Richard Branson spills on Elon Musk and $6B Virgin empire revival
Richard Branson opens up on his rivalry with Elon Musk, life at 72, and bringing his $6 billion Virgin empire back from the brink.
On a snowy day in early 2008 Richard Branson was skiing with his family in Verbier, Switzerland, when Elon Musk unexpectedly turned up at his chalet driving a sports car. “Elon had just built his first car and shipped it over and drove up to show it to us,” Branson says. “We went for a drive in it and it was extraordinarily comfortable and nice. I have a feeling he might have been hinting we could invest in his company, which was then quite little. But equally he may have just been bringing it to show it off. He was quite rightly proud of it.”
Branson had got to know Musk a few weeks earlier at the wedding of Larry Page, the billionaire co-founder of Google and a mutual friend. The ceremony was held on Necker Island, Branson’s Caribbean home. As part of the celebrations, Larry and Lucy, the newlyweds, had kitesurfed around the island wearing matching white outfits on boards emblazoned with “L loves L”. At one point a huge tiger shark fin appeared in the water next to them. It turned out to be a fake constructed by Branson to entertain the party guests.
Musk avoided the giddiness and there was something in his thoughtfulness and hesitant delivery that reminded Branson of a younger version of himself. At the time Musk was virtually unknown outside Silicon Valley but he was serious about the same things as Branson, one of which was building electric cars that could help reduce global warming. The Tesla Roadster he brought to Verbier consisted of the shell of a British-built Lotus into which Musk had shoehorned a battery and electric motor. The fact that it was emissions-free impressed Branson but the little two-seater wasn’t about to change the world. Or so he thought. In the end, he didn’t invest (not one of his finest business decisions, he confesses - he could have got back 200 times what he paid), but the two men remained in close touch.
“Elon is tremendously smart and even more driven,” Branson says. “I admire his talent and his willingness to take calculated risks. He has been inches from failure on many, many occasions and kept pushing. He’s the Henry Ford of his generation.”
In July 2021 Musk, Branson’s friend and rival, was to pay another surprise visit, this time to wish him well on the day VSS (Virgin Space Ship) Unity was set to blast into the record books when it took the first passengers into space, soaring above the NASA-recognised altitude of 50 miles (80km). Branson had woken in the night at his hacienda near the New Mexico spaceport to find Musk padding around barefoot in his kitchen downstairs. With him, fast asleep, was baby X Æ A-12 (pronounced X Ash A Twelve). A member of Branson’s family had let them in.
“I think it was about 2.30am,” Branson recalls. “I woke up two hours earlier than I was meant to and jumped out of bed, and then actually realised I’d got the wrong time but by then I was wide awake,” he says. “I went to the kitchen for a cup of coffee to start the day and Elon had decided to surprise us. He was there with his baby. Basically, he’s a night animal. He doesn’t really sleep at night and gets his sleep in the daytime. We made a pot of tea and sat outside under the stars and caught up.”
“Every week a new crisis threatened us with ruin”
Later that day Musk was at the spaceport to witness Branson complete his 90-minute mission. As he floated above the Earth – weightless for five minutes, his voice hoarse with emotion – Branson described how it felt to fulfil the ambition of a lifetime. “To all you kids down here, I was once a child with a dream, looking up to the stars.”
The historic Virgin Galactic flight pipped the other space billionaire Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin rocket by nine days and brought to seven the number of records Branson has broken in the past four decades. He was the first person (with Per Lindstrand) to cross the Atlantic in a hot-air balloon, the first to cross the Pacific by balloon and the fastest to cross the English Channel in an amphibious car.
Before he retires he may claim one more record – for the oldest person to travel to space, currently held by William Shatner, aka Captain Kirk, at 90. “I’ve booked Virgin Galactic for my 80th, 90th and 100th birthdays,” Branson says. “Most likely I’ll book for my 110th birthday as well because I’m forever an optimist. I hope that on at least one of those trips the children and grandchildren come.”
Branson acknowledges he’ll need to stay space-fit for another two decades to boldly go one better than Kirk.
When we meet in New York, Branson is casually dressed in an open shirt and no tie, his mane of grey hair looking windswept as if he’s just kitesurfed here from Necker Island. Thanks to a rigorous regime of cycling, gym workouts and Pilates, the 72-year-old does look lean and trim but he has scaled back his risk-taking, he says. No more ditching hot-air balloons mid-sea, or being rescued from sinking speedboats in choppy waters as happened in 1985 during an attempt to break the transatlantic speed record (he succeeded the following year).
In a new edition of his autobiography he lists the number of close calls he’s had. There are 79. In 1986, while skydiving, he pulled the wrong ripcord and jettisoned his main parachute; in the nick of time an instructor yanked the cord for his reserve chute and saved his life. In 2004 he bungee jumped off Victoria Falls and gashed his head open, narrowly escaping serious injury.
With the exception of the space flights, Branson wants to keep his feet firmly on the ground as much as possible for his remaining years so he can spend time with Joan, 74, his wife of 33 years, and his five grandchildren by his daughter, Holly, and son, Sam. He fills notebooks with daily records of “ideas, thoughts, requests and reminders”. Is he concerned about getting forgetful? “Bloody hell,” he says, laughing. “I can’t remember. Fortunately I’m still pretty sharp, but I’ve got a lot that goes on in the brain and sometimes I think it is just full up.”
Among the things occupying him is fulfilling his promise to customers who’ve booked rides on his rockets – including, reportedly, Leonardo DiCaprio, Angelina Jolie and Justin Bieber. “We have 900 people to get to space who’ve signed up,” he says. Tickets on Virgin Galactic currently cost $450,000 but Branson thinks fares could eventually drop to $30,000 or less. The next commercial flight is planned for this summer. To keep pace with demand, he is building a third spaceship to add to the two already completed. But with room in each for a maximum of only six passengers it’s going to take a while before all the would-be astronauts get a turn. Musk has pride of place – he put down a $10,000 deposit more than a decade ago. His astronaut training may be postponed while he attends to other things, Branson concedes, in reference to his friend’s troubled takeover of Twitter. “I would be delighted to see him aboard but he’s obviously got his hands full at the moment.”
Virgin Galactic was Branson’s biggest gamble. It took 17 years, plus the hard work of nearly 1,000 engineers, technicians and pilots and $1 billion to achieve his first mission. It wasn’t without setbacks. An accident killed three people on the ground in 2007 and one pilot died and another was seriously injured when the VSS Enterprise broke up in mid-air during a test flight in 2014. Afterwards a shocked Branson declared: “In testing the boundaries of human capabilities and technologies, we are standing on the shoulders of giants. Yesterday we fell short.” An official inquiry blamed human error and failures at the company hired to operate the spaceship and train the pilots.
As a child, Branson’s family were constantly setting him challenges to soak up his restless energy. Interviewed for a new HBO documentary, Vanessa, his sister, says Branson had what would now be recognised as “full ADHD”. Is it true?
Are there mate’s rates in space? “We haven’t done any discounts for space, not even for Elon,” he replies.
If you’re curious to know why the man who owns SpaceX – the world’s most successful commercial launch company – wants to fly on Branson’s spaceline, it’s because SpaceX is all about sending astronauts into orbital space and beyond. Virgin Galactic is designed to take civilians to the edge of the upper atmosphere – sub-orbital space – and return to Earth. “There’s a big difference that the public doesn’t quite appreciate between orbital and sub-orbital space flight,” Musk explained when I interviewed him in 2011, just after he’d booked his flight with Branson. “To do an orbital space flight you need to have a terminal velocity of 25 times the speed of sound – Mach 25. Whereas sub-orbital you can get away with a terminal velocity of Mach 3.
“What Branson’s doing is cool,” he added enthusiastically. “It’s great and I’ve actually bought a ticket. I’ve been asking for a [departure] date. I’m not sure when exactly but I intend to fly on this thing.”
“I asked my wife whether I had ADHD as well as dyslexia and she said only when listening to her. Then she paused and went, you know, but Richard, you do have some kind of syndrome that hasn’t been invented yet.”
Is he able to wind down and relax at the end of the day or is he a night owl like Musk?
“I take some melatonin to help and I sometimes take a sleeping pill just to make sure. I need a good night’s sleep. If something’s gone wrong I generally don’t let it get me down, not for too long anyway. The nearest I got to being depressed was during the early weeks of Covid, when things looked really, really bleak.”
Two years ago Branson was contemplating the near collapse of his £3.6 billion [$6.3 billion] empire. Government-enforced lockdowns had compelled him to ground his planes, close his hotels and gyms and mothball Scarlet Lady, his new £500 million cruise ship, as the virus turned luxury liners into plague ships. In a triumph of bad timing, the 2,800-berth vessel came into service in April 2020, just as the pandemic hit. “Covid was absolutely the most disastrous thing to happen to Virgin,” Branson says, shaking his head. “We fought tooth and nail to keep it together. We’d taken the precaution of diversifying into lots of different sectors, but everything we had diversified into got clobbered by Covid – aviation, leisure, hotels, gyms, banking and cruises. Every week there was a new crisis threatening us with ruin.”
Ironically, it was his riskiest venture that eventually came to the rescue of the rest of the Virgin Group. “I had to sell 85 per cent of the shares in Virgin Galactic in order to keep Virgin Atlantic alive. Had it not been for that, the airline would not be here today.”
Branson recounts this story sitting on a sofa in the carcass of a building surrounded by brick dust, timber and plasterboard. No, not another stranded project but a 460-room, 38-storey skyscraper with views over Lower Manhattan and across to the Empire State Building. The tower is being stripped out and turned into a new Virgin Hotel.
There has been a post-pandemic surge in demand for hotel beds in the city that never sleeps, he explains, and the builders are racing to finish. It’s a sign of a return, in the US at least, of the feelgood factor – that nebulous thing that has been the lifeblood of Branson’s businesses since his days as a young music mogul when he started selling cut-price records and signing bands such as the Rolling Stones, Culture Club and the Sex Pistols. Some of his start-ups were spectacular failures – Virgin Cola, Virgin Brides, Virgin Cars – but with a nose for the next thing and a willingness to cash in his chips and move on, he’s still here, a battle-scarred but intact septuagenarian.
When his new hotel is complete it will join a chain of terrestrial Virgin Hotels (Chicago, Dallas, Las Vegas, Nashville and New Orleans are already open) and, he hopes, eventually a hotel floating in space where guests can enjoy panoramic views of the moon.
Branson admits that selling his majority stake in his spaceline was one of the hardest decisions he has had to make, but he is philosophical. No one ever said business is fair, he reflects. By way of consolation, he raised hundreds of millions from a public sale of Virgin Orbit, a space company that uses a similar low-cost launch system to Galactic to put satellites into low-Earth orbit. The company’s value surged to $3.7 billion on the back of a boom in satellite communications and reconnaissance. His first attempt to launch a satellite from British soil last month failed, however, to reach orbit.
Is he worried that he may be stealing business from Musk’s commercial launch company, SpaceX? Branson insists that money doesn’t matter as much as friendship. “Elon and I are two very different people but have gone through a lot together. It is important to remain friends with your rivals in the evenings and compete hard, and fairly, in the daytime.”
In any case, SpaceX is outgunning all its competitors in the commercial space race. Its rockets have flown higher and further than Branson’s and Musk is eyeing his next goal – flights to Mars.
Branson is contemplating other ways to get high. He wants to see cannabis decriminalised. He gestures around him to indicate that America has done so without serious repercussions. “The war on drugs has been going on for 70 years. As a businessman I would have closed it down 69 years ago because it has been an abject failure. It has cost hundreds of thousands of ruined lives, people languishing in prisons, people being executed in Singapore, Saudi Arabia and other countries. The same thing happened with alcohol in the States in the Twenties and early Thirties. There is $390 billion going into the drug underworld every year. Now the taxes [from marijuana] are going into education, into health, back into society. So it needs brave governments all over the world to do the right thing.”
Branson is weighing up plans for a Virgin Hotel in London. He’s only an occasional visitor to Britain these days. “It’s a mess in the UK at the moment,” he says, in reference to what he regards as the fallout from Brexit. “It was a mistake for Britain to rule out being part of the [single] market and not to have done something like Switzerland. I’m going to be killed for saying that, but anyway. There’s something like 2 per cent GDP a year being lost [as a result of Brexit], which is a lot of money. The other [European] countries are going to get stronger.”
Has Brexit inhibited him from investing in Britain? “Yes. If we’ve got a spare dollar to spend or a spare pound, we’d most likely go into a bigger market. America is as big a market as Europe. We’re sitting here in New York in a big hotel. Sadly, that’s what Britain has closed the doors on for the time being. It won’t last. It’s just whether you’ll have a brave enough government one day to change it.”
He has past form for starting companies and then closing them if they don’t perform. Does he know how many companies he has actually got? For the first time in the interview, Branson looks perplexed. “I don’t know exactly,” he says. “Quite a few, I think. I know that over my lifetime I’ve started about 400 and employed 1.5 million people. So many that I keep bumping into people who used to work for Virgin – which is gratifying.”
For a while he gave up alcohol after drunkenly flirting in 2009 with Jessica Michibata, who at the time was the girlfriend of Jenson Button, that year’s Formula One world champion. “I can’t remember ever getting that drunk before or since,” Branson admits in his autobiography. The details of what happened are excised from the latest revision of the memoir, but he confessed in a previous edition to making a beeline for her in a Melbourne restaurant and “foolishly” telling her “how gorgeous she was”. Button, who was in the lavatory when the incident took place, said he made her feel uncomfortable. “Jenson understandably took offence,” Branson admitted. He later apologised.
What does he regret? “I think I’d be a sad person if I had regrets. I’ve been fortunate enough to have had an extraordinary life, extraordinary family, parents, wife, children, grandchildren, and lots of wonderful friends. I’ve been very, very lucky. So, no regrets.”
He says he shares many of the same views as Barack Obama, another visitor to his Caribbean home. Does that include a belief in some form of eternal reward? “No, I’d love to live for ever but I think that I’m more Darwinistic than religious.”
When he eventually faces death he wants it to be not while trying to break another record but peacefully in his sleep. “Preferably aged 110,” he adds with a chuckle.
And unlike Musk, who hopes to die on Mars (though “not on impact”, Musk jokes), Branson has no wish to take his final breath on another planet – or, for that matter, to have his ashes blasted into the heavens on one of his own rockets. Instead he wants to end his days on Necker, the uninhabited island he purchased through his company in 1978. Back then he was still building Virgin Records and was drawn by the fact it was in the British Virgin Islands. The asking price was $6 million but he waited and eventually paid $180,000, justifying the expenditure to fellow Virgin executives by saying he planned to build a recording studio there. The real reason, he now admits, was “to woo Joan”, his future wife.
“Necker is my sweet spot, where I fell in love with Joan when I was 28 years old and where I’m very fortunate to live. I expect to stay on Necker, probably for eternity.”
Finding My Virginity, Richard Branson’s updated autobiography (Virgin Books), out Feb 21.
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