How Richard Branson Went From Dropout to Billionaire
Carly Zinderman June 03, 2018
Richard Branson is one of the most famous rich guys in the world. But he has only risen to the top by transforming a weakness into a strength, according to an article detailing the billionaire’s journey from high-school dropout to raging success story.
According to Branson, he was once known as the “dumbest” kid in school and diagnosed with dyslexia, which made it hard to keep up with his studies. However, “What’s interesting about people who are dyslexic is that they can often excel at things that they love and have a passion for,” he says. “And I have a passion for quite a lot of things.”
Branson’s first venture was Student, a magazine that was designed for young people. Branson actually dropped out of school at age 15 to promote the magazine worldwide. The magazine would fail, but the way he raised money to support the magazine would later become Virgin Records. From Virgin Records, he would then go on to create other independent record labels in order to promote musicians he believed in but were having trouble landing deals at larger companies. Later, he would sign The Rolling Stones, The Sex Pistols and Janet Jackson.
After Virgin Records became an established success, Branson went on to create Virgin Airlines. Although many believed Virgin was destined to fail, it quickly became a favorite with flyers and people would go out of their way to book a flight on the affordable airline.
Virgin is no longer the same airline it once was, Branson still has hopes go beyond the skies and into outer space—in a similar fashion to the plans of fellow billionaire and innovator, Elon Musk.
Despite his many successes, Branson has had many failures as well. One of which was Virgin Cola. Despite the failures, Branson says that not trying is worse because you can learn from failure.
