#10 Sir Richard Branson

Age: 60 yrs

Birth Place: Blackheath, London, England, UK

Industry: British industrialist

Influence:

Why they made the list…

Richard Branson is a well-known British industrialist probably best known for his company the Virgin Group, which holds in itself over 360 different companies. Branson started his education at scaitcliffe school, in 1963 continued by his attendance at Stowe School in 1965. In 1966 Branson started his first successful business venture Student Magazine. In 1967 Branson went on to opens first charity “The Student Advisory Centre”which was a great success. In 1970, Branson decided to create another company; which was a retail business based on mail-order deals. Its first success came when Mike Oldfield signed the virgin group and had a record which went platinum very quickly. Following the success of Mike Oldfield more bands began to sign with the virgin group The Sex Pistols being one of the biggest.

In 1984 Richard Branson formed the Virgin Atlantic Airways company, or as we know today, virgin Airways; which has been a great success just like many of his previous companies before it. Probably one of Branson’s most notorious business ventures to date, is his newest venture the Virgin Galactic, where is aiming to take passengers into space which he calls space tourism. The virgin Galactic company according to rumour will be licensing the technology behind the so-called spaceship one which is being funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen as well as Burt Rutan who is an American engineer well-known for his aeronautical work. Sir Richard Branson is without doubt one of the greatest entrepreneurs the UK has and possibly ever will have in its history, without him a lot of things wouldn’t be how they today, such as the music we listen to, the charities we support, and quite possibly in the near future space travel.

Net Worth: £2.97 billion ($474.6 billion)