Branson, Richard (1950-…), is a British businessman whose Virgin Group of companies is one of the largest in the entertainment and leisure industry. The group also operates an airline and a railway system, and publishing, soft-drink bottling, cellular telephone, space tourism, and other companies around the world.
Richard Charles Nicholas Branson was born on July 18, 1950, in Surrey, England. He was educated at Stowe School, Buckinghamshire, but left school at the age of 15. Branson founded Virgin as a mail-order company in 1969, followed by Virgin Records in 1970. His first release on the Virgin label was the British musician Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells (1973), which sold over 5 million copies. The label has since listed such artists as the British rock musician David Bowie , the British rock group the Rolling Stones , and the American pop singer Janet Jackson. Branson sold Virgin Records in 1992 to Thorn EMI (now part of the EMI Group). He founded another record company in 1996 called V2.
Branson’s Virgin Atlantic Airways, formed in 1984, became one of the largest British airlines. In 1986, Branson won the Blue Riband title for the fastest crossing of the Atlantic Ocean by powerboat. He crossed the Pacific Ocean in a hot air balloon with the Swedish balloonist Per Lindstrand in 1991. Branson was knighted in 1999, becoming Sir Richard Branson.
In 2004, Branson founded Virgin Galactic, the world’s first commercial space tourism company. Since its founding, Virgin Galactic has contracted with and acquired various spaceflight companies to design, develop, and manufacture vehicles for the company’s planned space tourism business. Many of these vehicles are space planes—that is, reusable spacecraft that can land horizontally on a runway like an airplane. By the early 2010’s, hundreds of people had paid as much as $250,000 per seat to reserve spots on future commercial space flights.
In 2021, Branson traveled to space aboard VSS Unity, one of Virgin Galactic’s space planes. Unity reached an altitude of more than 50 miles (80 kilometers) above Earth, which is considered by the United States to be the edge of space.
