SIR RICHARD BRANSON: ‘I’M LUCKY TO BE ABLE TO PICK UP THE PHONE AND CALL ALMOST ANYONE IN THE WORLD’
Sir Richard Branson, 75, was born in Blackheath, London. The thrill-seeking business magnate found fame in the 1970s when he turned a mail-order record business into the record store and music label Virgin Records. He went where others feared to tread, including signing the controversial band the Sex Pistols.
The serial entrepreneur went on to shake up the aviation, telecommunication, fitness and space industries with the launch of Virgin Atlantic, Virgin Mobile, Virgin Active and Virgin Galactic. He lives with his wife, Joan, on Necker Island in the British Virgin Islands. For our weekly My Saturday column, Sir Richard reveals how he spends his downtime.
5.30am
I wake up at 5.30am every day. I love to get up early to see the sun rise. You can see it coming up over the ocean. My wife, Joan, sleeps in a bit longer.
5.45am
I will start the morning with an ice bath on the beach. I jump in the ice bath just to wake myself up and it’s meant to be good for you as well. I dunk my head and it kick-starts the body for the day. I’m advised not to do more than about two and a half minutes. It’s something which I love to do.
6am
I head to the tennis court. At about 6am, we’ll have a singles tennis match every day. I don’t have lessons, but we’re having full-on battles together. We’re lucky enough to have wonderful tennis pros on Necker. There are two sisters called Kristin and Kat Wiley. They’re both very good players. We have our own handicap system. If we played straight they’d win every time so sometimes, they’ll let me win and they can stay on the island [laughs]. I prefer tennis to pickleball or padel as I play it more. But I’ll play pickleball with the guests in the afternoons. Pretty well anybody can pick up a pickleball bat and play. It’s like a slightly bigger version of ping-pong.
7am
Between 7am and 8am, I’ll join the guests who are staying on Necker Island for breakfast at the Great House. I love learning all the time and I love meeting people. We’ll sit on the roof and watch flamingos and scarlet ibises fly by. We can sometimes see humpback whales going around the island from the Great House and occasionally, we see dolphins. It’s extraordinarily beautiful. It depends on how the conversation’s going, but I’ll spend around an hour having breakfast.
Necker always has fascinating people staying there. We set up an organisation on Necker called Audacious Ideas with Chris [Anderson] from TED Talks. And we bring the wealthiest people in the world together for four days. Then we map out what the six biggest problems that need solving are every year. It’s been going now for about 10 years.
I think I’m lucky enough to be able to pick up the phone and get through to pretty well anyone in the world. Responsibility, I think, goes with that position I found myself in.
8am
If the wind is up, I’ll go kitesurfing. If the kids are on the island, they might go surfing and I might join them. Kitesurfing is in a sense my form of meditation because you just get up and away from everything... There are no phones, no iPads. I’ve been kitesurfing for about 18 years. All you have is a board below you and a kite above you, and off you go. You can be out at sea for an hour or two. We sometimes travel to Anegada, one of the neighbouring islands, which is about 18 miles away on a kite. If the wind is not up, I’ll probably suggest to all the guests that we go to another neighbouring island called Virgin Gorda and we do some fairly extreme bike riding. We sometimes go hiking around the island and we have something called a sea-cuzzi at the far end of the island, which is a natural rock Jacuzzi.
10am
Quite often when I get back from kiting, I’ll go and check out all the animals. My grandchildren call me Dr Dolittle. Necker is just a paradise for animals. Obviously, being an island, we don’t have to worry about the neighbours complaining. We have giant tortoises, kangaroos and lemurs.
We’ve got seven different species of lemurs. Sadly in Madagascar, their forests are being cut down, and some lemur species are disappearing. We managed to get some from zoos, and we’ve built the numbers up from about 20 to nearly 200 on the island. They’re the most beautiful, gentle creatures ever. They will occasionally come and join us for breakfast, but we try to discourage people from feeding them.
I was told that flamingos had disappeared from this region about 100 years ago so we decided to reintroduce them to it. We got 30 from Cuba and waited 10 years for the first baby. I remember we had just one egg, one year. We would creep down and look through our binoculars every day, waiting for it to hatch. Since then, we’ve bred nearly 2,500 baby flamingos.
We make sure they are protected the best we can. If the wind is in the wrong direction, baby flamingos have difficulty landing back on the pond. If a baby flamingo crashes into the sea, we will go out to rescue it.
11am
I’ve always just worked from home and Joan has generally always been in the room with me when I’ve been working. I’ll be on a sofa at one end of the room, and she’ll be maybe reading or talking to her friends on the phone at the other end of the room. I spend a lot of time on issues, such as Ukraine or trying to get drug reform or planetary issues. I think you get more done working from home. And then, you can also find time to keep yourself healthy.
4pm
I spend 25 minutes in the gym every day to make sure I don’t get niggly injuries, which people of my age often get. It also then makes it possible for me to do all these other things.
8pm
Every table at Necker is made for dancing on [laughs]. I have spent many a year dancing on the tables. As I’ve got older, I have delegated that more and actually value trying to get a good night’s sleep. What I’ll do is I’ll try to get the party going and then it becomes known as “Richard’s disappearing act”. I sneak out thinking that nobody’s spotted me leaving, but I think I’m caught every time.
9pm
I go to bed about 9pm. Joan and I will usually relax first on the terrace at our home on the island. We’re lucky because our house is on the beach, so we’ve got the sea right in front of us. We’re celebrating our 50th anniversary together in February. We really value our time together.
Richard Branson is celebrating 25 years of Virgin Limited Edition.
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