His business career—spanning everything from a punk record label to gyms, bridal wear, bank accounts, a mobile phone provider and the airline for which he’s been best known—has been as varied as his extra-curricular activities.
After running a student magazine at the age of 16, his first serious foray into commerce was through a mail-order music distributor and shop that got him a costly conviction for tax evasion. Undeterred, he went on to found Virgin Records in 1972, with the name chosen to reflect his inexperience in business.
Empire Building
The label was an immediate success as Tubular Bells, the debut album from instrumentalist Mike Oldfield, became a best seller. The company went on to sign artists including the Rolling Stones and the Sex Pistols, the latter helping to enhance Branson’s image as an outsider, earning enough money to bankroll the foundation of Virgin Atlantic Airways Ltd. in 1984.
Amid a pattern of selling off all or parts of his various businesses, Branson had an unqualified success with Virgin Mobile, offloaded to NTL:Telewest for almost 1 billion pounds ($1.4 billion) in 2006, and the subsequent sale of the combined Virgin Media to Liberty Global for $23 billion in 2013.
Failures have included a doomed attempt by Virgin Cola to oust Coca-Cola and Pepsi as the leading U.S. soft drinks, and the condom line Mates, sold off just a year after its launch.
Plans for an air-launched spaceship were first mooted at Virgin as long ago as 1995, according to Whitehorn, who says he, Branson and Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin drafted out the concept on a napkin. Aldrin was enthusiastic about the idea following the success of X-15 rocket planes launched from a B-52 bomber in the 1960s, Whitehorn said.
The Virgin Galactic name was registered in 1999, and the company was officially founded five years later. The business model promised the first space tourists a short period of weightlessness along with views of the curvature of the Earth and a look at the sun and stars against the backdrop of space, all for a neat $250,000.
The 2014 crash set the project back by four years but by 2019 Virgin Galactic was sufficiently on track to become the world’s first publicly traded space-tourism firm, thanks to a deal with a special purpose acquisition company. Virgin Galactic had a market value of more than $12 billion at the close on Thursday in New York.
The listing in turn helped Branson save Virgin Atlantic when the coronavirus pandemic hit. The U.K. government declined to provide the grounded carrier with state aid, partly as a result of his residence on Necker Island, a tax haven he bought in 1978 in the appropriately named British Virgin Islands. The sale of part of his Virgin Galactic stake allowed him to inject 200 million pounds into the carrier, part of a broader rescue plan.
—With assistance from Ben Stupples.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.