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It is 8am and Richard Branson is bounding towards the stage at the Adelaide Convention Centre. As the sound system pumps out Like a Virgin, the old Madonna hit, he skips up the stairs into the spotlight and beams at his audience. Officially, this is a business breakfast. More than 1700 people have paid about $200 a ticket to eat eggs Benedict and hear the founder of the Virgin empire expound on the commercial possibilities of space travel, among other subjects. But judging by the flushed faces and rapturous applause, many of the executives in the auditorium don’t really care what Branson says. It is enough to be in his presence.
The UK’s most famous entrepreneur mentioned in his sixth book, Like a Virgin: Secrets They Won’t Teach You at Business School, that he enjoyed visiting Australia more than anywhere else. His affection for the place had nothing to do with his part-ownership of our second largest airline. “I just love the Aussies’ zest for life – a wonderful, vibrant country,” he wrote.
We love him, too. Tagging along with his entourage for part of his latest whirlwind tour – to Perth, Adelaide, Brisbane and Sydney – I am bowled over, almost literally, by the number of people keen to shake Branson’s hand, pat him on the back and, especially, pose for photographs with him. In airports, hotel lobbies, bars, on the street, he seems always to be at the centre of a scrum of thrilled fans brandishing cameras and vying for his attention.
“Can I ask if you would be in a picture?” says one middle-aged woman. “Why not?” he replies affably. “Everyone else does.” According to his staff, it is like this every time he comes here. Branson is popular in the UK, the US and Canada, but nowhere does he generate more excitement than in Australia. “It’s a bit like our adulation of ABBA back in the ’70s,” says Geoffrey Thomas, airlines editor of Australian Aviation magazine. “We seem to have latched onto Richard Branson in a very big way.”
At 62, Branson is fit and full of beans. Not handsome, really, but attractive in the breezy, lightly bronzed way of one who spends a large part of the year on his own Caribbean island. He has blue eyes, a grizzled beard, a toothy grin and long, silver-blond hair – if you put him in an identity parade with Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus, it is probably Branson you would pick as a former member of a Swedish pop group. But when ABBA was singing Money, Money, Money, Branson was making it. Since discovering his talent for turning a buck four decades ago, he has put his Virgin brand on everything from planes, trains, credit cards and mobile phones to music stores, fitness clubs, bridal wear and vodka. Virgin companies now have about 60,000 employees in 34 countries. The Sunday Times in Britain recently estimated his fortune at £3.5 billion ($5.55 billion).
By any measure, he is an unusual plutocrat, given to bungee-jumping off tall buildings and crossing oceans in hot-air balloons. Last year, he became the oldest person to kitesurf across the English Channel – the sort of record that, in my mind anyway, invites a question: why? Whatever the answer, it seems to Thomas that it is Branson’s lack of pomposity that appeals to us in this part of the world: “He’s the anti-establishment person, the I’m-not-going-to-wear-a-tie guy. I think that really does resonate with a large number of Australians.”
Since Branson is mobbed everywhere he goes, I have my best conversations with him travelling between engagements. After the Adelaide breakfast, he waves to the people gathered around his car and climbs into the front seat. “Thank you very much,” he says before he closes the door, sounding both grateful for their interest in him and rather relieved to be out of their grasp. The driver moves the vehicle slowly forward, taking care not to skittle anyone. “Just 30 seconds of your time, Mr Branson!” an urgent female voice shouts after us.
A few blocks later, we stop to pick up a coffee – Branson’s first for the day. “I’m always nervous about drinking coffee before going on stage,” he says. “In case I want to have a leak.”
His accent is unexpectedly posh. Branson likes to present himself as the people’s capitalist, a cheeky upstart who cocks a snook at the men in suits. In the UK, starting with a single second-hand Boeing 747, he set up Virgin Atlantic in competition with British Airways. In this country, he pitted Virgin Blue, now Virgin Australia, against the might of Qantas. In New York, he rode a Sherman tank up Fifth Avenue to launch Virgin Cola’s crazy-brave assault on Coke’s domination of the US soft-drink market. He relishes the role of the outsider who challenges the order of things.
But it turns out he springs from the eminently respectable upper reaches of the British middle class. His father, Ted, was a Cambridge-educated barrister and cavalry officer. His grandfather, Sir George Branson, was a High Court judge and Privy Counsellor. Branson himself accepted a knighthood in 1999, though he insists he doesn’t expect anyone to address him formally. “I prefer Richard,” he says, claiming his title is widely ignored anyway. “The only time I hear people using it is in America. Walking down a street, I hear somebody saying ‘Sir Richard’ and I think there’s some sort of Shakespearian play taking place.”
Branson has a weakness for wacky costumes, rarely passing up an opportunity to attend a corporate event dressed as, say, a Zulu warrior. Or Elvis. Or a Virgin Cola can. To promote Virgin Brides, he frocked up in white satin and a veil. The first year Virgin sponsored the London marathon, he ran the race kitted out with butterfly wings. To his admirers, he is an anything-for-a-lark funster; to his critics, a shameless attention-seeker. In April, when he launched a new Scottish airline service by lifting his kilt to reveal underpants emblazoned with the words Stiff Competition, Britain’s Daily Mail asked in a headline: “Is this his tackiest PR stunt yet?” (No, murmured anyone who had seen the pictures of him kitesurfing with a naked model clinging to his back. Or remembered his descent by crane into New York’s Times Square wearing a skin-coloured body stocking and strategically placed Virgin Mobile phone.)
A raging extrovert, you would confidently assume. But though Branson is amiable and unfailingly polite, his manner up close can be quite diffident. He says “er” and “um”‘. He stammers. He doesn’t look you in the eye. “It sounds bizarre for me to say it, but I’ve had to overcome a sort of innate shyness,” he says. “My mother tried to drum it out of me by saying shyness is a form of selfishness: ‘You’re thinking about yourself, you’re not thinking about other people. Just get up on stage and perform.’ She would make us perform as kids, in-in-in-in-in order to try to overcome it.”
Eve Branson, a former air hostess and glider pilot, didn’t believe in cosseting Richard and his two younger sisters. In his autobiography, Losing My Virginity, Richard tells of her putting him out of the car a few kilometres from the family’s 17th-century cottage in a Surrey village when he was four years old, and instructing him to find his own way home across the fields. Before he was 12, she had sent him on a 160-kilometre bike ride to Bournemouth and back. “Mum thought it would teach me stamina and a sense of direction,” he writes, adding that when he finally staggered back into the kitchen the following day, expecting a hero’s welcome, she looked up from chopping onions and asked him to pop over to the vicar’s to cut him some firewood.
In Tom Bower’s unauthorised biography of Branson, Eve is described standing under a tall tree in the village green, demanding that her son, perched precariously in the upper canopy, climb right to the top. In Mum’s the Word, her own recently published memoir, Eve crisply defends her parenting style. “I was determined to do everything possible to prevent my children becoming namby-pamby, which was how I viewed the youth of the day,” she says.
It is tempting to suppose that if his mother had been easier to impress, Branson wouldn’t have had to make billions of dollars or risk his neck hurtling across large bodies of water in balloons and assorted marine craft. (He has attempted so many speed and distance records, and so often required rescue, that for some of us it is difficult to think about Branson without seeing him being winched into a helicopter.) His father, who died in 2011, seems to have been a softer taskmaster, and less sparing with praise. “Dad was the person I would ring up when I wanted somebody to show off to,” he tells me.
Still, he speaks with great warmth about Eve, who at 89 has started to learn French, having quite recently given up tennis and golf. “Nine months ago, she announced she was going to put on a polo tournament in Morocco,” says Branson. Her plan was to raise funds for a Berber community she supports in the High Atlas mountains. He explained to her that it would never work but she went ahead anyway, and the tournament took place just before Branson arrived in Australia. “It was a magnificent success,” he says. “She raised lots of money and proved us all wrong.”
Eve and Oscar-winning actress Kate Winslet were among those lucky to escape when the main house on Branson’s Necker Island burned to the ground after being struck by lightning during a hurricane a couple of years ago. Branson, who was staying elsewhere on the 30-hectare island, says he woke to see flames leaping into the night sky and ran naked towards them – “straight into a cactus bush”, unfortunately. Winslet, who is married to one of Branson’s nephews, came through the smoke with Eve in her arms, having scooped her up when they met on the stairs. Branson says his mother was indignant: “She didn’t like the idea of being carried out of the fire by Kate.” But at least everyone got out alive and now rebuilding is almost complete.
Necker, bought for £180,000 in 1976, is one of the British Virgin Islands. It is possible to book accommodation at stratospheric rates but, first and foremost, it is a retreat for Branson, his wife Joan, and their children, Holly, 31, and Sam, 27. Surrounded by turquoise water and fringed by a coral reef, the island is also a sanctuary for threatened species of lemurs. “Their habitat in Madagascar is being destroyed and some are down to 200 in number,” says Branson, “so we’re taking them from zoos and giving them more space on the island. And we’re finding they’re breeding beautifully. They’re the most lovely creatures. Adorable.” Other forms of wildlife flourish, too. “You get giant tortoises waddling over the road, and we’ve got iguanas which grow up to six feet long, which look like mini-dinosaurs. And flamingos and scarlet ibises. It’s gorgeous.”
The driver pulls up at Parafield Airport in northern Adelaide, where Branson is scheduled to meet the first group of cadet pilots to be trained by Virgin Australia. One of them is going to take him for a spin. “I should have brought my leather flying jacket,” he says as he gets out of the car.
If the rest of Australia treats Branson like a rock star, within Virgin he is almost a cult leader. “That’s one of his great attributes – his ability to inspire people,” says Geoffrey Thomas at Australian Aviation. “His staff will walk over burning coals for him.” Virgin Australia’s corporate communications manager, Jacqui Abbott, tells me of near-hysterical scenes at a meeting with Perth-based employees. “They were squealing and handing over their babies,” she says.
At the company’s national headquarters in Brisbane, I watch hundreds of people hang over balconies, cheering and whistling, as Branson arrives for a party in his honour. A professional band leads the throng in a thumping rendition of a song that some of the staff have composed for him. “My parents told me I should be a surgeon,” they belt out. “I said, ‘No way, I’m workin’ for Virgin!‘ ” Just when it seems the atmosphere can’t get any zanier, Branson does a bit of crowd surfing, launching himself from a temporary stage into a sea of eager arms. “Haven’t you heard, we’re the Virgin crew,” the singing continues. “We do what we love and we love what we do …”
The airline had just two planes operating on one route when it started in 2000. Now it has a fleet of 125 aircraft and about 30 per cent of the domestic market. Over the years, Branson has reduced his stake in the company to 13 per cent – in his latest divestment, in April, he sold close to 10 per cent to Singapore Airlines for $122 million. “But he is still the face of the airline,” Thomas says. “He’s a fantastic figurehead.”
Aviation analyst Neil Hansford isn’t so sure about that. Virgin Atlantic in the UK lost £93 million ($145 million) in the year to February, says Hansford, of Strategic Aviation Solutions, who argues that companies associated with Branson are better at marketing than operations: “The man is the ultimate promoter. There’s a whole lot of sizzle but not always a lot of steak.”
Shares in Virgin Australia fell in value after a warning last month that this year’s pre-tax profit would be below last year’s $82.5 million. But Thomas believes the airline’s future is assured. “The fundamentals of the business are sound,” he says. “They’ve got a superb product and they’re giving Qantas a hard time.” Last year, Virgin introduced business class, ending Qantas’s monopoly of the lucrative top end of the market. “And they’re making some very significant inroads.”
At the start of a flight from Perth, Branson sits in the first row with his feet up on the bulkhead, paying no attention to the safety demonstration being given by a pretty young woman identified by her name-tag as “Tilly”. Later, while flying over the Nullarbor, I notice that he is out of his seat and chatting with the cabin crew – not just Tilly, but two other flight attendants as well. Soon a pilot emerges from the cockpit and joins the group. Next thing, they’re posing for pictures with one another. The passenger across the aisle leans towards me. “Who’s running this plane?” he asks.
At Stowe, his Buckinghamshire boarding school, Branson was a truly terrible student. By his account, his dire results were due partly to his dyslexia and partly to his lack of interest in the curriculum. He still thinks most subjects kids study are a waste of time. “All you actually need to be able to do is add up, subtract and multiply,” he says. “I mean, reading and writing, it’s nice to have a bit of that.” As for the other stuff, “it might be good for a couple of rocket scientists, but for the majority of us …”
Branson’s attitude to education is this: Why become a rocket scientist when you can hire one? He has a number of them on his payroll, as it happens, because Virgin Galactic aims to be the first company to offer regular passenger flights out of Earth’s atmosphere. He hopes that within his lifetime, we will be able to travel from Australia to London by shooting into space and back again, the journey taking little longer than it takes to watch an in-flight movie. But first things first. Sub-orbital joyrides from Virgin’s spaceport in New Mexico are expected to start in 2014, and tickets are selling for $US250,000. The company has accepted bookings from more than 600 people, reportedly including Stephen Hawking, Angelina Jolie and about 40 Australians.
The rocket-powered SpaceShipTwo will carry two pilots and six passengers, and travel at more than three times the speed of sound after launching from a large fixed-wing aircraft, the VMS (Virgin Mother Ship) Eve. Flights will last more than two hours, though only a small fraction of that time will be spent beyond the 100-kilometre-high Kármán Line, commonly defined as the beginning of space. Along with spectacular views of their home planet, passengers have been promised about six minutes of weightlessness. Branson says his goal is to make the experience available to more than just the wealthy: “It’s up to us to bring the price down to a level where a lot of people will have a chance to become astronauts and go to space.”
As you might imagine, he is itching to get there himself. Before the end of this year he expects to take a flight on SpaceShipTwo with Holly and Sam, both of whom seem to have adopted his motto: “Screw it, let’s do it.” “Last year we climbed Mont Blanc together,” he says. “And we’ve kitesurfed across the English Channel. We’ve tried to break the transatlantic sailing record. These adventures we’ve had are the moments I think they’ll remember more than almost anything else.”
Joan, who is six years older than her husband, rarely goes with him when he gallivants around the globe. “She’s quite sensibly got her own life and her own friends,” he says. “I think the reason we’ve been together for 35 years is that we give each other space.”
There’s a touch of Phileas Fogg about Branson. Whether waxing philosophical (“Sometimes, if you reach for the stars, you can actually get there without even a lot of money – just with a very, very big dream”) or talking cheerfully about a skydiving mishap (“I pulled the cord that got rid of the parachute rather than the cord that opened it”), he can seem to embody a peculiarly English daffiness. Joan, on the other hand, is a no-nonsense Glaswegian. “She’s very grounded,” Branson assures me. “She has a little bit of interest in what I do, but not a lot. It takes a lot for me to get her to say ‘Well done’.” (According to Branson’s personal assistant, Helen Clarke, Joan is more likely to roll her eyes and say, “Jumping off a building again, Richard?”)
Branson has always had a reputation as a ladies’ man, though in Losing My Virginity he portrays himself as a bit of a bumbler in the bedroom. The first time he had sex, he says, he was astonished – and quite chuffed – by the response of his partner, who panted, puffed and tossed her head from side to side. Only when she gasped, “Call an ambulance!” did he realise she was having an asthma attack.
By 1974 his first marriage, to Kristen Tomassi, was in trouble, and they took a holiday in Mexico to try to salvage it. With another couple, they organised a marlin-fishing expedition, hiring two local fishermen to take them out. The fishermen were concerned about the weather, but overcame their misgivings when Branson and the other tourists offered double payment. Sure enough, a huge storm blew up while they were on the water: the waves looked likely to smash the small vessel, so Tomassi and Branson opted to swim for shore. “The traditional thing is to stay with the boat,” he says, “but our intuition and instincts told us not to. It turned out to be the right decision.”
In his memoir, he writes that the four people who remained on board were never seen again, and that he had to live with the possibility their deaths might have been avoided if he hadn’t waved his wallet in front of the fishermen. As the car moves through city traffic, I ask if this has weighed heavily on him. “For a while,” he says, looking out the window. “I mean, I’ve sort of moved on now.”
When Branson left Stowe in 1967, aged 16, the headmaster predicted he would end up a millionaire or in jail. Six months later, Branson published the first issue of Student, a magazine remarkable not only for the youth of its proprietor but for the quality of the contributors (artist David Hockney, philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre) and interviewees (John Lennon, Mick Jagger) he was able to persuade to appear in its pages. Next he started a mail-order records business, which grew into the Virgin Records retail chain.
At 20, Branson was arrested for selling records in London that he had pretended to export to Europe in order to avoid sales tax. He spent a night in a cell – the headmaster turned out to be right on both counts – and was ordered to pay £60,000 in fines and back taxes. “A good rap on the hand,” he says. His chronic cash-flow problems were temporarily relieved by the release on his new Virgin record label of Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, which sold more than 15 million copies worldwide. He signed the Sex Pistols, too, and by 1984 was ready to start his first airline, Virgin Atlantic.
Branson does not claim to have the Midas touch. He and his financial partners have had many disappointments – Virgin Cola, Virgin Brides, Virgin Vodka, Virgin Cosmetics, Virgin Cars, Virgin Electronics and Virgin Digital among them. He has had several nerve-racking brushes with insolvency, though he maintains that on the whole he has been blithely indifferent to credit and debit columns. “I’ve never been interested in making money,” he says. “I’ve been very interested in creating things. Business is simply creating something that people want.”
He gets his biggest laugh from Australian audiences when he says that until about 10 years ago, he didn’t know the difference between “net” and “gross”. I tell him I simply don’t believe this. “It happens to be true,” he says. “I think we had the largest private group of companies in Europe by the time I’d actually worked out whether we were doing well or not. I think it illustrates that figures are not really all that important.” Virgin Australia chief executive John Borghetti takes this with a grain of salt. “He’s a very astute man,” Borghetti says of Branson. “The fun-loving side, don’t let that fool you. His mind is as sharp as a razor.”
Branson has always run casual, egalitarian workplaces, giving his employees the impression he regards them not as subordinates but as allies in his battles to outmanoeuvre corporate giants. In the early 1990s, when he won £500,000 in damages in a libel suit against British Airways, he distributed the money among his staff, calling it the “BA bonus”. Nice guys do finish first, he contends. “I think the stereotype that you only get ahead in business by treading all over people is just not true.”
But critics such as biographer Tom Bower argue that Branson is a tougher boss than he appears – that, despite the occasional magnanimous gesture, he has a history of paying low wages while salting away profits in tax-free, offshore family trusts. “Branson always poses as the people’s champion against profiteers,” writes Bower. “But eventually his true motive surfaces. He single-mindedly pursues self-interest to increase his own wealth.”
In fact, Branson has recently undertaken to direct more than half his fortune to philanthropic causes, having signed up to the Giving Pledge project started by the world’s richest man, Bill Gates. Through his charitable foundation, Virgin Unite, he already supports organisations tackling poverty, sickness and homelessness around the globe, and funds research into the development of clean fuels. He is also the force behind The Elders, a group of former world leaders, originally headed by Nelson Mandela, who work together for peace and human rights. “I was brought up to be responsible,” Branson says. “I have been extraordinarily fortunate. My parents would be very upset if I didn’t make the most of the position I find myself in.”
Per Lindstrand is the Swedish aeronautical engineer who manufactured and piloted the enormous balloons used by Branson in his series of record attempts. The two men went through a lot together – ditching into oceans, landing on a frozen Arctic lake, crashing in the Algerian desert. “I think I know him fairly well,” says Lindstrand, who admires Branson’s verve and his willingness to take risks but has come to dislike what seems to him his limitless capacity for self-promotion. The Swede tells me that when listening to Branson regale journalists with stories about their voyages, he would think to himself: “Richard, just tell the truth – the truth is dramatic enough. You don’t have to exaggerate it.”
Perhaps I catch Branson in an unusually candid mood, because when we talk about his various stunts, he volunteers that he isn’t really a daredevil at all. Leaping off the top of the Palms Casino Hotel in Las Vegas wearing a dinner suit and a bungee rope may have generated publicity for Virgin, but it wasn’t fun. It was terrifying. “Every time I’m asked to do something like that, my heart skips a beat or two,” he says. “I’m not a natural. When my kids went to fairgrounds, I would not be the first person to jump on a fun ride and go upside down. I’ve had to train myself to deal with these things.” He laughs sheepishly. “One’s demons.”
Not that he is complaining. “The incredible satisfaction I’ve had from overcoming fear … Um, you know, life is definitely the richer for it.”
Jane Cadzow travelled courtesy of Virgin Australia.
Lead-in photograph by Art Streiber/August/Raven Snow.
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