Richard Branson's convenient truths

Finding My Virginity

Richard Branson

Virgin Books

500 pages; £499

In early October, Virgin founder and chief Richard Branson invested in Hyperloop One, a start-up that promises to zip people around in pressurised capsules, shortening travel time and limiting environmental damage caused by fossil fuels.

In the popular imagination, Mr Branson is the eccentric businessman who thinks nothing of jumping from high-rises or dressing in drag. The reality is that beneath the glitter, Mr Branson is an astute entrepreneur whose bets have paid off with surprising regularity. 

With interests in airlines, trains, banking, mobile communications, and many other businesses, even Mr Branson may not be able to come up with a number for the projects he has founded/invested in. This is one reason that he has had to write a second autobiography (the first one, Losing My Virginity, finished at 1999).

In the ensuing 20-odd years, Branson has remained active on various fronts. Whenever faced with a conflict, he tells us, he has hunkered down for the fight rather than let events run their course. If the earlier book focused on British Airways’ “dirty tricks” campaign, here Mr Branson takes on Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, Australia’s Qantas Airways, and the partnership forged between British Airways and American Airlines. 

He explains each of these scenarios with honesty, presenting himself as the maverick outsider whose entry into a new territory was expectedly met with animosity by the established players. Yet, Virgin Atlantic has soldiered on, forming alliances with America’s Delta Airlines and, more recently, with Air France-KLM.

To be sure, Mr Branson’s penchant for gloss sometimes goes beyond the antics he is well-known for. He presents himself, for instance, as the messiah who saved British railway by launching Virgin Trains and revolutionising travel on the West Coast Mainline service that was franchised to him. He omits to mention that much of this modernisation would not have been possible without the generous subsidies provided by the British government. 

Even so, Mr Branson is not a typical businessman. From founding a global coalition of seniors called Elders to working with Kofi Annan in Iraq, he has shown exemplary initiative in a range of humanitarian issues. Yet, his understanding of these problems can accommodate greater complexity. 

On climate change, for example, his advocacy – a whole chapter is devoted to this issue – pays no heed to the lessons learnt from Donald Trump’s victory in the last presidential election. Where globalisation has hurt local economies, talk of clean energy is unlikely to find many takers.

In fact, Mr Trump and he seem to have a long-running battle, helped in no part by the former’s intransigence. In the book, Mr Branson shares a letter he received from the American president in 2004, in which Mr Trump criticised Mr Branson for his television show, The Rebel Billionaire. The letter is classic Mr Trump: Mean-spirited, petty, and with no concern for how it might read at a later date.

Barring Mr Trump, though, some of the book’s best parts are about Mr Branson’s interactions with global celebrities. Bill Gates “hones in on specifics and is an expert on subjects ranging from gaming to global health.” Bill Clinton “is a shrewd operator and never misses a trick.” On Nelson Mandela, “I have never known somebody transform rooms the way Madiba did, lighting them up with his humour, his humility and his wisdom.”

At 67, Mr Branson shows no signs of slowing down. It is hard to avoid the impression that his keenness to come up with the next big idea has roots in his regret at having missed the internet bus. He speaks often about his dislike for formal education and how he is a big-ideas man, a clear departure from the details-oriented nerds who run Silicon Valley.

He calls Facebook’s and Google’s plans to provide internet globally via drones and balloons “bizarre” but acknowledges the spirit that drives these companies to explore moonshot ideas. “While the Virgin brand punches massively above its weight, we are still small compared to Google or Facebook,” he says, a fact so obvious that it is more a statement on his ambition than anything else. 

Little wonder his interest in space travel and hyperloop technology has brought him in the crosshairs of Valley czars, especially Elon Musk. Mr Branson presents an account of how Mr Musk tried, unsuccessfully, to scuttle his plans to invest in the One Web suite of satellites that are expected to provide internet services beginning 2019. 

This, in a nutshell, is Mr Branson’s account and is, naturally therefore, riddled with convenient interpretations. A more rounded picture will be obtained only when the many dramatis personae, who make an appearance here get to tell their side of the story. Even so, the book is a neat compendium of Mr Branson’s entrepreneurial philosophy, which translates, in his own words, to “Screw it, just do it.”