Richard Branson: What a Life

'I don't think of work as work and play as play. It's all living.'

By Betsy Morris

September 22 , 2003

[Continued, page 2]

Before Sam's birthday festivities begin, Branson wants to get in his morning tennis. He trots down Devil's Hill through the bougainvillea and neckerberry bushes to his clay courts where he is to take on Paul, the tennis pro he has imported from London, and two other bleary-eyed partners. (They appear to be hung over; Branson is not.) Tennis is one of his current passions. He's in the middle of reading Tennis's Strangest Matches: Extraordinary but True Stories From Over a Century of Tennis. He is mulling the creation of an alternative tennis league back in London. Tennis could become a hot game again, he believes, if only it could be less stodgy—you know, ditch the whites, change the ridiculous uptight scoring.

Today, as usual, he plays in his bathing suit. After a couple of wild ball tosses, he decides to serve underhand, and when he takes the set, he says, "I think I'll serve underhand more often." His partners look as though they'd be just as happy to quit after one set, but how can they when Branson's so eager? He doesn't like to work out in a gym; this is how he stays in shape: tennis and swimming and crawling all over this island. He tries to make up for a more harried lifestyle in London by overdoing the sports on Necker.

After the tennis, he begins a day of multitasking. The family gathers in a private knot at one end of the great room so that Sam can open his presents. Branson watches with great amusement as Sam rips open his packages, dons his new gold signet ring, and models his new Ozwald Boateng tuxedo jacket over his Jams. (The gifts were procured by Joan; Branson, who couldn't care less about clothes, was once photographed wearing two shoes that didn't match.) As soon as there is a lull, though, he is back in his hammock, dialing Phil Condit, CEO of Boeing, to see if he can talk him down on the price of his 747s for Virgin Atlantic.

From there the party migrates to neighboring island Jost Van Dyke for an afternoon of bar hopping and catapulting off an anchored catamaran. Branson is conducting an outrageous Halle Berry look-alike contest, grading Sam's girlfriends on a scale of one to ten as they emerge in their bikinis from the surf. When a cellphone rings, it becomes apparent that Branson has not had nearly as many rum-laced bushwhackers as everybody else: He snaps effortlessly back into business mode. ("I hate being out of control," he wrote in his 1998 autobiography, Losing My Virginity, about his one and only acid trip. "I prefer to have a great time and to keep my wits about me.") It is Stephen Murphy on the line, one of his top executives, who sits on the board of Virgin Blue. By the next morning Branson will have a handshake deal with Chris Corrigan, the CEO of Patrick Corp., resolving their dispute over how much Patrick should pay for its stake in Virgin Blue and clearing the way for a public offering. And Branson will not have missed a minute of Sam's birthday.

Despite his well-known eye for the ladies, Branson is devoted to his family. He dotes on his daughter Holly, 21, a graceful and gorgeous medical student whom the British tabloids linked with Prince William a few years back. (They're just friends.) He is endlessly amused by Sam, who, after unsuccessfully lobbying his parents to let him drop out of boarding school to open a nightclub, graduated in June. He is clearly devoted to and dependent on Joan, his wife of 13 years and companion of nearly 30, who has been able to keep the kids on track and mostly out of the public eye, even if she hasn't been able to do much about Branson. (It was Joan who grabbed Branson's hand to keep him from raising it at the Microsoft conference when Bill Gates asked if there was anyone left in the group who doesn't use the Internet.)

It is not clear exactly how much cavorting Branson still does, if any, or how much of his playboy image is really just that: an image. But Joan, like any of Branson's investors and partners, clearly knew what she was getting herself into. The two were married when Holly was 8, after the youngster told them she thought it would be a good idea. When Branson isn't traveling, he's a homebody. He spends winter holidays with the family at Ulusaba, his South African game preserve, and spring break in Majorca at a hotel he used to own. He spends weekends at the family's home in Oxfordshire and weekdays in London. Two months during the summer he's with them at Necker. "I'm always around my kids," he says. "I've seen much, much more of my family because I've always worked at home."

His London executive suite is an overstuffed armchair at one end of his living room in a townhouse on Holland Park that is at once grand and lived in. In the marble entryway and up and down the front hall are strewn pairs of running shoes, Rollerblades, open gym bags, slung shopping bags. Atop a grand piano sits a vase that contains two dozen long-stemmed roses—crispy, dried-up dead. When they are home, Holly and Sam wander in and out with their friends. So do business executives. "You have one call waiting, and Mr. Nomura is here to see you," announces a voice from an intercom on the table in front of Branson's chair. Ever polite, Branson excuses himself to usher in Koichi Nomura, an EVP at All Nippon Airways, right past the sports gear and drooping flowers.

Branson really doesn't care about putting on airs. Dan Schulman, the head of his U.S. cellular business, has bet him an expensive bottle of wine that he will add more customers than his U.K. counterpart, but Branson has no idea what the wine is. (It is a 1982 Bordeaux, Cos d'Estournel.) He owns one car, a Land Rover, but he prefers to take cabs—it's easier. He wears a Breitling watch (both the car and the watch are gifts from their makers) not to show off but because he's fascinated by a tiny pin in its side, which, if pulled, will send out an emergency radio signal that will then summon a rescue helicopter. (It never tells the right time, because he's not sure which pin will set the time and which will call the copter, but he's constantly glancing at it, as if tempted to just pull one and see.) He never has a penny in his pocket, which Holly finds hysterical. "I'm sure it's because he's never figured out how to use a cash machine," she says. "And even if he could," she laughs, "he'd never be able to remember his PIN."

When it comes to spending, "my real extravagance is being able to bring lots of friends on holiday—200 or 300," Branson says. "It's fortunate that I own an airline." It's much more fun than an art collection, and much more practical. It burnishes the aura that helps Branson attract and keep the supporting cast he badly needs to make it all work. There is Joan, of course, and a stable of aides, including Penni Pike, his personal assistant for 30 years, who keep him on track if not on time. There is his advisory team, whose job it is to capture his entrepreneurial ideas and wrestle them into some kind of corporate structure that is both attractive to investors and palatable to him. He's loaded it with guys with who have credible resumes and skills he doesn't have, like Stephen Murphy, a former finance executive at Quaker Oats, Gordon McCallum, a former McKinsey consultant, and Patrick McCall, a former investment banker at UBS Warburg.

Branson is anything but hands-off. On the contrary, he can be obsessively, passionately meddling, as he was the Sunday morning right after the U.K. cellular launch. He called Tom Alexander, the former British Telecom exec, four times between 6 a.m. and 7 a.m. (Branson had listened to the voice recording on the customer-service line, and he thought it "a bit rude." He wanted it changed, and by the end of the hour he had written out what he wanted it to say.) But people like Alexander and Schulman, who was CEO of Priceline.com and head of AT&T's consumer business, deal with that because Branson can be a joy to work for in other ways. What really sets him apart from other CEOs is that he doesn't mind surprises. He thrives on them. Startup problems don't bother him at all. Neither do unforeseen battles. "It's refreshing to work for somebody who wants to say yes instead of always wanting to say no," says Alexander. In fact, Branson is a lot like a kid with a chemistry set, mixing up ingredients to see what happens next.

Branson's appetite for the unexpected, along with his innate opportunism, can turn an ordinary day into a high-wire act. On a morning in July, he is supposed to be down at the London Stock Exchange, or so he thinks, for a 7 a.m. interview with the BBC. He jumps out of the cab and dashes up the stairs of the exchange with his gym bag (which he carries instead of a briefcase) and into the BBC studio. The producer greets him, trying to conceal a look of shock. "Oh, Richard Branson," she says. "What a nice surprise."

After a few minutes it becomes clear that he was really supposed to be down the street at CNBC. "So sorry," he says. He begins to straighten out the mess but discovers he has forgotten his cellphone. He borrows mine, writes "mobile" on the back of his hand as a reminder to have someone give him a new one, and before long he is being interviewed by not one but three networks about Virgin's new upper-class cabins and his battle to save the Concorde. While Branson's on television, I answer the cell and take messages for him.

Now he is running very late. He must catch a train that will take him to Gatwick airport, where he is to star in a Virgin Atlantic press conference that begins at 10 a.m. We jump into a cab and are heading for Victoria Station when suddenly it occurs to him that he has no money. "I'm terribly sorry," he says. "I may need to borrow some."

That causes the cabdriver to whirl clear around and take a closer look. "It's Sir Richard, isn't it? Did you say you needed to borrow some money?"

"Yes," quips Branson. "It's terribly hard being a billionaire."

"How goes it with the empire?" the driver asks. Replies Branson: "Oh, the empire is fighting back."

He arrives at the ticket counter the moment the train pulls in, grabbing a cellphone that one of his assistants has arranged to have handed to him as he steps aboard. He arrives at his hangar at Gatwick just in time to jump onstage, amid pyrotechnics, and uses an electric chainsaw to slice through the upper-class airline seat of archrival British Airways.

Branson is getting a little more ambivalent about the publicity stunts. There's always a danger that one could backfire, that he could go a step too far. He worked hard to tone up and lose weight last year for his cellphone drop into Times Square. "There's something inside me that says I don't really need to be doing these things anymore," he concedes. He sometimes wishes he could groom Sam for the role. "It would be a bit more appropriate for a handsome 18-year-old to be launching some of these products than for a 53-year-old," he says.

But he's created a monster. "All Richard has to do is to sneeze, and he's all over the front page," says one of his executives. It's true. And that's largely how Virgin has been able to build its brand on a shoestring. He can count on getting his letters to the Financial Times published. He can pick up the phone and get through to Bill Clinton, or Phil Condit, or Stelios Haji-Ioannou, the founder of easyJet, another low-cost European airline, as he did on Necker, to find out how much he has to pay Phil Condit for his airplanes. Branson's high profile "makes it that much easier to conduct my business," he says. "Can I really say, Well, I'm all grown up now, I don't want to do that anymore?"

The conventional wisdom in his family is that he will never retire. "Never," says his mother, Eve Branson. "Not ever." Indeed, a glance at Branson's black book shows that after three full decades, he is still as energetic, peripatetic, and fully engaged as ever. The current diary (he began keeping them when he was 16) begins in March, and it includes every brainstorm, every business conversation, every meaningful valuation of any business deal, any substantive conversation he has had with his advisors, his investment bankers, his partners. It includes musings about a possible new cellular company in Canada, a low-cost airline in Japan, and another transatlantic balloon race. He has filled page after page with his exhaustive efforts to get his hands on the Concorde—details of talks with Airbus executives, former Concorde pilots, and engineers—and he is clearly irked that he won't succeed.

But the book also includes the following: "Michael Jackson wanted to come [to Necker] next week." And several days later: "Nicole Kidman said she'd love to play tennis." It includes a letter he has penned to Nelson Mandela, urging him to do something about the war in Iraq. There is a quote from Joan: "Extremism in the pursuit of excellence is not a vice." Woven in are amusing stories ... Why did the British immigration lady check his passport, when it was so obvious she knew who he was? "We wanted to know your age," she tells him. Holly has been to Prince William's 21st birthday party, where there was an enormous elephant made of ice, with straight vodka pouring from its trunk. As Holly leaned forward, mouth open, to taste the vodka, she caught a glimpse of the Queen, surveying the scene with a disparaging look on her face.

In some later entries he muses about possible promotional schemes. Can we sell a side of an airplane to Viagra, he wonders.

If you happen to be Richard Branson, it's all in a day's work.

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