Recently, at the TED Conference held in Monterey, California, Sir Richard Branson (a brand in himself) took the stage to be interviewed by Chris Anderson, TED’s head and fellow Brit. Branson spoke about his dazzling career with Virgin Group (which grosses 25 billion dollar, has 55,000 employees within 200 Virgin companies) including publicity stunts with Pamela Lee Anderson as pictured above “It’s a tough job, isn’t it. The lawyers say we mustn’t do things like that.” And about his recent misadventure starting a company called Virgin Brides. “We couldn’t find enough customers.” So it’s going belly up.
Daredevil ballooning and devilish antics: He’s hardly pure as the name virgin implies but that’s why he’s titillating. If he’d named his company Playboy (taken) he would hardly have gotten the same attention, would he?
And the very newest venture for Virgin is space travel (Philippe Starck has designed the interior of Virgin’s space ships.) Is this so Branson can escape our distressed earth just in the nick of time as Greenland’s glaciers melt away?
Obviously feeling substantial guilt over all the jet fuel he’s used up on Virgin Air, Branson has put out a call for submissions for ways to blunt global climate change by removing at least one billion tons of carbon dioxide a year from earth’s atmosphere. He will pay out a cool $25 million to anyone who can successfully prove they can do this (through this nonprofit arm Virgin Unite: the Virgin Earth Challenge.)
Branson was just one of many arresting speakers at this year’s TED Conference, the theme of which was ‘Icons. Geniuses. Mavericks.’ For more about TED go to ted.com.