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Issue 4
The Forward Thinker's Newsletter - Richard Branson
Time waits for no one, and neither does one-man business entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson. The 58-year-old grew up in London and started his first business at the age of 16 with the magazine Student.
Since then, Branson has become best known for his hand in the creation of Virgin Group Ltd., which lends its name to over 360 companies worldwide.
One of the most widely recognizable of Branson’s ventures is Virgin Records, currently home to over 40 bands and solo acts. What started off as a small rock record shop in London called Virgin Records and Tapes became a primarily progressive music label in 1966 and got punk-rock face lift when it signed the Sex Pistols in 1977. Today it represents artists like The Rolling Stones, N.E.R.D., Gorillaz, Iggy Pop, and We Are Scientists.
Branson was knighted in 1999 and went on to establish Virgin Mobile in 2002, a cell phone company in cooperation with Sprint Nextel. This gave way to the creation of the Virgin Mobile Festival, a two-day music event that started in 2006.
Over his entire career, Branson has dabbled in everything from airlines and railways to comic books and his own brand of vodka. Virgin even has its own line of hot air balloons, radio stations, and a health bank where parents from the UK can store their babies’ umbilical cords to make later use of the stem cells.
In recent years, the Jack-of-all-trades has turned his attention to the environment and humanitarian efforts. He launched the Virgin Earth Challenge is 2007, a contest offering $25 million to anyone who could devise a plan to continually reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere for at least 10 years. Entrants have five years from the time the competition began to complete their plans and present them to a panel of judges that includes Al Gore and Branson himself.
When added up, all of his projects add up to a net worth of about $4.4 billion. Not bad for someone who began working as a 16-year-old high school dropout.
- Nadia Tamez
