Sir Richard Branson is an English investor and author. He founded the Virgin Groups in the 1970s which controls over 400 different companies.
His first business, at the age of 16, was a magazine called Student.
In 1970, he set up a mail-order record business. He opened a chain of record stores, Virgin Records. Branson's Virgin brand grew rapidly during the 1980s, as he started Virgin Atlantic airline and expanded the Virgin Records music label.
In March 2000, Branson was knighted at Buckingham Palace for "services to entrepreneurship". In 2004, he founded spaceflight corporation Virgin Galactic.
Branson was educated at Scaitcliffe School, a prep school in Surrey, before briefly attending Cliff View House School in Sussex. He attended Stowe School, an independent school in Buckinghamshire until the age of sixteen.
Branson has dyslexia, and had poor academic performance; on his last day at school, his headmaster, Robert Drayson, told him he would either end up in prison or become a millionaire. Branson's parents were supportive of his endeavours from an early age. His mother was an entrepreneur; one of her most successful ventures was building and selling wooden tissue boxes and wastepaper bins. In London, he started off squatting from 1967 to 1968.