Five of Richard Branson’s Most Inspiring Moments
Richard Branson's life is an example of what an individual with a passion for business can achieve, and an inspiration “to the next generation of dreamers.”
You may have heard of Virgin Atlantic, Virgin Mobile, or Virgin Galactic, but how much do you know about the mastermind behind all the Virgin companies—a man whose entrepreneurial spirit earned him the nickname Dr. Yes?
Richard Branson first went into business at the age of fifteen when he started the magazine Student, despite the fact that he was dyslexic and was told that he “was too young and had no experience.”1 But he succeeded, dropping out of school to focus on the magazine full-time. By his early twenties, he had started one of the first mail-order record businesses. He followed this with a record shop—initially opened by renting space in a shoe shop—that he grew into an international empire of entertainment stores. At its peak, the chain had locations on every inhabited continent.
In naming the original company Virgin Records, he highlighted his inexperience in the music industry. Yet by the end of the 1970s, he had launched his own record label, signing such artists as Mike Oldfield and Tangerine Dream. In the decades that followed, Branson launched an increasing number of Virgin businesses, including Virgin Atlantic, Virgin Active, Virgin Cola, Virgin Mobile, Virgin Trains, Virgin Holidays, Virgin Money, Virgin Orbit, and numerous others. His positive, can-do attitude, encapsulated in the title of one of his many books on business, Screw It, Let’s Do It, has led him also to attempt several world record attempts and daring feats.
Here are a few of the most impressive moments from his prolific life.
1. Branson Took on the British Monarchy—and Won
1977 was the year of the queen’s Silver Jubilee celebrations, marking twenty-five years on the throne. It was also the height of the punk movement, led by the Sex Pistols, whose antiestablishment messages and deliberately controversial, offensive lyrics got them banned from the BBC and dropped by a series of record labels. Branson saw an opportunity to corner a risky market others shied away from. Virgin Records signed the Sex Pistols and, in the middle of the Jubilee celebrations, released their anti-monarchy anthem “God Save the Queen,” which calls the British monarchy a “fascist regime” and says the queen “ain’t no human being.”
“God Save the Queen” hit number two in the UK charts, selling 250,000 copies. The band’s album Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols debuted at number one despite bans from several major retailers, spending forty-eight weeks on the charts and establishing Virgin as a major player in the record industry.2 Branson’s risk had paid off, catapulting his career forward. One wonders whether the queen was aware of his role in the song’s release when she knighted him for services to entrepreneurship twenty-five years later.
2. Branson Started a Transatlantic Airline with One Plane
His success in the music industry required that he fly frequently, and he quickly grew frustrated with the poor quality of service from the few large airlines that dominated the transatlantic market in the late 1970s and early 1980s. One day, stuck in the airport after one cancellation too many, he had a novel idea. “I’d had enough,” he recounts. “I called a few charter companies and agreed to charter a plane for $2,000. . . . I borrowed a blackboard, divided the charter cost by the number of people stranded, and wrote down the number. We got everyone to Puerto Rico for $39 a head.”3
The experience showed him that the airline industry was ripe for a new way of doing things. A few years later, when new landing slots became available at London Gatwick Airport, he jumped at the chance. Leasing a secondhand Boeing 747, he launched Virgin Atlantic, flying between London and New York in direct competition with PanAm, British Airways, American Airlines, and TWA. He offered passengers a new kind of flying experience with extra emphasis on perks, comfort, and customer service. Today, Virgin Atlantic and its partner airline, Virgin Australia, operate more than one hundred aircraft flying to seventy destinations around the globe.
3. Branson Made the First Hot-Air Balloon Crossing of the Atlantic Ocean
Branson loves adventure and exploration, listing Antarctic explorer Captain Scott among his heroes. He broke the record for the fastest sea crossing of the Atlantic Ocean in his Virgin Atlantic Challenger II, which he had built specifically for the crossing after his first attempt in Challenger I ended prematurely when the boat capsized. Shortly after, he embarked on another daring adventure: making the first crossing of the Atlantic by hot-air balloon. The flight took a day and a half, with just two men aboard, and ended in near-disaster with both having to jump into the Irish Sea. But they had achieved their mission.4 Forever looking for the next record to break, he went on to make the first balloon crossing of the Pacific four years later.5
4. Branson Drove a Tank through Times Square to Take On Coca-Cola
One of Branson’s boldest moves was challenging Coca-Cola’s market dominance in the United States after Virgin Cola had become successful in the UK. For the American launch, Branson drove a tank through Times Square, crushing thousands of Coke cans before aiming the turret at a Coca-Cola advertisement. He promised to “liberate” America from the Coke-Pepsi duopoly.
Coca-Cola responded with a campaign that undercut Virgin Cola in the UK market, wiping out its main revenue source and destroying the company almost overnight. He never made the same mistake again. “What I learnt from it,” he later said, “was if you’re going to take on the biggest company in the world, make sure that you take them on with a much better quality of product.”6
Although his effort to challenge Coke failed, the tank stunt was still a hell of a show, and as Branson later said, “If you never make mistakes, you’ll never make anything.”
5. Branson Went to Space in His Own Spaceship
Like many children with big imaginations, the young Branson dreamed of going to space. Decades later, American aviation innovator Burt Rutan designed SpaceShipOne, a craft intended to win the Ansari X-Prize for the first privately developed craft to take a human into space. Branson immediately saw the opportunity to make his childhood dream a reality and change the world in the process. “The government isn’t going to start sending people into space again,” he told Microsoft cofounder and SpaceShipOne investor Paul Allen. “It’s up to us.”7 When Rutan’s company Scaled Composites won the X-Prize in 2004, Branson joined forces with them, setting up Virgin Galactic with the goal of developing and operating a larger version—SpaceShipTwo—capable of taking groups of tourists into space.
Seventeen years later, the seventy-year-old Branson made sure that he was on the crew for SpaceShipTwo’s first flight above fifty miles altitude—NASA’s definition of the edge of space. Floating weightlessly, he said, “I was once a child with a dream, looking up to the stars. Now I’m an adult in a spaceship looking down to our beautiful Earth. To the next generation of dreamers: if we can do this, imagine what we can do.”8
What Next?
At the age of seventy-three, Branson is far from winding down. One of his latest projects is Virgin Orbit, which recently launched the first satellite into orbit from the British Isles. He is active in various social causes and often uses his influence to stand up against rights abuses around the world; in recent years, these have included the persecution of gay people in Uganda, the death penalty in Singapore and Saudi Arabia, and the suffering of Venezuelans at the hands of the Maduro regime. He is keen to advance new technologies that could improve human life, from spaceflight to reducing pollution here on Earth. His life is an example of what an individual with a passion for business can achieve, and an inspiration “to the next generation of dreamers.”