Sir Richard Branson has revealed that things got so bad for his businesses during the Covid-19 pandemic that he feared he would lose his entire empire of planes, trains, hotels, health clubs and spaceships.
“There was a time when it really looked like we were going to lose everything,” the British billionaire told the BBC. “We had 50, 60 planes all on the ground, and the health clubs all closed, the hotels all closed, and the worst [case] would have been 60,000 people out on the streets. I was certainly a little depressed.”
In the interview with the BBC’s Amol Rajan, Branson said he personally lost about £1.5bn during the pandemic.
The entrepreneur said he found the media backlash “painful” when his Virgin Group asked the UK government for a £500m loan to help the airline Virgin Atlantic in April 2020.
He said: “It’s complicated. It’s pretty difficult to explain to people when everybody is hurting. What we were concerned to do is try to get support from government, not gifts from government but underwriting loans so the cost to the airline … was not prohibitive.”
Branson, who is one of the richest people in the UK, made the plea for a Treasury bailout from his private Necker island in the Caribbean, after the British airline easyJet secured a £600m loan from the government.
However, the move led to widespread criticism at the time, with the Labour deputy leader, Angela Rayner, tweeting: “Richard flog your private island and pay your staff, we are in unprecedented times here.”
The government refused the request for a taxpayer-funded bailout and instead the Virgin Group injected £200m into Virgin Atlantic as part of a £900m rescue package that also included support from shareholders and some of the airline’s suppliers.
The 72-year-old entrepreneur told the BBC that if there was anything he resented in life, it was the tag of billionaire. “People don’t address you by your net worth, they call you by your name, he said.
Branson also discussed past Virgin marketing campaigns and publicity stunts, which often featured glamorous, partially dressed women, whom he sometimes threw over his shoulder. He said he would not do such stunts today.
Asked whether those stunts made him wince now, Branson replied: “It would make me wince if I felt the women were uncomfortable at all. I don’t think that I ever made anybody feel uncomfortable. In those days, it made them smile … But today, obviously, I think people would feel uncomfortable with something like that. So it’s changed and I fully accept that. And I’ve changed alongside everybody else.”
