Richard Branson.

Branson's path never ran through a classroom. Dyslexic and bored by rote learning, he barely scraped through Stowe School, where on his last day headmaster Robert Drayson told him he would either end up in prison or become a millionaire. At 16 he dropped out to launch Student, a youth-culture magazine whose first issue appeared in January 1968 and whose first edition sold roughly 8,000 pounds in advertising. The office was the crypt of St John's Church off Bayswater Road in London. To keep Student afloat, he began selling discounted mail-order records to readers, calling the sideline Virgin because he and his friends were new to business. In 1972 he opened The Manor recording studio in Oxfordshire, and in May 1973 Virgin Records released its very first album: Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells. It became a global hit and funded everything that came next.

Branson has described Virgin Cola, launched in 1994, as his most notable failure. He famously drove a tank through a wall of Coca-Cola cans in Times Square in 1998, but Coke responded aggressively, retailers pulled orders, and Virgin eventually sold the rights in 2007. The 1990s nearly broke him in another way: to keep the fledgling Virgin Atlantic flying, he sold Virgin Records to EMI in 1992 for about 1 billion dollars, a deal he has said reduced him to tears on the pavement. Earlier in his career he was briefly jailed overnight in 1971 for a purchase-tax dodge involving export-stock records and settled with HM Customs. And through the early 1990s British Airways ran its "Dirty Tricks" campaign against Virgin Atlantic, which Branson defeated in a 1993 libel case worth 610,000 pounds in damages, plus a 3 million pound settlement.

The win against British Airways turned Virgin Atlantic into a national underdog story and Branson into a brand in his own right. He distributed the 500,000 pound personal damages to Virgin Atlantic staff as a "BA bonus." From that platform he spun the Virgin name across industries: Virgin Mobile launched in the UK in 1999, Virgin Trains, Virgin Money, Virgin Active gyms, Virgin Media and more than a dozen other ventures across 35 countries. He was knighted at Buckingham Palace in March 2000 for services to entrepreneurship. In 2004 he founded Virgin Galactic to open commercial spaceflight, and on 11 July 2021 he flew to the edge of space aboard VSS Unity as Astronaut 001, beating Jeff Bezos by nine days. Today Virgin remains one of the world's most licensed consumer brands.

Branson's career is a masterclass in brand as asset. Virgin is not a product; it is a reputation for cheeky quality that he rents to new industries. The template is consistent: pick a sector dominated by complacent incumbents, enter as the customer-friendly underdog, and let the founder's personality do the marketing. The second lesson is that failure is survivable when the brand is bigger than the bet. Virgin Cola, Virgin Brides, Virgin Cars and dozens of other misses never dented the parent name because each was ring-fenced. The third lesson is about leverage over ownership: Branson often takes minority stakes and licenses the Virgin trademark rather than operating everything himself, keeping risk capped while upside stays open. The final lesson is the one Drayson missed: dyslexia forced him to delegate, listen, and simplify. Those three habits built an empire.