Sir Richard Branson: Sky's the limit

23:09And I say on a speedboat, it was festooned in Virgin branding, of course. so unfortunately they did not make it it actually crashed right before it completed near the hours of scilly but he turned it into a great story because his son sam was born during the four-day journey when a photographer was sent to snap them in the hospital it was reported as daredevil father toasts newborn yeah he also joined the balloonist perlin strand in the virgin atlantic flyer they set the record for the first ever hot air balloon to successfully this time they didn't crash crossed the Atlantic. He crossed the Pacific later too.

23:45During the 90s, he made four attempts to circumnavigate the world in a balloon before he finally gave up in 99. He had this kind of, I always think of it as Phineas Fogg kind of thing, you know, around the world in 80 days. This is madcap sort of adventurer. And we lovingly follow his antics. And there's always someone there to snap a picture. And that kind of PR was quite new at the time. And it's cheaper than doing advertising. And you're associating it with a kind of adventurousness, youthful spirit, pitching yourself against the odds. It's a powerful message. Do we think that part of this was also because he liked being the centre of attention?

24:21I don't know. It's really difficult to figure that one out. Because as I say, when you meet him in person, he's actually quite shy and retiring. And yet he does all these kind of crazy things. It's one of the many paradoxes about him, you know, partly because he's clearly a very ambitious person. But also, I think, you know, there's a bit of Wizard of Oz, There's a shy person behind it. Yeah, if you pull back the curtain, you'll find Branson in a hot air balloon. Yes. Anyway, so he was winning on the branding front, but he was still very much an underdog in the airline business. So by the end of the 80s, Virgin Atlantic still had only a handful of planes, four of them, and it was struggling to compete with its main rival, British Airways.

25:01He hired a new PR head and he told them, you've got to fight for Virgin and you've got to knock British Airways. So this launched a kind of war against BA. So one advert said BA is for short, thin people to poke fun at the fact that their seat sizes weren't big enough. And at that point, Virgin were a bit of an irritant to BA, no more than that. But that changed and the tension between them stepped up a gear in 1990 when Virgin was given approval to fly from Heathrow Airport, BA's real sort of spiritual home. And then there was another stunt where Branson wrote to Saddam Hussein offering a Virgin plane to pick up Brits who were stranded by the Gulf War.

25:36And the BA chairman at the time was a guy called Lord King. And there was a real feud between these two individuals. King was shocked that Branson had bypassed the usual channels and was said to have instructed his staff, do something about Branson. So it's getting quite personal, this feud. And it actually became a matter of espionage because Branson received a tip-off that BA was hacking into Virgin's computers, poaching its passengers and leaking stories about their finances to the press. So Virgin started to collect evidence of BA's wrongdoing. And Branson started using the press who would begin running articles about BA's what became known as Dirty Tricks campaign, an ITV editor documentary which was called Violating Virgin.

26:19So when BA's Lord King claimed Branson's accusations of dirty tricks were baseless, Virgin decided then to take the dramatic step of suing them for libel. So to take on BA in court, Branson needed some money. So he announced to his staff they had sold Virgin Records to EMI for 510 million pounds, an enormous amount of money in the early 90s, 510 million. And that's a big move. That's kind of the heart and soul of the Virgin family, really. Yeah, that's staking the house on everything. Yeah, he again, apparently he cried to staff about this. I think those tears were probably kind of genuine. I don't think he would have wanted to get rid of and it strikes me as a strange decision to sell Virgin Records to go and take off the highly competitive airline industry.

27:02That is a very bold move. And I wonder whether he would have done it. I suppose, look, we're talking about him as a billionaire. So something worked out. So he sold Virgin Records, but this injection of money basically saved Virgin Atlantic from going under. And finally, in 1993, Virgin won one of the most bitter and protracted libel actions in aviation history. Yeah, a BA admitted in the high court that staff had engaged in disreputable business practices. They apologised, they paid Branson£500 ,000 personally. That was divided among staff and became known as the BA bonus. And BA also had to foot the£3 million legal bill.

27:39And his rival, Lord King, had to resign. So it is Virgin 1, BA 0. I think that made him kind of the maverick superstar in many ways that we think of today. Oh, definitely. And I think it kind of solidified this reputation that he's kind of cultivated of being the little guy, the underdog, the outsider taking on the big establishment. You know, you can see kind of seeds of that being planted in his early years. but I think that fight against an aviation giant like British Airways was the thing that solidified it. Yeah, but even his own head of A &R, which is Artist and Repertoire of Virgin Records, said that people were naive who had allowed themselves to be used by the informality, the no suits.

28:21It was always about the money. Even his own mother described him as someone who plucks what he needs out of you. It's interesting what the head of A &R said about that because in many ways it kind of mirrors what happens with tech companies, right? Everyone's in hoodies, super informal. You're never going to get sat down with a guy in a suit to do your appraisal. But it is still always about the money. But if it works for the branding, it works for the branding. And it really did for Virgin because by the mid-90s, the brand had this reputation as being honest, quality, fun, stylish. I'm told that Virgin Group at this point was now the largest private company in the UK.

28:56It had 6 ,000 staff and subsidiaries in 15 countries. I personally find that difficult to believe. And there were so many businesses there, it's actually quite hard to narrow them down. But we can discuss one in particular, Virgin Cola. Which is interesting. I mean, taking on behemoths of an industry, you can't take on anyone perhaps more dominant than Coca-Cola in that industry. And it launched Virgin Cola in 1994. And this is a classic example of like, let's throw this off the wall and see what sticks. Of course, Richard Branson had a stunt for the launch of this. he drove a Sherman tank through three tonnes of cans of Coke in Times Square, and he launched a bottle in the shape of Pamela Anderson.

29:36Classy. Virgin Cola did not do well. It was a flop. Yeah, by 2000, it had debts of over 30 million. And it's one of the businesses that didn't work. Other failures also included Virgin Vodka, Virgin Brides, Virgin Clothing, Virgin V, which was a cosmetics line, Virgin Cars. So they really were trying to do quite a lot. So we've lost sight of our goal here. We're trying to figure out when he became a billionaire. And it's quite tricky to pin down his wealth. It's a private company, so it's not listed on the stock exchange. There's also loads of companies across the group. Some are being shut down, others are being started.

30:12He's selling some off. In 1997, for example, he sold Virgin Radio to Chris Evans, the presenter, for£81 million. But we can say that in 1997, the Sunday Times Rich List estimated his wealth to be£1.7 billion, which ranked him at number five alongside the Duke of Westminster. And his biggest asset was still his airline, Virgin Atlantic. That accounted for half his wealth on paper. So Richard Branson is a billionaire.

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34:23conspiracy. Who replaced Avril Lavigne? Listen on BBC Sounds.

34:31So he's officially a billionaire. Now what? Cast your mind back. This is back in 1997. And a little thing known as Cool Britannia was starting to steamroll ahead thanks to the election of the new Labour government. In 1997, the UK was rocking at this point. You have Blair versus Oasis. Oasis are hanging out in 10 Downing Street. Right. And Branson was very much the poster boy for, what's that famous line where it's like, cool to be stinking rich? He said that. Peter Mandelson, the new Labour, so ditched their kind of heavily unionised Labour roots. Peter Mandelson famously said, we're very comfortable with you becoming filthy rich as long as you pay your taxes.

35:13I was living in the US, but I was coming back a lot. And I just couldn't believe there was a real sense of, I don't know, fun and enthusiasm, opportunism in the air. And also the music was rocking at the time. It was a very cool scene, man. Right. I guess Branson with the kind of glamorous, youthful, sexy, virgin brand fit right in. And it was just after this time he actually got knighted. He got his knighthood for services to entrepreneurship, becoming Sir Richard Branson. And he also took advantage of privatised British Rail in the 90s. So that meant an opening for Virgin Rail. Yeah, which he took.

35:47He got an initial 15-year franchise of the cross country and the West Coast mainline routes. And it actually made a profit. By 2012, the end date of that franchise, Virgin Group had received£180 million in dividends. And by the end in 2019, that turned out to be£306 million in total. So the Virgin Group has done well out of the rail industry. But in 2019, they actually lost this franchise because it disqualified itself over pension liabilities. I think you have to explain what this means. They're not putting enough money into the staff pension pot. And the pensions regulator said that the UK rail industry needs an additional five to six billion pounds to plug the pension shortfall.

36:29Virgin said it was being asked to take on risks it couldn't control and manage. So at that point, they lost that franchise. So originally they agreed to pay£3.3 billion to the government to plug that shortfall. But by the time they lost the franchise in 2019, they'd only paid£970 million. And a Labour former politician, Lord Adonis, said he was forced to resign partly in protest. What he saw as a taxpayer-funded bailout of Virgin, they didn't pay as much as they owed. That was a quasi-bailout in his view. And that meant the taxpayer was left footing the bill. And Branson also pops up in another Great British privatisation story with Northern Rock Bank.

37:08Yeah, this one I remember extremely well. In 2007, he tries to buy a bank called Northern Rock, but he was stopped because Vince Cable, a politician at that time, said his criminal conviction for tax evasion back in 1971, over those records, stood in the way of trusting him with public money. And in a way, he dodged a massive bullet by not buying it then. because in 2008, it got into terrible financial difficulty because of the subprime mortgage crisis, the great financial crisis. Am I right in saying that Northern Rock was basically one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse to signal the fact that recession was coming?

37:42Well, it was definitely the most visible thing in the UK, at least, of the financial crisis. There were pictures on the front page of every newspaper of queues of people around the block trying to get their money out of a bank because basically Northern Rock was taking enormous risks on how much money it was lending. It was lending people 125 % of the value of their home. So when the financial crisis hit, they couldn't fund themselves and they collapsed. In 2008, they were nationalised. The taxpayer was left footing the bill. So 1.4 billion pounds of taxpayer money was put into Northern Rock to save it.

38:18And it was hoped that a sale of the bank would eventually earn that back for, you know, regular Joes. So it was nationalised. Listen, the government was pumping money into all sorts of banks. It pumped tens of billions into RBS, which is now known as NatWest, tens of billions into Lloyds, which then merged with HBOS. It was carnage, financial carnage. Out of the wreckage of this, in 2011, the government did sell the nationalised Northern Rock to Richard Branson for£747 million, and it became and is still virgin money. And would you say that this is kind of a discount fire sale price? It seems pretty cheap for a bank.

38:56Yeah, no, it definitely would have cost more back in 2007. Even by 2011, the valuation of banks is still very depressed. In fact, it's still depressed to this day. Where are we now? We're 15 years on. And for example, the share price of NatWest, which used to be known as RBS, is still less than half what it was in 2008 when the government bought 80 odd percent of the bank. So, yes, he's definitely buying financial assets at a fraction of what they would have cost before 2007. Listen, critics complained that the government had lost hundreds of millions by pushing for a quick sale, denying customers, for example, a stake in the business.

39:31But it worked out for Branson. Within two years, Virgin Money reported£150 million in profit. And in 2018, Virgin Money was sold to CYBG for£1.7 billion. So it was sold to CYBG Clydesdale Bank for£1.7 billion. But Branson retained 13 % of the company. Plus Clydesdale are paying royalties to Branson for the Virgin Money brand, equivalent to 1 % of revenues. That brand still got value. So even though he sold it, he's still making money from it. Yeah. So at this point, Branson's still a billionaire. He's not lost his money yet. He's conquered trains and planes. Sadly, Virgin Cars did not work. So what's next?

40:12Like any self-respecting billionaire, space. He officially launched Virgin Galactic in 2004. In 2013, Virgin Galactic's spaceship, the VSS Enterprise, made its first powered flight. But in 2014, disaster struck. Enterprise was destroyed in an accident during a test flight that actually killed the pilot, Mike Allsbury. But even after this tragic incident, Branson vowed to carry on. He was determined. In 2021, Virgin Galactic completed its first fully crewed space flight. Obviously, Branson had to be on board. And it beat another one of our billionaires, Jeff Bezos, into space by a mere nine days.

40:48So he wins the space race by a few days. In 2023, Virgin Galactic did indeed fly customers to the edge of space. I don't know, the edge of space? I want to be in space. Is the edge of space good enough? Where have you just been? I've been to the edge of space. I'm not into space. I want my money back. You want the full kind of zero gravity experience, don't you? I think you do get that, to be fair. I think that does happen. But Branson claimed there are 800 customers ready, already booked, paying a quarter of a million dollars for a ticket, including Brad Pitt, Tom Hanks and Lady Gaga. Honestly, I can think of better ways to spend my money.

41:21But, you know, go you, Lady Gaga. I think I would like to go to space if I had the money. You know, don't you want to go and be able to see and look back at our beautiful Earth? Not at the rate we're destroying it. OK. But by the end of 2023, Richard Branson helped send Virgin Galactic shares down 16 % after he announced he wasn't going to put any more money in. Like I say, it's a big cash burn going into space. He also said that Virgin Group hasn't been in the best financial shape because of the pandemic. He says he actually lost about£1.5 billion during COVID. Mainly because of the devastating effect COVID had on airlines.

41:58They had 50, 60 planes on the ground. Remember his health clubs, the Virgin Active health clubs, they were all closed. He's got hotels. They were closed. At this time, he asked for a£500 million bailout from the government who refused. This is on the Virgin Atlantic, the airline side. And the bailout appeal did not go down well. So Angela Rayner, who's deputy leader of the Labour Party, tweeted, Richard, flog your private island and pay your staff. We are in unprecedented times here. Angela Rayner, as always, knowing her way around a quote. So the private sector came to the rescue. A private deal to rescue Virgin Atlantic eventually saw the Virgin Group put in£200 million and investors and creditors also giving it an additional£1 billion in order to rescue the airline.

42:43Yeah, and which is still in the air today. He actually lost big again last year. I don't know if you remember that satellite launch from a spaceport in Cornwall. That was run by Virgin Orbit. This is going to be the new space industry. It ended up in disaster. The rocket carrying them sort of exploded. Nine satellites were destroyed. and Virgin Orbit went bankrupt. But despite this, people still seem to actually really like Branson as a person. Yeah. YouGov poll placed him at number two in the UK and number five in the US in their most popular business figures. So big in the US as well. And there was a 2022 documentary about Branson in which former Observer business editor Emily Bell said, I'm constantly impressed by the latitude that the British public will give Richard Branson.

43:28They constantly want him to succeed in a way that they don't want most businessmen to succeed. That is odd, isn't it? And I think it should be our mission here to try and figure out why that is. I feel like there's a bit of Boris Johnson pre-disgrace, pre-being kicked out of the Tory party. Really? Yeah, because if you think about it, this kind of cheeky, happy-go-lucky, chappy, bit of a rogue, you know, clearly loves a bit of fun. Like, they're quite similar qualities, I think. And I think the British public really responds to someone who doesn't appear to take themselves seriously. That's true.

44:01There's a little bit of the kind of businessman Jack Sparrow about him. He's got a little bit of a glint in his eye. He's taken down some of the Goliath of the business like BA. Michael O 'Leary, the front man for Ryanair, has a similar kind of thing. He's kind of sticking it to the big guys. There's something kind of fun about him. He's slightly irreverent. And also, I just think also the Virgin brand is still steeped in the music business. And I think that still has some charm and some appeal. Yeah, it's a story about branding, isn't it? I mean, really, when you think about big brands like Coca-Cola, like Apple, what Virgin was able to accomplish because it was kind of tagging along to the 70s and the cool Britannia and, you know, boom in pop culture and music, then that is basically Virgin.

44:46Yeah.

44:51So he's a billionaire. Let's come to the bit where we judge him. On sheer wealth, he's not anywhere near the top of the tree. £2.4 billion currently. That's down£4.2 billion from the year before, thanks to that Virgin Orbit bankruptcy. But in this category, we also talk about how you wear your wealth. And this he does extremely well. Oh, yeah. I mean, Necker Island alone, buying a private island in your 20s. And also, you know, don't forget the first billionaire to go into space. That's quite the achievement. Yeah, he won the space race, which matters to these billionaires. I'm going to give him a six for wealth because it wouldn't usually justify that by the amount of money he has.

45:31But the way he's worn it and the fact he embodies billionaire so well, I'm going to give him some extra boosts. He gets a boost from that. So six out of 10 for me. I'll be more generous at the points I give him for wearing it well, so to speak. I'm going to give him an eight out of 10. OK. Rags to riches. Well, comes from a pretty solidly upper middle class family. Parents rented him a four-story house near Hyde Park when he was a kid. He went to boarding school and was rich enough to drop out of boarding school without many consequences. Yeah, he was hanging with a pretty cool crowd. I think he had a pretty privileged upbringing.

46:05I'm going to give him a two for Rags to Riches. I'm going to give him a two as well. He was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Yeah, pretty much. Okay, villainy. Has his bigness practices done damage? Has he shafted people? What's he been like in business? Well, he's basically a tax excel, right? Even though he denies it. I mean, he lives on Necker Island. He's done so since 2006. And actually, in 2016, the shadow chancellor of the Exchequer, John McDonnell, asked for him to lose his knighthood because he resided in Necker Island. Yeah, if everyone who was a tax excel lost their knighthood, there'd be a lot fewer knights of the realm, I can tell you that.

46:42And also, his carbon footprint's not looking great, is it? I mean, if we criticise Taylor Swift for her carbon footprint, Richard Branson owns an airline and blasts rockets into space. In his defence, in 2007, he did start a company to make biofuels to counter the impact of his airline. But, you know, you're still essentially propping up the airline industry. And what about his business practices? In this, he actually scores quite well because he's seen as the one who was being shafted. You know, the battle with BA kind of defined his business career. and he was seen as the wronged party in that and came out on top.

47:19So I don't think his business dealings are particularly villainous. No. I mean, the crying thing is interesting. It's not particularly villainous, but it is a smack of manipulativeness. I'm going to come down the middle and give him a five because, you know, the aviation industry is literally burning carbon into the atmosphere. But in terms of the actual villainous business practices he did to get to that point, he doesn't score that high. But for the aviation stuff, I'll give him a five. OK, well, you know, if he didn't own the airline, somebody else would. You know what I mean? You're five, I'm four.

47:56So philanthropy, what do we know about that? Well, he actually has signed the Giving Pledge. So we've talked about the Giving Pledge on this podcast before. It's set up to encourage billionaires to give away their wealth in their lifetime. Yeah, set up by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. And in 2006, Branson pledged$3 billion of his transport profits to fight global warming. But there are questions over how much he's actually given away because in 2014, Naomi Klein claims he gave less than a tenth of the cash promised to develop low carbon fuel. I think that pledge of$3 billion of transport profits to fight global warming, I mean, is that trying to absolve yourself of your own sins?

48:36I suppose it is. but still it's a big chunk of money. I'm going to give him a five for philanthropy. I would also give him a five. I mean he scores quite well. He did sign the giving pledge which even though you don't get put in jail if you don't give away your money it is quite the statement. So maybe I would push him up to a six out of ten for signing that. Power. In the past we've defined power as like for example could he sway an election? Could he pick up the phone to world leaders? Is he a massive influencer? I don't think he's any of those things, is he? No. And actually, I think, you know, seeing Richard Branson, like growing up, seeing him on telly flogging stuff, actually made me in a way take him less seriously as a serious business figure.

49:20Yeah. Because the image he cultivated was one of glam, kind of sexy, cool, funny, irreverence, you know. I think that this is a category he would want to score low in. because the whole point about him is he's not powerful. He was taking on BA as a pretender, as an interloper in that. Virgin, which is more like a nightclub than a record store. Power is not what he's trying to project. And I don't think he does. So I'm going to give him a two for power. I would give him a three out of ten. Because I think coolness, however you define it, is a sort of power. It's just one that works in a slightly different way to being able to ring up the president.

49:58Yeah. OK, legacy. I think that his stature as the best known entrepreneur that Britain has produced in the last, well, ever, probably. He is a role model, I think, to an entire generation of people who think they can do things a bit differently, want their own island. Yeah, there's a kind of scrappiness that I think is inspiring to a lot of younger people who want to become millionaires or billionaires or entrepreneurs. As an exemplar of entrepreneurialism is pretty powerful. So I'm going to give him an eight for legacy. And even, you know, the power of having a personal brand. You know, nowadays people take real pains to cultivate personal brands for themselves on social media.

50:39Just look on TikTok. Everyone's trying to create a personal brand. And in a way, Richard Branson was right at the centre of that. He really pioneered this idea of you can be more than just a person. You can embody a brand. You can embody a company's values. You can change the way people perceive your company through just sheer personality. Yeah, whether it's true or not, it has power. I can imagine if you're a university student and you're studying marketing or one of those disciplines, Richard Branson is a case study for you. For sure. Okay. So I would give him an 8 out of 10 for this as well.

51:11Two eights. Okay. And then we have to ask, is he good, bad or just another billionaire? Honestly, I feel like he's just another billionaire. Like, you know, the companies he started, I don't want to say they were just companies. Obviously, they were very successful. But did they contribute tons and tons to, you know, did they reshape the world for the better? Did they, you know, change the way we do things? Yeah, Tubular Bells is probably a really good album, but I wouldn't say it really changed lives, except for maybe the life of Richard Branson and Michael Field who made the album. Yeah, I find myself quite perplexed by this story in a weird way.

51:45It's like he sets up so many companies in a way because Virgin is so powerful as a brand. But a lot of those companies just do stuff, you know. They don't transform people's lives. They don't change the way we do things. So for that reason, I think he's just another billionaire to me. I think as an aspirational character for many people who want to start out in business. And you know when we talk sometimes about the unacceptable face of capitalism? People have been described as that. Philip Green, for example, other people. I think in many people's eyes, he's the acceptable face of capitalism.

52:19He's worn it well. He seems to have fun. Billionaires aren't generally liked people, but there is a certain amount of affection for him. I'm really torn by this because he is a really complex character and it's difficult to get to know what the real Richard Branson is. But I think for what he's done for music, what he's done for branding, he revolutionised the airline industry. He put out Chubla Bells, Never Mind the Bollocks. These are all great moments in history. So I'm going to call him Richard Branson. Sir Richard Branson is a good billionaire. And I'm going to listen to the Chubla Bells album now.

52:50Oh yeah, you've got to. So who do we have next episode? The youngest self-made billionaire in history. One of the top four richest people in the world ever. He's not even 40 yet. You may know him from a film called The Social Network. He has revolutionised the way we spend our time, how advertisers spend their money. And some people say arguably for the worse. Mark Zuckerberg, next up. Thanks for listening to Good Bad Billionaire. This podcast is produced by Hannah Hufford and Mark Ward. James Cook is our editor and it's a BBC audio production.

53:33America is changing. And so is the world. But what's happening in America isn't just a cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere. I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C. I'm Tristan Redman in London. And this is The Global Story. Every weekday, we'll bring you a story from this intersection, where the world and America meet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.