By Gabriella Cornelius and Emilie Evans
Sir Richard Branson is a famous british entrepreneur/billionaire, who is best known as the founder of Virgin Group, which holds over 400 companies.
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- Born in Surrey, 1950
- Father was a barrister; Mother was a flight attendant
- Scaitcliffe School and Stowe Boarding-School
- Struggled due to dyslexia; dropped out
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- Youth culture magazine called Student (run by students, made £8000 worth of ads in 1st edition)
- 1969; began a record company called Virgin
- Expanded business, got a record shop in London
- 1972; built a recording studio
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- First artist's label by Mike Oldfield - "Tubular Bells" in 1973
- Very popular, UK charts for 247 weeks
- Virgin Music 1 of the top 6 record companies in the world.
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- Included a travel company, the Voyager Group (1980)
- Airline, Virgin Atlantic (1984)
- Some Virgin Megastores
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- In 1992, Virgin, to stay financially afloat.
- Company sold to 'THORN EMI' for $1 billion
- Richrd Branson was very sad, determined to stay in music business
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- In 1993, founded the station Virgin Radio
- Several years later, started a second record company, V2. Founded in 1996, V2 now includes artists such as Powder Finger and Tom Jones.
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- Upgraded his planes
- Club house in Heathrow Airport
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- Virgin Group now holds more than 200 companies in more than 30 countries, including the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, Canada, Asia, Europe and South Africa
- Expanded his businesses to include a train company, a luxury game preserve, a mobile phone company and a space-tourism company, Virgin Galactic.
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- Recently, Branson's attention on his space tourism venture. He partnered with Scaled Composites to form The Spaceship Company, which is currently developing a suborbital spaceplane
- In April 2013, the project got closer to the test launch of SpaceShipTwo.
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- He is known for his sporting achievements, especially the record-breaking Atlantic crossing in Virgin Atlantic Challenger II in 1986, and the first crossing by hot-air balloon of the Atlantic (1987) and Pacific (1991).
- He was knighted in 1999 for his contribution to entrepreneurship, and in 2009, he landed at No. 261 on Forbes' "World Billionaires" list with his $2.5 billion in self-made fortune, which includes two private islands
- Now $5 billion...
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- Not many
- Virgin Galactic accident in 2007, issues in engine, killed 3 people and injured 3 workers.
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- Branson married to second wife, Joan Templeman
- Has two children: Holly and Sam
- He currently lives in London, England.
Here are some of our sources, others are on our Big 6 papers...
- http://www.biography.com/people/richard-branson-9224520
- https://www.virgin.com/author/richard-branson
- http://www.forbes.com/profile/richard-branson/