Word: virgin
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...past year has been rocky for Branson, 50, who still holds the undisputed title of Britain's most absolutely fabulous tycoon. "The entrepreneur in a sweater," as the Guardian newspaper recently dubbed him, owns stakes in hundreds of businesses-from the banal, like Virgin Cosmetics, to the notional, like the spacebound Virgin Galactic Airways-so it's never easy to say if he's up or down. Last March, Branson sold 49% of his Virgin Atlantic airline to Singapore Airlines for a nice $900 million. But his Virgin Trains-about 17% of Virgin revenue-are still notoriously late and slow...
...Unless you are Branson. "Having just done massive research on the brand, [Virgin Trains] doesn't seem to have done the sort of damage to the brand you might have thought," says Branson, sitting on a sofa in a surprisingly modest office tucked away in London's Notting Hill Gate neighborhood. Branson, others have noted, can seem shy for a guy equally smiley alongside bare-chested models and Tony Blair. But "shy" doesn't quite capture it; imagine Bill Gates in court, except handsome and well turned-out. Branson crosses his arms as if to hug himself and talks...
...took over the most dilapidated network in the United Kingdom," he says of the railway lines Virgin got from the old British Rail in 1997. "It hadn't had any investment in 30 years. Trains were falling apart." Virgin introduced airline-style pricing, so that the cost of business class and peak standard-fare tickets went up while pre-booked tickets got cheaper. (A testament to the power of brand: the government forced Virgin to paint its name on the trains as a condition of the sale.) Mean-while, Virgin's two long-distance lines have ranked near the bottom...
...Time was when Branson could do no wrong in the eyes of U.K. opinion makers; now that he has been knighted it sometimes seems he can do no right. Virgin's reams of cheerful consumer research notwithstanding, Branson came in third on bbc radio's lighthearted year-end Villain of the Year poll. And in December an unauthorized biography by journalist Tom Bower-which seems to try the fancy trick of painting Branson as both a Machiavellian schemer and a reckless fool-ranked alongside Branson's own autobiography on the Sunday Times business best-seller list. (Branson has sued Bower...
...middle age isn't easy. Consider that Branson is thinking about asking for up to $43 million from the government to cover the cost of maintaining his doomed bid to wrest the lottery franchise away from its current operator Camelot. All this for a business-not associated with any Virgin company-that was designed to give its profits to charity. Sir Richard says money can come from the Treasury, which taxes the lottery. But Norman Baker, the Liberal Democrats' spokesman on the lottery, warns that it would likely come out of the lottery's own "good causes" fund...