"Hurricanes are so rare," says Sir Richard Branson as he looks at the ocean from the Great House on Necker, his private Virgin Island. "You get plenty of warning." So has he been in one?
"On purpose," he says. "I hate the idea of not experiencing something. It was a completely awesome experience. Just watching the seas, and the velocity of the wind, and the sounds. It was fantastic.
You only get a hurricane about once every 50 years in the same specific place, so it was a privilege to be here. The house is built to withstand 180-mile-per-hour winds. Foolishly we did venture out occasionally, but we all survived it."
He went out?
"I actually just sat in the swimming pool and kept my head as low as possible. It was fabulous."
Branson is 54, so it's not likely that he'll be around for the next hurricane that hits Necker's 74 acres of beaches, lagoons, palm trees, volcanic rock outcroppings, and Balinese-style pavilions. And he's running out of the dangerous sporting escapades that enthrall him. He gave up trying to fly around the earth in a balloon after an American, Steve Fossett, did it first. (Branson had to be rescued from the sea five times by helicopters.) Now he's financing a venture to send tourists into space. He plans to go up on the first Virgin space voyage, but thinks that will be several years away.
Until then, Sir Richard will have to rely on business for the danger he craves. There aren't many challenges left here either. Branson has been superrich for a long time -- his net worth is more than $2 billion -- and he has indulged his entrepreneurial instinct by starting an astonishing number of ventures: His Virgin Group comprises 350 companies he founded; they took in $8.1 billion in revenues last year. Earlier this year, Virgin had $450 million in cash ready to invest.
But where? There's not much room for Branson to grow in his native Britain, where he's a hero for shaking up the stuffy old establishment. Or on the Continent, for that matter. In an annual poll that asks thousands of consumers to name the five brands that had the greatest impact on their lives, Virgin ranked as the number-two brand in Europe last year, ahead of Nokia, Mini, and BMW, and behind only IKEA. And Virgin Blue, Branson's Australian airline, ranked seventh in the Asia-Pacific market.
Coming To America
Now Branson is launching his most audacious effort yet: a major assault on the United States, the world's biggest and most competitive market. And he's targeting one of our most notoriously challenging industries: airlines. The spearhead of his invasion is a new carrier, Virgin America, that will fly domestic routes with a base in San Francisco. It will be a very costly gamble: Branson may have to spend as much as $500 million just to start up the carrier and sustain its losses for the first couple of years. Even though he's searching for partners to share the financial risk, it's uncertain whether he'll find takers. Virgin America will be the biggest and boldest test yet of Branson's maverick approach to entrepreneurship and of the power of the Virgin brand, which he's stretching in some very unconventional ways. Watch what he does closely if you're interested in the power of disruption. For Sir Richard, breaking the rules has almost always paid off handsomely.
We'll soon have a lot more opportunity to see him in action. While his transatlantic carrier, Virgin Atlantic, is beloved by Yanks who fly to London, and Virgin has megastores that sell CDs and DVDs in major U.S. cities, the brand isn't nearly as well-known here as it is abroad. Virgin didn't even make it onto the list of the top 68 brands in America. Branson himself isn't much of a celebrity in our minds. But that will change suddenly in November with the premiere of a reality-TV show starring Branson, tentatively titled The Billionaire. The 13-part series will be Fox's answer to NBC's highly rated The Apprentice with Donald Trump.
The show is a blatant plug for Branson's new airline. When its contestants aren't emulating Branson's derring-do at skydiving, they will reportedly fly on and criticize United and American airlines. The show's premise is that Branson is the anti-Trump: He doesn't sit behind a desk or preside over a boardroom -- at Necker, his office is a hammock overlooking the sea, steps away from a billiards table and a bar. Branson never wears a suit and tie; he prefers old jeans or khakis with sports shirts. And he has really good hair. He dislikes firing people and says that he has to get others to do it for him. He's an outspoken advocate for fun in the workplace, not fear and intimidation.
There's not much fun and lots to fear in the airline business these days, though. Carriers are struggling with everything from soaring fuel costs to plunging brand loyalty. This time, Branson really is going out into a hurricane, his critics say. "Virgin is too late," says the marketing guru Al Ries, coauthor of The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding. "It's 33 years since Southwest launched a low-cost airline, and now there's JetBlue, Song, Ted, and all the others. At this late stage, it's hard to imagine any angle they can come up with." The other startup airlines succeeded by serving markets that Southwest had ignored, Ries says: JetBlue flies out of New York and AirTran serves the Southeast. "Where's the hole for Virgin? They have the advantage of a brand name, but I think Virgin America is going to be just as successful as Virgin Cola and Virgin Vodka," which were Branson's most conspicuous failures. Adds Henry Hardevelt, a travel industry analyst at Forrester Research: "Please tell me why anyone would invest in an airline. The U.S. airline industry makes NHL hockey matches look like fifth-grade recess. It's brutal and bloody. The sad truth is an investor could get a better return starting a Subway sandwich shop than an airline."
But what really gives the skeptics conniptions isn't so much any specific business Branson launches, but the sheer number of ventures he dives into. Isn't Branson spreading his brand too thin by slapping it on anything that will hold still? "A brand can't stand for music stores, airlines, mobile phones, colas, financial services, and on and on," says Peter Sealey, the former head of marketing at Coca-Cola, who now teaches at UC Berkeley and Stanford. "There's no brand on earth that can do that. That's ego."
If they're right, the thrill-seeking Branson may finally be diving into one adventure too many. He has led a charmed life so far -- a man with a Midas touch who seems to be able to turn every whim, hobby, and surmise into gold. But beneath the showmanship, the seeming effortlessness, and the Boy Billionaire lifestyle, Branson is a tenacious, focused, and creative entrepreneur who has defied the naysayers time and again. The experts thought he was insane 20 years ago, for example, when he started out with only one airplane to launch Virgin Atlantic. "He's charming and disarming," says one of his executives, "but he has a razor-sharp mind behind that."
Branson infuriates the experts precisely because his success has come from breaking nearly all of their most sacrosanct rules. "You're not supposed to 'stretch' a brand so much," says Alycia de Mesa, a marketing consultant and author of Before the Brand. "But Richard Branson is a billionaire because he hasn't accepted limitations." She contends that even a failure like Virgin Cola actually benefited the brand because it generated so much media coverage and reinforced Branson's image as a risk taker challenging the establishment. "I would look at it as a promotional effort, not a product," she says. "It's a great promotional tactic."
Branson's willingness to pull publicity stunts has been invaluable, from plastering the Virgin name on his giant balloons to posing in full drag in a frilly wedding dress for the opening of his Virgin Bride shop. But wackiness aside, there's a clear method to Branson's madness. He may claim to plunge into ventures just because they seem as if they might be fun, but there's usually much more calculation to it than that. "The time to go into a business is when it's abysmally run by other people," he says, and when he feels Virgin can provide a significantly better customer experience. Airlines, for example. Cell phones, too. Five years ago, Branson realized that many young people couldn't afford the expensive monthly charges the big players required. Instead, he envisioned a pay-as-you-go approach, so teenagers wouldn't need to lock themselves into yearlong contracts or pay for airtime they didn't use.
Virgin Mobile USA is a classic illustration of how Branson builds a business. It started, of course, with an outrageous stunt. His people wanted to dramatize the motto "nothing to hide" since their service has no hidden costs. So Sir Richard rose above New York's Times Square on a crane, then stripped down to a "nude" bodysuit, his loins covered with a Virgin cell phone. He was surrounded by the cast of Broadway's The Full Monty in the same pose.
Pay-as-you-go was a new idea for cellular service in America, and the Virgin brand wasn't widely recognized here, so Virgin Mobile USA got off to a slow start. The operation quickly ran out of cash. Its top executive, Dan Schulman, said he needed more money to order phone handsets to sell during the holiday season. Branson called him and said, "I'm selling one of my favorite hotels in the world to fund you." Recalls Schulman: "He won me over right there. Now there's little that I or my organization wouldn't do for him. He puts his money and actions behind his words."
Schulman calls Virgin Mobile USA a "youth marketing company." And it shows in how innovative it has been. Virgin Mobile offers a bunch of features that make cell phones more playful and fun, such as VoiceMania (voicemail greetings from campy celebrities such as William Shatner and Adam West), Rescue Rings (to save yourself from a bad blind date or a boring meeting), wake-up calls, ringtones from the latest hit songs, and music news and celebrity gossip from MTV. Virgin Mobile USA's risque marketing inspired The Wall Street Journal to give it an award for the worst ad of the week. "The last publication I want endorsing our ads is The Wall Street Journal," Schulman told his people. "Your goal for the fourth quarter is to win that award again."
Control Freak
For a long time, Branson has wanted Virgin to be much bigger in America. But he thought he would have to live in the States to become a highly visible presence here and promote the Virgin brand. He wasn't willing to consider such a move while his two children were growing up in England. Now, though, his kids are adults. His daughter, Holly, 22, is in medical school. Sam, 19, recently took what the British call a "gap year" -- some time off before college. Branson was openly envious: He has worked, albeit for himself, ever since he dropped out of high school at 16. His first big success came in his early twenties, when Virgin released a recording of the Sex Pistols screeching, "God save the queen, she's not a human being." How ironic now that the same queen has made Branson a knight.
Last year, he decided to take his own gap year and live with Sam in Australia. "I learned to surf, which was tremendous fun, and hung out with teenagers and had a ball," he says. But after five weeks, Branson gave it up to oversee the 2003 public stock offering of Virgin Blue, his low-priced airline startup in Australia that had swiftly captured 35% of the market.
The Australian success helped inspire Branson's plans for Virgin America, even though he knows that the United States will be a much tougher market. Why is he entering this business so very late? Branson was waiting while he lobbied Washington to repeal the rules forbidding foreigners from owning a majority interest in a U.S. airline. It wasn't that he was a control freak. He had learned a hard lesson from his troubled venture in the PC business, when Virgin's name wound up on a mediocre product another company had designed. "We had decided that we'd never get involved in a company unless we could control it and protect the Virgin brand name," he says.
Virgin's brand was so glamorous that Branson could typically keep 60% or 70% ownership of new ventures while partners put up and risked all the capital. But his insistence on control forced him to pass on a terrific opportunity. In the late 1990s, David Neeleman offered him 40% of a new U.S. airline for no cash, just the use of the Virgin name. Branson turned him down. The airline became today's JetBlue.
Branson has given up on lobbying. He's starting a U.S. carrier even though he can own only a 49% stake and has to let Americans -- who they'll be is still undetermined -- control the operation. His goal will be to outdo the majors and the upstarts alike in quality, especially in business class. It's not a bad strategy, some analysts figure. Forrester's Hardevelt says: "If I were Branson, I'd go for the quality-focused traveler who will pay $1,000 for business class coast-to-coast and give them an airport clubhouse and in-flight Internet access. That's the only niche that's left."
Branson isn't intimidated by all the competition. "In America you've got an excellent airline in JetBlue and a good airline, a pioneer airline, but slightly tiring, in Southwest. It's the Tower Records of the airline business: a great reputation in the past, but now . . ." He pauses for effect. "And then most of the other airlines are just pretty awful."
But for Branson to succeed, he'll have to fight all the trends in domestic airlines. He's pushing a brand in a business where they matter less than ever: Last year, only 33% of U.S. fliers were brand loyal, according to Forrester's research, down from 40% in 2002. Meanwhile, "mercenary" customers, for whom price is everything, make up 20% of the market. And the industry's economics, to put it politely, stink. "What's Virgin's advantage?" asks Sealey. "He's going to be buying the same planes and hiring pilots at the same salaries. His cost structure will be identical to theirs. If I were a banker, I wouldn't lend him the money. If he were presenting this as a business case in my class at Stanford, I would fail him."
Getting It Right
Branson has lured Fred Reid, former president of Delta, to run the new carrier. But Branson says that he's going to "get out there and help him shout about it." And he's planning to use all the publicity around the new airline to bolster his other American ventures. "An airline is a very high-profile way of getting a brand established in a marketplace," he says. Virgin America will spend around $70 million a year on television advertising in the United States, while Virgin Mobile will lay out another $70 million and Virgin Atlantic will ante upward of $25 million. But the reality-TV show will probably do more for Virgin's brand awareness than all of those well-funded marketing campaigns combined. "In one fell swoop we should get Virgin completely well-known in the States," Branson says.
Still, Branson knows from experience just how unforgiving the airline business can be. Four years ago, Virgin Atlantic introduced new first-class sleeper seats, but customer feedback revealed that "we didn't get it quite right," Branson says, because the seats didn't fully recline. "Rather than living with it for 10 or 15 years, we just decided to start again," discarding an investment of $68 million. "It's important to acknowledge that you haven't gotten it right and then not keep your head in the sand but get on with it." The cost this time around was another $127 million.
Isn't that throwing good money after bad? Isn't that kind of business decision a lot like playing blackjack in Las Vegas: You lose big and then you raise your bet, but each new hand is still another big gamble, right? "There's always a risk," he says. "But the much bigger risk is to let your reputation erode away by not getting it right. There's no room for second best. In the airline business that's particularly the case."
Virgin Everything
Virgin is an unusual conglomerate. While most of its revenue comes from a handful of businesses -- airlines, megastores, mobile phones, the V2 music label, and European trains -- the final 20% or so comes from hundreds of small and scattered ventures, so many that it's hard to believe that even Branson can remember what they all are. There's Virgin Cosmetics, Virgin Radio, Virgin Wines, Virgin . . . just about everything. In London he even owns a modeling agency and two nightclubs (one straight, one gay).
Why does he keeps launching so many small operations? "If we were purely a money-making machine, with our one reason for being to get a 35% to 40% return annually, I suspect that we wouldn't do as many new ventures and we would be marginally more focused than we are," he says. "Having said that, our returns are still pretty astounding -- maybe triple what they would be if you invested in the stock market or with other venture capitalists." Of course, that's impossible to confirm since most of Virgin's ventures are privately held and chartered offshore.
So again, why start all those companies? "I love learning about things I know little about," Branson says. "I love people, and I don't like to say no all the time. We've got people all over the world who are coming up with great new ideas, and it doesn't actually cost us a lot relative to the overall size of the group. Four months ago, I went into a juice bar in Sydney called Pulp. Fantastic. Healthy. Delightful staff. I knew the guy who set it up. So let's give it a go outside Australia."
Branson especially hates to say no when he likes the people who propose ideas. Virgin Bride was the brainchild of one of his flight attendants, who wound up running the London wedding superstore. When Branson's wife Joan's manicurist suggested offering massages and nail treatments to Virgin's first-class passengers, he created Virgin Touch and put the manicurist in charge of it. Even the Virgin Web site solicits proposals for new business ideas.
The person Branson admires most in the world is his friend Nelson Mandela, who has been an accidental scout for new ventures. Mandela told him that a big chain of health clubs had gone bankrupt in South Africa and 5,000 people were about to be put out of work. He asked if Branson could come down the next day and save their jobs. Branson got on a plane, looked over the books, and decided it was a very good business. Now Virgin owns around 85% of the health clubs in South Africa.
Paradise Island
Branson's home in London is a 19th-century four-story Holland Park townhouse that doubles as an office. He doesn't have a driver -- he hates the idea of making someone wait for him all the time -- so he takes taxicabs around town. Like the queen, he doesn't carry cash, so the billionaire has to scrounge cab fare from colleagues. He won't carry keys, so he'll wait outside his own office until someone lets him in. He wears frayed woolen pullover sweaters, even when he goes to the House of Parliament, that bastion of formality, to address the ministers on important matters of international airline competition and regulation. At boozy London parties, Branson flirts outrageously and pulls naughty stunts such as lifting up a woman in a short cocktail dress and holding her upside down until everyone in the room can see her underwear. Oddly, the British find this perfectly charming. Americans would probably sue him.
Now that he's invading America, Branson is spending more of his time at Necker, which is closer to the States and shares a time zone with New York. (When he is not using the island for his own work or leisure, he rents it to tourists for up to $40,000 a night, which includes food, booze, and lodging for as many as a couple of dozen guests.) This summer, Branson invited the boards of Virgin Mobile USA and its partner, Sprint, to meet on the island. Dan Schulman arrived at 5 p.m. and Branson made him play three sets of tennis before dinner. Then Branson got him up at 5:30 a.m. for another match. "He's an incredibly competitive guy," Schulman says. By the end of the three-day visit, they had faced off over 10 sets of tennis, three games of chess, and a round of billiards. They raced Hobie Cats, and Branson forced him to try kite-surfing. "The actual board meeting was a picnic in comparison," Schulman says. "When I come back from Necker, it takes a week for my body to recover."
On a weekday at Necker in May, Branson got up before dawn and settled into his "office," the oversized white hammock in the Great House. When he bought Necker at age 25 for $300,000, there was only one lonely palm tree on the island. Since then he has imported so many that it looks more South Pacific than Caribbean.
Beginning around 5:00 a.m., Branson made a couple of hours of phone calls to the UK, where it was still late morning. Then he played tennis by the beach before returning to the hammock to resume his calls when the Americans on the East Coast were just getting into the office. He frequently made himself fresh pots of hot tea. He called himself a "tea addict." By 1:30 his workday was done, and he had lunch outside with his wife, Joan. He limited himself to a small bowl of curried pumpkin soup, passing up the Greek salad and spicy chicken samosas prepared by the island's superb chefs. That afternoon he walked down a path to the beach to rendezvous with his personal watersports instructor for his daily lesson in kite-surfing. The idea is that the kite catches the wind, like a sail, and propels the surfer at high speeds along the water.
His instructor was pleased with Branson's rapid progress. He said that Branson actually listens to his comments and fixes what he's doing wrong, unlike many students. Afterward, Branson hurried to play more tennis before joining the live-in staff of 10 for dinner beneath a bright full moon.
Even after-hours on the island, Branson was much more subdued and well behaved than during his raucous nights of London partying. Perhaps it was because he was trying to get "ship shape" while on the island. Even at the beach, he poured guests Chassagne-Montrachet but passed on the fine white Burgundy himself. "When I'm here, normally I misbehave myself atrociously," he said. "On this particular trip, I've decided to cleanse myself. I'm trying to do a month without drinking at the moment. Very dull, very boring."
Maybe he was uncharacteristically restrained because his wife was there, too, quaffing Dom Perignon with the island's young British staffers and talking about the Martha Stewart case and Dominick Dunne's profiles of the rich and powerful in Vanity Fair. Two of the gorgeous female attendants looked very much as Joan must have appeared 30 years ago, but Branson wasn't flirtatious or outrageous this time.
Three weeks later, Branson traveled to New York for the first open audition call for contestants for his reality-TV show. The event took place at the Virgin Megastore in Times Square. The line outside began forming at 10 p.m. the night before for the 10 a.m. call. The event began with the sound system playing the theme song to the James Bond movie Live and Let Die as Branson descended through the store's central atrium using the same kind of jet backpack that propelled 007 in Thunderball. Branson took the stage to address the long line of would-be contestants and have his picture shot by the paparazzi. As usual, though, he seemed conspicuously stiff at public speaking. He's uncomfortable in public forums, which is odd for someone famous for his publicity extravaganzas. Branson has a natural shyness that he overcomes for the sake of promoting his brand. He's better schmoozing one-on-one, and he's at his best at parties with women around and a drink in hand. Before long, the potential contestants hijacked the media event, shouting out questions from the balcony levels. Their cheekiness and chutzpah inspired Branson to loosen up. He confessed that he'll have nothing to do with choosing the 16 initial contestants, since "if it were up to me, all 16 would be women." Someone asked whether the producers want only contestants with prior business experience. No, Branson replied: "I started out at 16 and I didn't have any experience at business," he said. "I didn't have any experience at anything, actually. That's why I called the company Virgin." The crowd loved it. Either this guy was going to get sued for sexual harassment here, or he was going to become America's newest star

One lightly frozen billionaire has just climbed down from the port wing of a Virgin Atlantic 747 parked at the edge of a runway at Mojave Airport. It's a blustery gray morning in California's southern desert, and Virgin in chief Richard Branson has spent more than an hour standing in the wind, waiting to tape the opening sequence of his new reality show, Rebel Billionaire. The jet's not going anywhere, either: It's a mothballed reserve plane, prettied up just for the shoot. "We've been thinking about sinking her in the Caribbean for divers," says Branson, deep-sixing hot cocoa from a styrofoauddenly the sun pops out. Branson clambers back up onto the wing and runs through his paces again for the boom-rigged camera: crossed-arm stance, million-mile gaze across the desert, then a quick turn as the lens swoops in for a close-up, with a tease of that famous toothy grin and a glint of sky-blue eyes. Take that, Donald Trump! The rest of the cast hustles out onto the wing, the camera whirs again, and it's a wrap. To celebrate, Sir Richard Charles Nicholas Branson, 54-year-old lord of a $9 billion-a-year global empire, joins his happy TV troupe in mooning the crew. Everyone cracks up.
Branson has been mugging and grinning, diving and rappelling, ballooning and mooning his way to extreme mogulhood for nearly 40 years. (He started his first business, a magazine, while still in boarding school.) In that time, his Virgin Group has expanded from a funky record business into a sprawling keiretsu encompassing air travel, cell phones, train travel, soft drinks, African safaris, digital downloads, and Caribbean hideaways. Branson's own Virgin Island - no kidding - is available starting at $25,000 a day. All of which adds up to a personal fortune pegged by Forbes at $2.2 billion.
Despite such a dazzling career, the business world has always been ambivalent toward Britain's best-known entrepreneur. He launches trendy companies the way Trump builds casinos. But a farsighted innovator like Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos or even Southwest Airlines' Herb Kelleher he is not. Branson traffics in opportunism. He spots a stodgy, old-line industry, rolls out the Virgin logo, sprinkles some camera-catching glitter, and poof - another moneymaker. While that formula has kept him in champagne and headlines, no Virgin business has ever changed the world.
Until now. Mojave Airport isn't just where aging jets wait to die; it's where the dusty dream of commercial space travel is finally coming alive. Last summer, a tiny winged wonder called SpaceShipOne spiked 62 miles into the desert sky on its way to nailing the $10 million X Prize for the first sustainable civilian suborbital flight. The world's stuffed-shirt airline chiefs took one look and went back to worrying about fuel prices. Branson took one look at the gleaming white carbon-fiber spaceship and said, Beam me up.
The upshot is Virgin Galactic, the world's first off-the-planet private airline. Under a deal still being negotiated with SpaceShipOne's owners - Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen and legendary Mojave airplane designer Burt Rutan - Virgin will pay up to $21.5 million for an exclusive license to SpaceShipOne's core design and technologies. Another $50 million will go to Rutan's company Scaled Composites to build five tricked-out passenger spaceships. An equal amount will be invested in operations, including a posh Virgin Earth Base somewhere in the California desert. Total outlay: $121.5 million. Business plan: 50 passengers a month, paying $200,000 each. Core product: a two-hour flight to an apex beyond Earth's atmosphere, wrapped in a three-day astronaut experience. Lift off: T-minus three years.
Of course, Virgin Galactic is a tiny bit riskier than the typical Branson venture. For starters, the first passenger-carrying Virgin spaceship - already dubbed VSS Enterprise - is still just a glow on Rutan's computer screen. No one knows how big the market for seats into space might be. And what happens to the business model when a ship full of amateur astronauts fails to make it back to Mojave in one piece?
But look at the upside. The total price tag is half the cost of a single Airbus A340-600 - and Virgin Atlantic ordered 26 of those last summer. In return, Branson gets bragging rights to one of the cooler breakthroughs of the early 21st century, with rocket-powered marketing opportunities that could fuel excitement - and sales - in his entire 200-company holding group.
For the happy-go-lucky tycoon, though, there's something else at stake: Virgin Galactic is his chance to climb off that 747's wing and into the history books with the first airline - make that the first brand - on the final frontier. "Affordable private space travel opens a new era in human history," he tells reporters at a mini press event for the reality show in LA. "We'll go into orbit; we'll go to the moon. This is a business that has no limits."
Virgin Galactic isn't just about seizing first-mover advantage in space - it's about opening space to a wave of other entrepreneurs who will follow if Branson succeeds. Commercial spaceships will lead the way for private investment in what has been a government-funded vacuum, bringing a new physics of market forces to outer space. If Branson and his Virginauts can attract even a quarter of the customers they believe are out there, they'll rally today's alt.space backwater of wild dreamers, cranky engineers, and rich geeks to launch an era of glittery, out-of-this-world-class new businesses. "If we can make space fun," Branson says, "the rest will follow."
So today Branson is a billionaire with a mission. Forget low-cost satellite launches and zero-gravity platforms for growing crystals. Here comes caviar, designer space suits, and charter membership in the 62-Mile-High Club. The right stuff for everyman - or, at least, anybody with four and a half times the median annual US salary to burn on a three-day weekend.
Hangar 78, part of Scaled Composites' jumble of buildings at the edge of Mojave Airport, is as clean and well lit as a hospital nursery. Some of Rutan's babies crowd the broad floor; others hang upside down from the ceiling. The muttonchopped proprietor is away on what is described variously as a confidential business trip and a post X Prize extended golf vacation. But Branson is dropping by anyway. He's due back in LA in 90 minutes - Entertainment Tonight wants the rebel billionaire - but the cameras will have to wait. He's not leaving Mojave without a quick peek at his newest love.

White Knight, the mother ship that carried SpaceShipOne its first 47,000 feet into the sky, reclines just inside the open hangar door. The smaller space vehicle rests next to it, a shiny white winged cocoon. It's the size of a minivan, but it looks like one of the toys that come with a Happy Meal.

The adventure capitalist lopes in, not quite like he owns the place but definitely like a VIP customer. He inspects the newly stenciled 16p-x2 on SpaceShipOne's fuselage (Rutan decoder ring: 16th flight, powered; second X Prize launch). Then he steps around back to admire the Virgin Galactic logo neatly painted on the tail. "To think that this little ship can head off into space," he muses. "Tell me something more awesome."
Most of the Mojave crowd got the space bug as kids launching backyard model rockets or, like Rutan, watching Wernher von Braun explain Mars missions on The Walt Disney Show. Not Branson. He became interested in extraplanetary travel watching Jane Fonda in Barbarella as a teenager. "I saw it again when I was 21. I'd just been circumcised for health reasons, and I popped my stitches."
At 21, Branson was just about to launch the business that would start him on his way to the Forbes list: Virgin Music, a hit factory noted for Mike Oldfield's stoned classic "Tubular Bells," the Sex Pistols, and Culture Club. By the 1980s, the Virgin Group - so named, Branson says, because "we started with no experience at business whatsoever" - had moved into films, books, food, pubs, and apparel. Then, over the transom from an American dealmaker, came an offer that dramatically raised the stakes: Would Virgin want to front an upstart transatlantic airline?
What became Virgin Atlantic soared, but so did the Virgin Group's debts. A cash crisis in 1992 forced Branson to unload the family silver, Virgin Music. The $1 billion proceeds allowed him to regroup - and then to fund new ventures. The ones that stuck were airlines in Europe and Australia, newly privatized British rail lines, and mobile phones - plus a kaleidoscope of companies that contribute more to brand equity than to the bottom line.
The move from entertainment to travel inspired Branson to take up the feats of derring-do that have become his personal trademark, Virgin-branded adventures that typically involve high speed or altitude. He followed up the airline's debut with a record-breaking Atlantic crossing aboard a Virgin mega motorboat. He made the first transatlantic hot-air balloon trip in Virgin Atlantic Flyer, then a 6,761-mile jaunt from Japan to a nasty crash in the Canadian Yukon. Branson's last challenge was a 1999 attempt to balloon around the globe nonstop. Heading east, he made it from Morocco to Hawaii. When a rival Swiss team succeeded soon after, Branson was at a loss for new records worth pursuing.
Since then, the nearest thing he's had to a grand adventure revolves around Virgin Atlantic Global Flyer, a giant white gull of a plane being readied in one of Rutan's hangars for the first solo nonstop flight around the world, scheduled for January. Slight problem: Branson isn't a pilot. Instead, his buddy Steve Fossett will go for the record, with Branson listed as his backup. "Steve's an extreme human," Branson says. "I'm quite sure he won't be sick."
But Global Flyer turned out to be the start of something a lot bigger. In 2003, a Virgin pilot visiting Mojave to check on the new plane's progress spotted Rutan's SpaceShipOne, then still under wraps. Bells went off when word reached headquarters in London; almost a decade before, Virgin had quietly registered with the British government to use the company name for a space tourism business. Branson asked Rutan who owned the ship, but Rutan kept mum; Paul Allen had sworn him to secrecy. When the project went public last spring - and with an X Prize attempt looming - Rutan swung into gear.
"Burt was worried stiff," Branson says. "He thought Paul might drop the project after they won. Paul doesn't run airlines; he's a technologist. Burt urged me to pick up the baton." Rutan remembers things differently. He says he "wasn't looking" for a new backer but adds: "I know of no one who is better qualified and better motivated to do this than Sir Richard."
Billionaire jostling ensued over where the two principals would meet: Branson's private island? Allen's 413-foot yacht? They finally sat down in London last May. Soon Rutan joined the talks, which culminated in the announcement of a preliminary agreement just two days before SpaceShipOne's first X Prize flight in September. Branson opened his London news conference with a huge grin: "Well, we're going to space."
Branson likes to boast that Virgin is "the best place in the world to work and have fun doing it." Exhibit A: Alex Tai, Virgin Atlantic Airbus captain, Virgin Galactic chief pilot designate, and the space venture's acting program director. A 36-year-old former RAF flier, Tai did a stint shuttling wealthy Middle Easterners before he joined Virgin as a pilot in 1995. On one flight, Branson popped his head into the cockpit, looking for advice on possible balloon launching sites in North Africa. Tai suggested an airstrip he knew in Morocco. Branson liked the idea, and Tai's reward was to fly the chase plane, a sideline that became one of his regular duties for Branson's ballooning exploits.
Today Tai is piloting a rented yellow Mustang convertible from Mojave to LA after a round of meetings with Rutan's design team. He does the run from the desert to Los Angeles International Airport on autopilot; he has spent the past six months bouncing among Rutan's shop, LAX, Allen's offices in Seattle, and Virgin's London headquarters. Tai is not quite Virgin Galactic's CEO - send r�sum�s to Virgin Management Ltd., London - but he's flying point on the only really critical mission right now, working with Scaled Composites to transform its X Prize-winning prototype into a luxury spaceship capable of carrying a stream of high-net-worth individuals safely into space and back.

Some of the issues Tai is working out are basic, starting with how many paying astronauts Virgin's ships will carry. Rutan's team puts the range between five and eight. The trick is to balance revenue per flight against passenger experience: Will people pay a fortune to view the stars in a packed minibus? But there's no question about one thing: Everyone gets a window seat There's also the weighty question of what the passengers will wear. "People who are going to be astronauts want space suits," Branson says. But Rutan, the less-is-more engineer, is holding out for SpaceShipOne's "shirtsleeve" environment. Thick suits, he says, would take the fun out of going weightless. "The flight is too brief to be encumbered by those awful things. Better to put the entire cabin in one big space suit, with double windows, walls, and door seals."
Tai has the calm-voiced captain's job of charting a course between these two forces of nature. "We're looking at all the possible configurations," he says diplomatically. "We have to keep our eye on the ball: passenger experience."
One experience no one needs is fiery death. "Everyone involved knows that one incident can put the whole business in deep trouble," Tai says. "Burt has designed and built nearly 300 planes during his career, and he has never lost one due to aircraft failure. SpaceShipOne was conceived as a passenger ship from day one. Safety isn't an add-on."
Take the X Prize winner's hybrid engine. Traditional rocket motors use volatile liquid or solid propellants that can explode at the slightest spark. Rutan's design combines both approaches, resulting in an engine that's more stable and easier to control. The liquid component is compressed nitrous oxide - laughing gas. The solid is basically tire rubber, guaranteed not to blow up no matter how hard you whack it. "Burt has golf balls made out of the stuff," Tai says. "This is the safest rocket engine in the world."
SpaceShipOne's "shuttlecock" design adds an extra measure of safety. When the craft reaches its airless apogee, it hinges (feathers, in pilotspeak) into a broad V shape that automatically brakes the descent. "It lets you take an averagely competent pilot - like me - and throw anything you can think of at him, and still have everyone aboard get away safely," Tai explains. "The space shuttle does that with all sorts of fantastically complex systems. Burt's brilliance is that his ship uses smart design and the laws of physics. Which are, in fact, the only ways you can be truly drop-dead safe."
Tai pulls the Mustang off Wilshire Boulevard for a 40-minute flyby with Buzz Aldrin, the guy who was there to snap the photo when Neil Armstrong took his first steps on the moon. Aldrin is part of a kitchen cabinet Branson is assembling to tap the broader aerospace community. The Apollo veteran works in a gleaming seventh-floor home office packed with enough lunar memorabilia to fill a small museum, including a Buzz Aldrin GI Joe. Like a lot of the first-generation space crowd, he's slightly amazed at the excitement over suborbital flights. It's easy to see where his heart is. "Burt's feathering mechanism doesn't get us back from orbit," he points out. "It either has to evolve, or we need other options."
Tai's final stop is the air-crew hotel near LAX, where he'll nap for a few hours. Then he'll climb into an Airbus cockpit and pilot a couple of hundred Virgin Atlantic passengers on the red eye to London. "Flying the plane saves buying me a seat," he says, as if it's the most obvious thing in the world.
Will Whitehorn is barking orders into a cell phone. Standing in the lobby of a sleek London hotel, he wears a black leather jacket and carries a flame-red helmet. What he calls "my office scooter," a hulking 650-cc Honda Deauville, is parked outside. At 44, the former North Sea oil-rig helicopter crewman is Virgin's group director of brand development, which usually translates as Branson's right hand. Whitehorn swears that's an exaggeration. "Richard has a lot of right hands," he says. "Left ones, too."
Branson himself has a different take. "Behind my back, our directors call me Dr. Yes," Branson says. "Their name for him is Will Lightyear."
It was Whitehorn who registered the idea of a Virgin space-travel company back in 1995. Four years later, amid talks with a now-defunct Mojave outfit called Rotary Rockets, he and Branson took the next step, trademarking the name Virgin Galactic. They also toyed with sponsoring the X Prize but realized they could avoid risk and save money by waiting in the wings until a winner emerged. "The X Prize was going to either produce an answer to suborbital flight or prove it couldn't be done," Whitehorn says. "Paul Allen de-risked what might have been a very hairy project."
Among Whitehorn's other contributions is a neat bit of business jargon, "branded venture capital." The phrase describes what Virgin does: fund and launch companies that can benefit from the group's accumulated experience and shrewd application of the Virgin logo. From an 80-person West London headquarters only a short stroll from Branson's town house, Virgin Management controls nearly 200 companies organized in a dozen major groups, with a total of 50,000 employees. Branson and a small group of other shareholders fund new businesses from a $600 million war chest fed by profits, sales of mature assets, and IPOs. Three Virgin companies are on stock exchanges in the UK, Belgium, and Australia, a number Whitehorn says could triple over the next several years, starting with Virgin Mobile's US offshoot in fall 2005. "We're like a little investment bank with a marketing department," he explains.
Virgin Galactic has the potential to be more than just the latest addition to the portfolio. "We've been looking for a flagship company for the 21st century," Whitehorn says, "especially for the US." The trans-Atlantic reference is no minor detail. Virgin Mobile found a sweet spot selling pay-as-you-go cell phones to young Americans who don't want long-term contracts. Still, overall, the US accounts for only 10 percent of Virgin Group's global revenue. So next in line is a low-cost, high-frills airline, Virgin America (Whitehorn calls it "JetBlue with business class"). Even much-maligned Virgin Cola will be getting a new US push.

Galactic will put the Virgin brand on the American map in a way money can't buy," Whitehorn says. "It will cost us $100 million to take people to space. Vodafone is spending $100 million putting decals on Formula One racing cars. Every time someone mentions space travel, they'll mention Virgin."

Of course, Vodafone's racers don't have to reckon with the FAA. Virgin Galactic opens up a Pandora's box of questions about how to regulate commercial spaceflight. A bill in Washington that would authorize suborbital flights on an "experimental" basis and establish liability guidelines passed the House by 402 to 1 last spring. (The sole opponent was Texas libertarian Ron Paul, who opposes regulating space travel and pretty much everything else.) A similar bill bogged down in the Senate over precisely what constitutes a spacecraft and whether the experimental era should have a time limit.
"We're not too worried," Whitehorn says. "Who's going to want to come out and say, 'Branson can't be allowed to take people into space'?"
If no one is stopping him, certainly others would like to get there, too. The Russians are already selling seats on Soyuz rockets. What about Disney? "Walt would have done this in a heartbeat," Whitehorn says. "I don't think the current bunch are up to it." The big airlines? "You're joking! British Air couldn't keep Concorde going." Whitehorn is more respectful toward the rest of the embryonic commercial space crowd - Rutan's Mojave neighbor XCOR, John Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace, Jeff Bezos' supersecret Blue Origins. "We wish them nothing but the best," he says. "Does anyone seriously think space will be a monopoly?"
But Virgin Galactic's first job is just to make space a profitable business. "Everybody's saying, 'Go straight to orbit,' or 'Build space hotels,'" Whitehorn observes. "We're saying, you can sit around talking about that that for 30 years. You already have. What we really have to do is prove that it works with the public."
Whitehorn wouldn't be a Branson hand if he didn't add a note of swagger. "We need 3,000 people over five years," he says. "We've already registered four times that number on our Web site. People are throwing checks at us."
Oscar Wilde once remarked, "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." Branson is no bard, but it's hard to avoid the sense that he's going into this project at least a little, well, starry-eyed.
The huge advantage of being Richard Branson is that you can strap engines to your dreams. "My father will be 90 when he goes into space with us three years from now," he says, taking a break in the lobby of a West Hollywood hotel. "What a way to end your life! And I'm sure we'll get to orbit. Imagine sitting up there in a bubble window, watching Argentina drift between your legs."
Why stop there? "I hope we'll get to the moon in my lifetime. The first baby born there - what country will it be a citizen of? Maybe we can put a Virgin bank in space, or maybe a Virgin tax haven. We could pay for all our people to go up there just by depositing their money." Now, that's adventure capitalism!
The simple fact is that going into space gives Branson a chance to do what a lot of massively successful guys wish they could do: grab the wheel of history and tug. Opening the final frontier to private citizens will ensure Branson's place in the human saga. And if that means fleets of Virgin spaceships soaring through the inky void, serving sip-packs of Virgin Cola on the way to the latest Virgin Clubhouse, so be it. "Space is virgin territory," Branson says, trying out a prospective marketing line and shooting another grin. "Is that 21st-century enough for you?"

When I was 3 years old, my father sat me down in front of the family TV during the first moon launch and said, "Never forget this." I didn't, and since then I've been stewing for my turn. With Virgin Galactic's liftoff just three years away, I decided to start my training with a trip to Space Camp.
The Advanced Space Academy, an adjunct of the NASA installation in Huntsville, Alabama, is a legendary rite of passage for geeky kids - and, increasingly, their parents. For just under $1,000, Space Camp delivers a five-day program that promises to make an astronaut out of even the lamest desk jockey. So here I am, Elton John's "Rocket Man" playing in my head as my plane lands in Huntsville. If I've got the right stuff, I'll know soon enough.
DAY ONE
Did I get off the bus at Sesame Street? The academy's literature refers to "trainees," but counselors Phil Willingham and Lenny Bhullar keep calling me and my 11 teammates "campers." At the orientation meeting, Willingham hands out dorky-looking flight suits covered with fake mission patches and pockets in all the wrong places. "You're required to wear these during your missions," he says in an Alabama accent, clearly quoting a script he reads to hundreds of children every summer.
After a bland cafeteria meal, the counselors herd everyone into a room containing a multiaxis trainer - a chair suspended within an assembly made up of concentric rings, one for each axis of rotation. Willingham turns the thing on to demonstrate the chaotic tumbling of the chair, where each of us is fated to spend a few agonizing minutes. This is a gut check, preparing would-be astronauts for the rigors ahead. "But we've just eaten dinner," someone complains. Willingham smiles. "Your stomach is your center of mass," he says. "It doesn't really move."
When my turn comes, I strap in, grit my teeth, and keep my eyes open as the room starts to jerk and tumble around me. As the machine ramps up to full speed, I'm relieved to find Willingham is right: It's not nearly as sickening as it looks.
DAY TWO
I'm orbiting Earth at last. Rather than outer space, though, I'm in a fake space shuttle on an elaborate simulation floor. The area holds four realistic shuttle replicas and half a dozen space station modules, beneath a jet-black sky dominated by a photo of planet Earth the size of a three-story house.
I'm learning how to repair a satellite that hangs over the shuttle on a chain. I slip on a white space suit, connect myself to a safety line, and climb out onto the shuttle's robot arm - actually a cherry picker from a telephone truck. Pressing buttons to guide the arm, I swing up to the satellite. Following the service checklist, I replace two defective antennas and make my way back to the crew compartment.
DAY THREE
It's time for the centrifuge - a rotating shaft with a swiveling arm that ends in a two-seat cockpit. Once it spins up to 3.2 g, I'm supposed to reach up and press buttons. It's not easy. I can't lift my legs, and my arms feel like they've got 6-year-olds hanging from them. There's a weight on my chest, too, making it difficult to breathe. But I feel the most pressure on my throat, which seems like it's being squeezed.
Later, it hits me: If I can work this button under heavier-than-shuttle g-forces, then I can pilot the real thing. Me.
DAY FOUR
Today we fly four 60-minute shuttle missions. We manage the first two without incident. But on the third flight, Bhullar, who runs the simulation from a workstation tucked away in a separate room, makes things go haywire. Red caution and warning lights suddenly show up on our screens. By the middle of the fourth mission, it's all we can do to keep the right program running in the flight computer.
A few days ago we were reading canned lines and flipping switches according to a script, but today we're learning - under fire - how to turn on backup systems, run diagnostic tests, clear a garbled memory. The elaborate protocols for dealing with problems make the point clearly enough: The shuttle is not an easy bird to fly.
DAY FIVE
I'm up an hour early, feeling amped and a little bit nervous. Today is the final test: a six-hour Extended Duration Mission. What a disappointment, then, to be stuck on the ground this time, at Mission Control.
Willingham and Bhullar start throwing wrenches in the gears before we've even launched. Not only are there unfamiliar switches to flip, arcane systems to activate, and heretofore unknown manuals to page through, but the counselors silently pass out mysterious handwritten notes. When Bhullar holds one in my face - "You have food poisoning" - my stomach sinks for real.
From my perch in the control room, I can see every part of the shuttle through a video monitor above my console. I spy Willingham creeping around up there, playing Mr. Zero G: Any unstowed gear on the orbiter quickly "floats away" in his hands. The funny part is, I watch a drifting headset and barely notice the counselor smirking behind it.
But another surprising development has crept in here; I've begun to develop a sense that, like the flight deck and cargo bay, Mission Control is just one more compartment aboard the ship. In fact, it's the bridge. It dawns on me that the shuttle's commander is really just another crew member; the actual captain of the voyage is … me!
The difficulties escalate in frog-boiling fashion, bit by bit, so I don't notice how hot the water is getting. Suddenly we're fighting back three serious anomalies at the same time - and winning. Through deorbit, reentry, and landing, we bring the ship down in one piece. Then it's high fives all around. We did it.
Sappy though it sounds, you really do get wistful when it's time to leave a place like this. Somewhere inside we're all graduates of Hogwarts or Star Fleet Academy, but this place, despite its cheese factor, is more real than either of those. I'm going to miss the challenges, teamwork, and rusting Saturn Vs on the lawn. If I ever do get to outer space, I'll look down at Huntsville and wave.

Sir Richard Branson arise !

Richard Branson is CEO of Britain's Virgin Group, which includes Virgin Airlines and Virgin Records. On July 14, 1997, in a Reuters News Service article about a proposed ban of tobacco sponsorship of sporting events, Branson said, "Don't misunderstand me -- I'm a libertarian. If adults want to smoke and buy cigarettes, they also have the right, provided they don't cause harm to others."

Richard Branson writes to Quantas chairman in australia

Flamboyant Sir Richard Branson founded Virgin Atlantic Airways in 1984. In 2000, he started a new airline in Australia - Virgin Blue.
At the time of Virgin Blue's conception, there was a fair measure of skepticism within Australia as to whether it would be possible for what would have become a third Australian airline to survive. Several earlier attempts by other would be competitors to the two established airlines (Qantas and Ansett) had all ended in ignominious failure. Of course, Qantas did all it could to discourage and disparage its new competitor.
Nonetheless, Virgin Blue proceeded, and then, more or less fortuitously perhaps, Ansett (owned by Air New Zealand) went bankrupt, and Virgin Blue suddenly found a market that was reasonably full of air service change to a market where 40% of all flights had suddenly ceased. Partly because of that, and partly because it is a good airline anyway, Virgin Blue now appears to be flourishing.
Flash forward to 2003. Virgin Atlantic have often stated their desire to be able to operate flights to Australia, and their interest has again surfaced to the point where they're aggressively planning to start such flights (if they can get permission from the Australian government!).
Qantas has again been understandably disparaging about this - for sure, Qantas would very much prefer not to see another major competitor on its 'Kangaroo Route' (ie London-Sydney).
And so, with this as background, please enjoy the following open letter from Sir Richard to Geoff Dixon, CEO of Qantas.
Update : The first Virgin flight to Australia was in December, 2004. Geoff Dixon would have lost the bet.
Sir Richard Branson
24 July 2003
OPEN LETTER TO GEOFF DIXON FROM RICHARD BRANSON
Dear Geoff,
I was amused to read Qantas’s completely dismissive comments about Virgin Atlantic’s chances of getting permission to fly to Australia. It would be prudent for you to remind yourself of your and James Strong’s equally dismissive comments about Virgin Blue’s chances of entering the Australian market only three years ago.
Here goes! This is the gist of what you said:
“Virgin Blue is a lot of media hype.”
“This market is not big enough to sustain Virgin Blue.”
“Virgin Blue doesn’t have deep enough pockets to cope.”
“Qantas will employ any option to see off this interloper.”
“They’ll be unlikely to survive a year.”
“Claims by Richard Branson that domestic fares are high are a misnomer!” (my exclamation mark)
Here is what James Strong, your former C.E.O, said about Virgin Blue and myself:
“If you listen to most of the pretenders there is a distinct air that they are making it up as they go along. In terms of real plans and real commitment you could fire a shot gun up the main street and not hit anybody.”
Yet three years later you are telling your staff that this same airline, “that was making it up as it went along” and that now has 30% of the market could, “Drive Qantas out of business!” We also find it flattering, if a little silly, that three years on you now have spies hiding behind pot plants in the Virgin terminal trying to work out why we are so successful.
Even if some of your comments don’t suggest it, your actions indicate you are taking us seriously. But let’s not take ourselves too seriously. I would like to propose a friendly challenge!
If Virgin Atlantic fails to fly to Australia (within 18 months, say) I’d be prepared to suffer the indignity of donning one of your stewardesses brand new designer outfits and will work your flight from London to Australia serving your customers throughout.
However, if Virgin Atlantic does fly to Australia you would do so instead. On our inaugural flight from London to Australia you would wear one of our beautiful red Virgin Stewardesses uniforms and serve our inaugural guests all the way to Australia. Oh and in case you were wondering, we’re not hung up on flying through Hong Kong. You might end up doing your days work experience through Singapore, Thailand or Malaysia instead.
This is the challenge. If you believe in what Qantas said to the press there can’t be any risk for you. We expect your response within one week. Our inaugural flights are great fun and I look forward to welcoming you on board personally. Oh and by the way my preferred drink is ………..!
Kind regards,
Richard

Richard Branson to start charity run in London

Rumour Branson to start British 10K London charity run in London near his home in 2007.

Richard Branson -the genius does it again

Where others see disaster, Richard Branson sees opportunity. The founder of Virgin Group has business interests on six continents, including airlines, express trains, and limousine services, so his company's conBut instead of wringing his hands, Branson sees a new fortune to be made in reinventing the fuel business, much the way he's made over air travel, credit cards, health care, and more.
He's investing in conventional ideas like ethanol plants and solar power, but he's also developing a formula for a new ultraclean fuel that can power his jets as well as cars and trucks.
What we love about Branson is that he's part Warren Buffett, part P.T. Barnum. Not every idea he's dreamed up has panned out: Virgin Cola bombed in the United States, and the irresistibly named Virgin Brides retail chain is down to one lonely store in Manchester, England.
Still, Branson remains an unflappable inventor and promoter. On a brief landing in the States between launching a cell-phone carrier in South Africa and promoting a rock concert in Toronto, he sat down with Business 2.0 to explain how he keeps coming up with new ideas.
What's the next big thing?
I used to be skeptical of global warming, but now I'm absolutely convinced that the world is spiraling out of control. CO2 is like a bushfire that gets bigger and bigger every year.
All of us who are in a position to do something about it must do something about it. Because Virgin is involved with planes and trains, we have even more responsibility. So we've put aside quite a lot of money to invest in alternative fuels. Over the next four years, we'll invest something like $1 billion in alternative fuels.
The money is going into a whole series of different things like building ethanol plants. We're looking into wind power. We're looking into solar. And we're also actually working on developing a new kind of fuel, which I can't say much about but which is quite exciting.
So we'll be pumping Virgin Fuel?
It will be called Virgin Fuel, yes! It's not ethanol-based as such, but it'll be a clean fuel. And if we've got it right, it could be a very important breakthrough. We think this fuel will work in cars and trucks and trains within a year. And we're hoping that it might work in commercial jet engines within five years, possibly sooner. So it will be able to work in Virgin Atlantic planes one day.
But it's not just that we thought we should do this to try to save the world and the thousands of species that could die if we don't do it. Unless you can generate cash, it's not going to be successful. With oil prices above $70 a barrel, people want to save on the cost of fuel, and so alternative fuels suddenly make business sense.
Some of your latest ventures, like an Indian comics and animation studio and the Virgin Galactic spaceship line, seem far afield of what you've done in the past. How do you decide what to invest in next?
I honestly invest in things that interest me or in things that I want. The reason I moved into the airline business was that I flew a lot of other airlines and I hated the experience. I felt we could create an airline that people wanted to fly, and that turned into Virgin Atlantic Airways.
But we made it with a difference: We straightaway started with sleeper seats. We put stand-up bars in the plane. We introduced, years before anyone else, seat-back videos for economy and business class, and we had manicurists and masseuses on the planes.
Manicurists. Where'd you get that idea?
That I got from my wife's manicurist. People come to me or e-mail me every day with great ideas. I get hundreds of them - you can send me one on www.virgin.com. I listen a lot, and eventually something sticks.
And why space travel now?
NASA has always looked at it as a government-run research program - never thinking of it as human beings, individuals wanting to go into space. We think there are millions of people who'd love to go into space, and why shouldn't they have that experience?
Ten years ago I thought, "Right, how can Virgin be the first company to send people into space commercially?" Then we went out talking to every single person in the field, so that we'd learn the ins and outs of space travel. By the time Burt Rutan had his breakthrough, we were there. We were the first on the scene.
Likewise with clean fuels; it was exactly the same. We went out and we registered Virgin Fuels, we went out and talked to every scientist developing clean fuels. And when there were breakthroughs, we were the first on the scene. So we immerse ourselves in things we are interested in and make sure that nobody gets there before us.
Having an idea is one thing. Having a successful business is another. With more than 200 startups under your belt, what advice would you give entrepreneurs on making an idea stick?
I made and learned from lots of mistakes. In the end, the key is willpower. It's just really hard work to make sure you can keep paying the bills. But I do think one can have too much respect for bank managers.
When we entered the airline business, the very first plane Boeing (Charts) sent over to us ran into a bunch of birds and lost an engine. Because it hadn't been delivered yet, the insurance didn't cover that, so we were $1.5 million down before we flew our first flight, which took the whole Virgin Group beyond its overdraft facility.
Two days later, as I returned from the inaugural flight, our bank manager was sitting on my doorstep and telling me that he's going to foreclose on the whole business if we don't get the money in by Monday - and that was a Friday.
So I had to scurry around like mad over the weekend to try to get enough money to cover what I owed, which I just managed to do. For most people, bank managers are a bit like doctors - they never leave them because they have too much respect for them.
By daring to be disrespectful, we went from having a $5 million overdraft facility to having a $40 million overdraft facility with a different bank by the end of that week. Where one bank was willing to ruin us based on the assets we had, another bank was willing to give us more credit.
There is a very, very thin dividing line between survival and failure. You've just got to fight and fight and fight and fight to survive.
What was the first business idea you came up with?
I set up this magazine called Student when I was 16, and I didn't do it to make money - I did it because I wanted to edit a magazine. There wasn't a national magazine run by students, for students. I didn't like the way I was being taught at school. I didn't like what was going on in the world, and I wanted to put it right.
Of course, a lot of businesses want to reach students, so I funded the magazine by selling advertising. I sold something like $8,000 worth of advertising for the first edition, and that was in 1966. I printed up 50,000 copies, and I didn't even have to charge for them on the newsstand because my costs were already covered.
So I became a publisher by mistake - well, not quite by mistake, because I wanted to be an editor but I had to make sure the magazine would survive. The point is this: Most businesses fail, so if you're going to succeed, it has to be about more than making money.
Are you saying entrepreneurs should go into business without the bottom line in mind?
Ideally, since 80 percent of your life is spent working, you should start your business around something that is a passion of yours. If you're into kite-surfing and you want to become an entrepreneur, do it with kite-surfing.
Look, if you can indulge in your passion, life will be far more interesting than if you're just working. You'll work harder at it, and you'll know more about it. But first you must go out and educate yourself on whatever it is that you've decided to do - know more about kite-surfing than anyone else. That's where the work comes in. But if you're doing things you're passionate about, that will come naturally.
______________________________tribution to global warming worries him.

Richard Branson-the marvellous virgin

Virgin staff set leap record
Sir Richard Branson and more than 1,000 of his Virgin staff have demonstrated their backing of London's 2012 bid - by setting the world leapfrog record.
The Virgin boss was among the 1,109 people who leapfrogged simultaneously at a giant staff party in fields behind the billionaire's home in Kidlington, Oxfordshire.
London 2012 Chief Executive Keith Mills and champion swimmer Sharron Davies were also on hand to start the 'Leap for London' record attempt.
Afterwards, Sir Richard said: "It's wonderful to celebrate Virgin's success with 40,000 of our people at a party at my home - and it's great that so many of them gave up some time to Leap for London's Olympic bid.
"Everybody had a lot of fun - even if one or two will be spending time with their chiropractors and back specialists next week."
Mr Mills added: "This afternoon demonstrated the spirit of teamwork needed to win the bid.
"Bringing the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games to Britain will be a giant leap for the UK economy, UK sport and UK health and I would urge everyone to show the same spirit by taking a virtual Leap for London, visiting our website and doing their bit to 'Back the Bid'."
Everyone who made the Leap for London signed their name to show their participation.
Adjudicators from the Guinness Book of Records are now looking at the paperwork, plus video footage of the event, and are expected to formally verify the record this week.
"We're confident we did it," said one Virgin worker. "The goal was 1,000 and we smashed that."