Sir Richard Branson

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Sir Richard Branson (born 18 July 1950, Shamley Green, Surrey), sometimes abbreviated as SRB for "Sir Richard Branson", is an English entrepreneur, best known for his Virgin brand, a banner that encompasses a variety of businesses. Branson's worth is estimated at over £3 billion according to The Sunday Times Rich List 2006. On 12 October 2006, he said he plans to invest £3 billion of Virgin's profits over 10 years to fight global warming.

Life and career

Branson was educated at Scaitcliffe School (now Bishopsgate School)<ref> Template:Cite web </ref> until the age of 13. He then attended Stowe School until he was 15. Branson has dyslexia, resulting in his not being a good student. He was the captain of football and cricket teams, and by the age of 15 he had started two ventures that eventually failed: one growing Christmas trees and another raising budgerigars.

At 16, Branson quit school and moved to London, where he began his first successful business, Student magazine. When he was 17, he opened his first charity, the "Student Valley Centre". Branson started his first record business after he travelled across the English Channel and purchased crates of "cut-out" records from a record discounter. He sold the records out of the boot of his car to retail outlets in London. He continued selling cut-outs through a record mail order business in 1970. Trading under the name "Virgin" he sold records for considerably less than the so-called "High Street" outlets, especially the chain W. H. Smith. At the time many products were sold under restrictive marketing agreements which limited discounting, despite efforts in the 1950s and 1960s to limit so-called resale price maintenance.<ref>Another example was the "Net Book Agreement" which limited the ability of book outlets, including discount book clubs, to offer deep discounts.</ref> In effect Branson began the series of changes that led to large-scale discounting of recorded music.

Branson eventually started a record shop in Oxford Street in London and, shortly after, launched the record label Virgin Records with Nik Powell. Branson had earned enough money from his record store to buy a country estate, in which he installed a recording studio. He leased out studio time to fledgling artists, including multi-instrumentalist Mike Oldfield.

In 1971 Branson was arrested and charged for selling records in Virgin stores that had been declared as export stock. He settled out-of-court with UK Customs and Excise with an agreement to repay the unpaid tax and fines. Branson's mother Joyce re-mortgaged the family home to help pay the settlement.

Virgin Records' first release was Oldfield's Tubular Bells, which was a best-seller and British LP chart topper. The album was released by Virgin after no other company dared to release the unconventional record.Template:Citation needed The company signed controversial bands such as the Sex Pistols, which other companies were reluctant to sign. It also won praise for exposing the public to obscure avant-garde music such as the krautrock bands Faust and Can. Virgin Records also introduced Culture Club to the music world. In the early 1980s, Virgin purchased the gay nightclub Heaven.

To keep his airline company afloat, Branson sold the Virgin label to EMI in 1992, a more conservative company which previously had rescinded a contract with the Sex Pistols. Branson is said to have wept when the sale was completed since the record business had been the genesis of the Virgin Empire.Template:Fact He later formed V2 Records to re-enter the music business.

Branson is married and has two children, Sam Branson and Holly Branson.

Business exploits

Branson formed Virgin Atlantic Airways in 1984, launched Virgin Mobile in 1999, Virgin Blue in Australia in 2000, and later failed in a 2000 bid to handle the National Lottery.

In 1997, Branson took what many saw as being one of his riskier business exploits by entering into the railway business. Virgin Trains won the franchises for the former Intercity West Coast and Cross-Country sectors of British Rail. Launched with the usual Branson fanfare with promises of new high-tech tilting trains and enhanced levels of service, Virgin Trains soon ran into problems with the ageing rolling stock and crumbling infrastructure it had inherited from BR. The company's reputation was almost irreversibly damaged in the late 1990s as it struggled to make trains reliably run on time while it awaited the modernisation of the West Coast Main Line, and the arrival of new rolling stock.

Virgin has acquired European short-haul airline Euro Belgian Airlines, renaming it Virgin Express, and subsequently merging it with SN Brussels. It also started a national airline based in Nigeria, called Virgin Nigeria. Another airline, Virgin America, is set to launch out of San Francisco International Airport in 2007. Branson has also developed a Virgin Cola brand, but is now retreating only to the UK market, and even a Virgin Vodka brand, which has not been an overly successful enterprise. As a consequence of these lacklustre performers and perceived obscure accounting practices, the satirical British fortnightly magazine Private Eye has been critical of Branson and his companies (see Private Eye image caption).<ref>Ironically, Private Eye had been mainly responsible for Branson's initial success, as it was one of the few nationally distributed magazines that carried advertising for his mail-order business.</ref>

After the so-called campaign of "dirty tricks" (see expanded reference in Virgin Atlantic Airways), Branson sued rival airline British Airways for libel in 1992. John King, then-chairman of British Airways, counter-sued, and the case went to trial in 1993. British Airways, faced with likely defeat, settled the case, giving £500,000 to Branson and a further £110,000 to his airline and had to pay legal fees of up to £3 million. Branson divided his compensation (the so-called "BA bonus") among his staff.

On September 25, 2004 Branson announced the signing of a deal under which a new space tourism company, Virgin Galactic, will license the technology behind Spaceship One to take paying passengers into suborbital space. The group plans to make flights available to the public by late 2007 with tickets priced at $200,000. The deal was mostly financed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and the American aeronautical engineer and visionary Burt Rutan.

Branson's next venture with the Virgin group is Virgin Fuel, which is set to respond to global warming and exploit the recent spike in fuel costs by offering a revolutionary, cheaper fuel for automobiles and also aircraft (in the near future). Branson has stated that he was formerly a global warming sceptic and was influenced in his decision by a breakfast meeting with Al Gore.<ref>http://www.abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=2477400</ref>

Branson has been tagged as a "transformational leader" in the management lexicon, with his maverick strategies and his stress on the Virgin Group as an organisation driven on informality and information, one that is bottom-heavy rather than strangled by top-level management.

He was 9th in the Sunday Times Rich List 2006, worth just over £3 billion.

On 21 September 2006, Branson pledged to invest the profits of Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Trains in research for environmentally friendly fuels. The investment is estimated to be worth $3 billion.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

He gave £1,000,000 to Sir Andrew Starkey as an unknown private business investment who then generated £17,000,000 from this. Starkey then repaid Branson his £1 million.Template:Fact

World record attempts

Richard Branson has been involved in a number of world record-breaking attempts since 1985. In 1986 his boat, "Virgin Atlantic Challenger II" rekindled the spirit of the Blue Riband by crossing the Atlantic Ocean in the fastest ever recorded time. This was followed a year later by the epic hot air balloon crossing of the same ocean in "Virgin Atlantic Flyer". This was not only the first hot-air balloon to cross the Atlantic, but was the largest ever flown at 2.3 million cubic feet capacity, reaching speeds in excess of 130 miles per hour (209 kph).

In January 1991 Richard crossed the Pacific Ocean from Japan to Arctic Canada, the furthest distance of 6,700 miles. Again, he broke all existing records, with speeds of up to 245 miles per hour in a balloon of 2.6 million cubic feet.

Between 1995 and 1998 Richard Branson, Per Lindstrand and Steve Fossett, made a number of attempts to circumnavigate the globe by balloon. In late 1998 they made a record-breaking flight from Morocco to Hawaii but were unable to complete a global flight before Bertrand Piccard and Brian Jones in Breitling Orbiter achieved the first circumnavigation in March 1999.

Television, film, and print

Branson has guest starred, playing himself, on several television shows, including Friends, Baywatch, Birds of a Feather, Only Fools and Horses, The Day Today, a special episode of the comedy Goodness Gracious Me and Tripping Over.

He also was the star of a reality television show on Fox called The Rebel Billionaire, in which sixteen contestants were tested for their entrepreneurship and sense of adventure. It did not succeed as a rival show to Donald Trump's The Apprentice and only lasted one season.

His high public profile often leaves him open as a figure of satire — the 2000 AD series Zenith featured a parody of Branson as a super villain, as the comic's publisher and favoured distributor and the Virgin group were in competition at the time. He is also caricatured in The Simpson's episode "Monty Can't Buy Me Love" as the tycoon Arthur Fortune, and as the ballooning megalomaniac Richard Chutney (a pun on Branson) in Believe Nothing. The character Grandson Richard 39 in Terry Pratchett's Wings is modelled on Branson.

He has a cameo appearance in several films, Around the World in 80 Days (2004) where he played a hot air balloon operator, Superman Returns, where he was credited as a "Shuttle Engineer", alongside his son Sam, with Virgin Galactic-esque commercial suborbital shuttle at the centre of his storyline. He also had a cameo in James Bond film Casino Royale. Branson played a passenger going through airport security. He makes a number of brief and disjointed appearances in the cult classic documentary Derek and Clive Get the Horn which follows the exploits of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore recording their last comedy album. .

In early 2006 on Rove Live, Rove and Sir Richard pushed each other into a swimming pool fully clothed live on TV during a "Live at your house" episode.

Politics

Branson was honoured by the Conservative government in the 1980s, and was briefly given the post of "litter tsar" by Margaret Thatcher – charged with "keeping Britain tidy." He was again seen as close to the government when the Labour Party came to power in 1997. In 2005 he declared that there were only negligible differences between the two main parties on economic matters.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> He reputedly considered running for Mayor of London in 2004, but decided not to. Branson has described himself as a libertarian.

Controversy

Branson has in the past openly admitted to smoking cannabis, and considered selling the plant in Virgin stores if it were to become legal.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Branson's business empire is owned by a complicated series of offshore trusts and companies. The Sunday Times stated that his wealth is calculated at £3,065 million; if he were to retire to his Caribbean island and liquidate all of this he would pay relatively little in tax.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Honours

In 1993, Branson received the honorary degree of Doctor of Technology from Loughborough University.

He became Sir Richard Branson when he was knighted by the Queen in 1999 for "services to entrepreneurship".<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

He is the Patron of the International Rescue Corps, which is one of the few truly independent front-line search and rescue organisations in the world – a UK-registered charity, financed solely by donations and their own fund raising, and manned totally by volunteers.

Sir Richard appears at No. 85 on the 2002 list of "100 Greatest Britons" (sponsored by the BBC and voted for by the public).

Ironically, Sir Richard also ranks No. 86 on Channel 4's 2003 list of "100 Worst Britons".