Sir Richard Branson: Sky's the limit

Simon Jack (0:00)

This is the BBC. This podcast is supported by advertising outside the UK.

SPEAKER_2 (0:09)

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts.

Zing Tsjeng (0:20)

Welcome to Good Bad Billionaire. Each episode, we pick a billionaire and we find out how they made their money.

Simon Jack (0:25)

Then we judge them. Are they good, bad, or just another billionaire?

Zing Tsjeng (0:29)

I'm Zing Tsjeng, and I'm a journalist, author and podcaster.

Simon Jack (0:31)

And I'm Simon Jack, and I'm the BBC's business editor.

Zing Tsjeng (0:34)

And this episode is about the world's most successful Virgin.

Simon Jack (0:38)

It's Virgin Group founder, Sir Richard Branson.

Zing Tsjeng (0:42)

I would say he's probably Britain's best known billionaire.

Simon Jack (0:45)

And weirdly, I didn't know this, he's the second most followed person on LinkedIn to be linked in after Bill Gates.

Zing Tsjeng (0:51)

And Bill Gates is significantly richer, but I feel like Branson has a better PR machine around him.

Simon Jack (0:57)

I think he's got one of the best PR machines I've ever seen in business. And he is the brand, he personifies it, and he sprinkles that magic dust of the Virgin name on just about any business you can think of. He's had a go at it.

Zing Tsjeng (1:09)

So he's currently worth over two billion pounds, and his wealth comes from his businesses under the Virgin name. Right now, there are 40 Virgin companies, but he reportedly has set up 400 companies. So he's done record labels, airlines, Cola, gyms, the internet.

Simon Jack (1:25)

And he also was the first in a billionaire race in a very important way to billionaires. He was the first one to space aboard his own Virgin Galactic rocket. He beat Jeff Bezos into space by nine days.

Zing Tsjeng (1:37)

But this isn't the first time he's tried some daring stunt. So he became known for his world record attempts. He set the record for the first transatlantic crossing in a hot air balloon.

That went at about 130 miles per hour.

Simon Jack (1:50)

Those daredevil stunts might be a personality thing, might be the most genius bit of marketing you've ever seen. Let's listen to a clip of him sharing his Desert Island Discs in 1989 BBC presenter Sue Lawley has just asked him why he does these daredevil stunts.

Richard Branson (2:04)

I mean, they're tremendous personal challenges, both with the balloon project, for instance, overcoming the technological problem where people said it was impossible for a hot air balloon to go that far. And then the actual personal challenge, having never flown a hot air balloon to learn to fly it, to learn to skydive, to see whether one was capable of setting oneself that kind of task.

And I'm in that fantastic position of being able to, say, ride in the jet stream at 150 miles an hour in a balloon, which no one's ever done before.

Zing Tsjeng (2:33)

He's quite a smooth operator, isn't he?

Simon Jack (2:35)

Yeah, there's another reason he does these stunts, because basically he knows that the press loves these things and will document his antics. You can't buy that kind of publicity for the Virgin brand. And he famously owns his own island, Necker Island. It's in the British Virgin Islands. He bought it when he was just 28 years old.

I feel like a real failure, that I don't have my own island.

Zing Tsjeng (2:58)

I mean, I think I set up my first iso when I was 28 years old.

Simon Jack (3:01)

Well, Necker became a big celebrity hotspot. You've had Princess Diana went there, Barack Obama, Kate Moss, after her cocaine scandal, went to recuperate or lay low there.

Zing Tsjeng (3:11)

I don't know how much lying low there is on Necker Island. It sounds a bit like a party center.

Simon Jack (3:15)

You can go there yourself if you like, apparently. For a mere 85,000 pounds a night, you can party like Branson.

Zing Tsjeng (3:21)

Have you ever met Branson?

Simon Jack (3:22)

A couple of times, actually, yeah. Funnily enough, I flew to New York on Virgin.

He was part of an environmental lobby, which was talking about trying to reduce emissions, which is, you got a bit of a nerve if you run an airline trying to do that. But he wanted to be in the front of that particular groovy initiative at the time.

Zing Tsjeng (3:39)

What did you make of him? What was he like?

Simon Jack (3:41)

I find it really interesting because he is rich and playboy-ish and he's got his own island, got his own airline.

And you'd think of him as being this uber confident, slick and confident in his personal presentation. He's actually painfully shy and he's quite faltering in interviews. So he's a real bunch of paradoxes, which is what I think we'll see in this. I mean, for example, he owned a famous record label. He doesn't even like music, but let's get into that. Let's go back to the beginning and find out where Richard Branson comes from.