable foundation. In 2007, with the musician Peter Gabriel, he helped bring together The Elders, a group of former world leaders launched by Nelson Mandela to work on peace and human rights. He has campaigned on climate change, on drug-policy reform as a member of the Global Commission on Drug Policy, and against the death penalty. In 2026 he renewed calls for cannabis to be legalised in Britain.

Dyslexia

Branson has spoken often about his dyslexia and has argued that it helped him, by making him focus on the big picture, delegate the details and explain things simply. He has supported campaigns to have dyslexia recognised as a different way of thinking rather than a failure, and has said he did not understand the difference between net and gross profit until well into his career.

He has continued to launch new businesses in his seventies, including the cruise line Virgin Voyages, which began sailing in 2021 and does not allow children on board.

Although the Virgin Group is private, Branson has published a series of books about his life and business, including Losing My Virginity (1998), Screw It, Let’s Do It and Finding My Virginity (2017), which have sold widely, in many languages, around the world.

The measure of him is the brand. Virgin was a name chosen because its founders knew nothing, and he turned it into a promise — of cheek, of better service, of taking on the big incumbent — that he could carry into almost any business. Many of those businesses failed. The name never did.

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