Kicking back on a private island with your family during the pandemic may only have been a dream for many, but for British entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson, that’s what lockdown looked like.
However, the services tycoon has revealed that the idyllic setting of his COVID experience did not protect him from the challenges battering the globe—with his planes grounded and hotels unable to open.
Not only did Branson lose $1.5 billion trying to save his companies, the Virgin Orbit founder revealed he also experienced depression for the first time in his life.
In an interview with the BBC, the man who oversees more than 40 companies under the Virgin brand said: “There was a time when it really looked like we were going to lose everything.
“We had 50, 60 planes on the ground at Heathrow [Airport] and Gatwick [Airport], and in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. The health clubs all closed, the hotels all closed and the worst would have been 60,000 people out in the streets.”
Branson said he sold shares to “find money” to save as many jobs as possible.
Like millions of other people across the globe, Branson said he felt “pretty low” for the first time in his life while isolating on his private island, Necker Island, with his children and grandchildren.
He also admitted he suffered depression as his company faced backlash when senior members of his team wrote to the British government asking for support.
“I’d never really had any coverage quite as painful as that,” Branson admitted.
He said the request was “complicated” as the business—particularly the airline—was not asking for a “gift” from the government but an underwrite on loan agreements.
“Everybody was hurting, there were no families that weren’t hurting,” he said. “I would say that 99% of the coverage that I’ve had in my lifetime has been fair, I’ve occasionally had criticisms but I would say they were fair criticisms. It’s quite rare to have had a major knock.”
A piece of advice he got from Sir Freddie Laker, a fellow airline entrepreneur, was to deal with press backlash by “proving them wrong”, Branson said.
“So we got on with proving that our teams were good enough to come bouncing back,” he said.
‘Don’t call me billionaire’
Branson, a father-of-three, is estimated to be worth around $3 billion by Forbes.
However, his net worth is something he’s keen not to get hung up on: “One of the things—if I resent anything in life—is the tag ‘billionaire’. People don’t address you by your net worth, they call you by your name, and what I’ve spent my lifetime doing is building ventures that hopefully will make a really positive difference to people’s lives.”
Among his recent ventures is the commercial space flight brand Virgin Orbit, which collapsed in April 2023.
Describing his journey into space as a “pinch me moment”, Branson defended his decision to spend his fortune on space travel instead of issues like global health.
Such criticisms of space travel have been aired by the likes of Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who told the BBC in February: “It’s actually quite expensive to go to Mars. You can buy measles vaccines and save lives for $1,000 per life saved. And so [that] just kind of grounds you, as in—don’t go to Mars.”
Branson, a close friend of Gates, said he agreed with the argument but justified: “Some of these issues are made easier to deal with by the fact that I have been to space, so I can now pick up the phone to pretty much anybody in the world, get through, cut through the red tape and hopefully get things sorted.”
He added space travel is “incredibly important” due to the communication networks established via satellites, as well as monitoring environmental factors and illegal activity.
