Richard Branson: from Sex Pistols to space Virgins
An appetite for fresh ideas still drives Britain’s best-known businessperson despite being in his 70th year
Richard Branson plucks a dried grasshopper from a jar, takes a bite and pronounces the insect surprisingly tasty before slurping down a vegan yoghurt and offering to test the concoction on Virgin Atlantic Airways flights.
The UK billionaire, a serial creator of companies spanning record labels to airlines to fizzy drinks and bridal gowns, is in his element. He is meeting with fellow entrepreneurs at a “Pitch to Rich” session in Israel, where the contest’s winner gets a business-class flight to London for a week of hot-housing at Virgin’s own innovation hub.
The event in Tel Aviv speaks to the appetite for fresh ideas that still drives Britain’s bestknown businessperson in his 70th year. Branson’s own contribution to human endeavour is about to enter a critical phase as Virgin Galactic, the primary focus of his attention for 15 years, prepares to launch the first tourists into space in 2020.
Travelling straight from Israel to the US, Branson rang the opening bell in the New York Stock Exchange on Monday as Virgin Galactic became the first space-launch company to go public.
Shares of Virgin Galactic rose as high as $12.93, up more than 9%, during trade.
On a trip marking Virgin Atlantic’s arrival in the Israeli market, the Englishman said he is trying to quell his mounting anticipation about the space voyage given previous delays, including a 2014 hiatus after a crash that killed two test pilots. He has pledged to be aboard the first public space shot.
“Virgin Galactic has been a difficult baby and it’s gone through some tough teenage years, but we’re now close to creating something very special,” he said. “There needs to be more test flights this year and I’m trying not to get too carried away until a few months before the launch, but I’m very excited.”
The spaceflight is just one of a series of planned milestones in a 12-month period that is set to define the Virgin Group’s future. With his iconoclast approach intact even after five decades in the business of disruption, Branson also has big plans for his airline, a satellite launcher and a cruise-ship business he plans to introduce in 2020, among other projects.
Boeing’s future-technologies arm has pledged $20m for a minority stake in Virgin Galactic, a business finding itself in hot competition for billionairefunded space travel. Amazon. com founder Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin company plans to take payloads and tourists to the edge of space on an 11-minute flight, while Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s SpaceX pledged to send passengers to the moon, Mars and beyond.
Rather than an initial public offering, Virgin Galactic is listing through a merger with a publicly traded investment vehicle, Social Capital Hedosophia. Its shares rose 11% on Friday after the combination was completed. The new entity will be known as Virgin Galactic Holdings and trade under the ticker SPCE.
Galactic is interested in developing hypersonic airline flights that would slash global travel times. While the dream of linking London with Australia in just a few hours remains distant, its technology could be more readily adapted to link far-flung US cities, Branson predicts.
He speaks in glowing terms of 35-year-old Virgin Atlantic, the airline that took the brand from a quirky UK record label known for signing the Sex Pistols to a global force.
Among his travel frontiers is India, where he will seek to crack the burgeoning travel market with a service to Mumbai in October. A route to Sao Paulo will follow in 2020 as the carrier steps up competition with arch-rival British Airways, emboldened by a partnership with Delta Air Lines.
In Delta, Virgin Atlantic now has an ally with shoulders broad enough to take on British Airways after years of often bitter competition — and courtroom clashes — with the larger carrier. That push could gain traction with an increase in flights after the opening in the next decade of a new runway at London’s Heathrow airport. Branson says he has been buoyed by the hub’s positive reaction to his calls for a shakeup to the slot-allocation systems to allow his airline to become a second UK flag carrier.
He admits to a sadness surrounding the imminent reduction of his majority stake in Virgin Atlantic to a 20% holding, saying he is taking the step reluctantly to safeguard the carrier’s future in an industry increasingly dominated by a handful of airline groups linked by cross-shareholdings and cost and revenue sharing.
“It’s not a deal that I particularly like doing because from talking to the staff they’d quite like the airline to remain slightly more personal,” he says. “But I’ve promised them I’m going to remain very involved.”
The launch of the new Virgin
Voyages cruise line will also take place in 2020, with the first ship starting sea trials in the Mediterranean before being based in Miami, with three more to follow.
Branson is pitching the business at people who would normally hate such a holiday “like me,” he says — and has asked managers to submit their own list of bugbears, headed by his own dislike of buffet dining, which he plans to eliminate.
Also in the pipeline are Virgin Orbit’s first full “drop and fire” launch from the wing of a modified Boeing 747 in January as the satellite-deployment start-up heads towards its commercial debut.
Then there is the opening of Virgin Hotels in four US cities that will more than double the size of a business founded as a bet on real estate after the 2008 crash, followed by the building of Virgin Hyperloop One’s link between Mumbai and Pune, marking the world debut of technology that shoots passenger pods through a tube at near-supersonic speeds.
Back in Tel Aviv, Branson regales his audience of Israeli start-ups with tales of how he became a one-man promotional campaign for the Virgin brand. They are familiar stories for many — death-defying stunts in hot-air balloons and yachts, getting arrested at Heathrow after painting a Virgin logo on the tail of a BA Concorde, crushing Coca-Cola cans in a Sherman tank in Times Square to promote Virgin Cola — but told with a renewed energy.
One thing seems certain: the man with the broad smile and surfer-dude wavy mane is not about to step back from the fray.
“I enjoy every minute of my life and the variety of what we do,” he says. “True, I sometimes glance in the mirror and wonder who the hell that is looking back. But I don’t feel any older and I want to carry on and use the experience that I have.”
VIRGIN GALACTIC HAS BEEN A DIFFICULT BABY AND IT’S GONE THROUGH TOUGH TEENAGE YEARS, BUT WE’RE CLOSE TO SOMETHING SPECIAL