Richard Branson

Sir Richard Charles Nicholas Branson is an English business magnate, born 18 July 1950 in Blackheath, London. He launched a magazine called Student at age sixteen and started a mail-order record business in 1970, then opened Virgin Records in 1972, which expanded into Virgin Megastores. He founded Virgin Atlantic airline in the 1980s, Virgin Rail Group in 1997 to bid for passenger rail franchises during the privatization of British Rail, and Virgin Galactic in 2004 to pursue suborbital space tourism, building the Virgin Group into a conglomerate of companies. He was knighted in March 2000 for services to entrepreneurship.