Richard Branson

Richard Charles Nicholas Branson was born on 18 July 1950 in Blackheath, London. He is dyslexic, did badly at school, and left Stowe at sixteen, with a headmaster's prediction that he would end up either in prison or as a millionaire. He started Student magazine that year with Nik Powell; the first issue came out of an office in a church crypt in January 1968, and he interviewed Mick Jagger and R.D. Laing for it.

Virgin Records followed in 1972, funded out of a record shop. Its first release was Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells in 1973, which became a phenomenon, and the label went on to sign the Sex Pistols, the Rolling Stones and Peter Gabriel and to become the largest independent record company in the world. He sold it to EMI for 500 million pounds in 1992, under financial pressure from the airline.

What is Richard Branson best known for?

Doing an enormous number of unrelated things and being visible in all of them. Virgin Atlantic launched in 1984 and spent the early 1990s in a war with British Airways over what became known as the dirty tricks campaign, which BA settled with payments to Branson and the airline and up to three million pounds in costs. He announced Virgin Galactic in 2004 and flew on VSS Unity to 53.5 miles on 11 July 2021, aged seventy. He has repeatedly attempted world records: the fastest Atlantic crossing by boat in 1986, the Atlantic by hot air balloon in 1987, the Pacific by balloon in January 1991 covering 6,700 miles, and the English Channel in an amphibious car in 2004. He was knighted in 2000, lives on Necker Island, and pledged it as collateral to save Virgin Atlantic during the pandemic.

Branson is dominant Ne, and the shape of the Virgin group is the function drawn as an org chart. Records, airlines, trains, phones, spaceflight, hotels, banks, gyms - there is no strategic logic connecting them, and he has never claimed there was one. The pattern is that he keeps encountering industries that seem badly run and asking why they could not be done differently, and then doing it before working out whether he can.

The auxiliary Fi is what stops it being pure opportunism. There is a consistent personal position underneath forty years of ventures: that big incumbents are complacent and unpleasant to their customers, and that being the underdog against them is worth doing for its own sake. The BA fight was not a rational allocation of a small airline's resources. It was personal, and he pursued it that way.

Why does Richard Branson do the balloons?

Because Ne and Fi together produce someone for whom the record attempt and the airline are the same activity. It is not marketing, though it works as marketing. It is a man who genuinely wants to find out whether the thing can be done and has arranged a life in which he can keep asking. The tertiary Te is real and is why any of it survived - he delegates aggressively, has been explicit that his method is to hire operators and get out of their way, and treats his own inability to run anything day to day as a design constraint rather than a flaw. The inferior Si is the reason the group has produced as many failures as successes, and he has been unusually relaxed about saying so.

ENTP is the most common alternative, and the serial venture-founding fits it well. The difference is the auxiliary. Ne with Ti produces someone who takes a system apart because the analysis is interesting. Branson's ventures are consistently framed in terms of how an industry treats people and whether he would enjoy competing in it, and his decisions read as enthusiasms with a value attached rather than as conclusions.

ESTP is sometimes suggested because of the stunts and the physical risk. But the balloons and boats are expressions of a temperament that is already generating ideas faster than it can execute them; he is not reading immediate situations for advantage, he is chasing possibilities and occasionally nearly dying in one.