‘DYSLEXIA IS MY SUPERPOWER’
HE HAS never been a suit-and-tie kind of businessman. Once, when I went to interview Richard Branson at his Swiss chalet, the Virgin entrepreneur padded down the steps to meet me in his socks.
This time, we speak by Zoom and the 72-year-old is wearing a faded orange T-shirt that looks identical to one my teenage son owns. The British billionaire is in Morocco at his kasbah in the Atlas Mountains – tanned, of course, and with hair bleached by the sun.
This is typical Branson. He’s always been happier leaping from planes or hanging out with supermodels than crunching numbers in the boardroom.
Richard has always been a brand as much as a businessman – a disrupter who loves to “tilt at big companies”, as he puts it. But even though he has a Caribbean island, a rocket and 400 companies in his Virgin group, running everything from gyms to planes and even a bank, he still thinks of himself as an outsider rather than part of the corporate establishment.
He prides himself on taking up new challenges and is always pushing himself to the limit, whether flying around the world in a hot-air balloon or beating Elon Musk into space.
“I hate saying no; I’m known as Dr Yes”, he explains and he’s convinced that his positivity is one of the secrets of his success. “I think being an optimist is a hell of a lot more fun than being a pessimist. As a leader, it’s so much better to look for the best in people, to praise people
