![]() ![]() ![]() Bloomberg estimates that Virgin Group's businesses have a combined annual revenue of around $22 billion.īezos is clearly the winner when it comes to net worth. Today, he serves as chairman of the Virgin Group, the conglomerate and holding company that owns stakes in a host of Virgin-branded businesses, from Virgin Atlantic and the Virgin Mobile telecom to Virgin Galactic, which Branson took public in 2019 and is now valued at nearly $11 billion. In 1971, he opened a brick-and-mortar record store in London called Virgin Records, which grew to become the chain Virgin Megastores, and later added a record label and even the Virgin Atlantic airline, among many other ventures.īranson sold Virgin Records to EMI (now part of Universal Music Group) in 1992 for $1 billion. With the two billionaires both chasing their overlapping dreams of reaching space, let's take a look at how Bezos and Branson stack up against one another: Self-made billionairesįor both Branson and Bezos, their paths to becoming billionaires started in retail.īranson dropped out of school in the late 1960s and launched his first business, which was a youth culture magazine called "Student" that later evolved into a successful record selling operation that saw Branson selling mail-order vinyl records through the magazine. Branson, 70, and Bezos, 57, are both self-made billionaires who built huge companies and massive fortunes that they then put to work funding projects built around their own personal passions for space travel. Of course, Branson and Bezos are definitely rivals in the sense that Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin are both competing to corner the market for suborbital space tourism.īut, that's not the only thing the two men have in common. He had previously congratulated Bezos on Twitter when the Amazon CEO announced his spaceflight plans in June, though Branson also told his followers at the time to "watch this space." "I think both of us will wish each other well, and it really doesn't matter whether one of us goes a few days before the other," Branson said at the time. However, Branson downplayed the competitive angle of the space race, telling CNN ahead of his own flight that Bezos' plans did not affect his own announcement. (Previous billionaires to reach space include space tourists such as software billionaire Charles Simonyi in 2007 and video game developer Richard Garriott in 2008.)Īs such, Branson's surprise move to schedule his own spaceflight aboard a Virgin Galactic spacecraft just nine days ahead of Bezos' flight was viewed as an attempt to one-up his rival space-bound billionaire. At the time, it appeared that he was set to become the first of the group of billionaire private space company founders (a fraternity that also includes Branson and SpaceX's Elon Musk) to reach suborbital spaceflight on one of their own companies' rockets. ![]() (The teen, Dutch 18-year-old Oliver Daemen, is flying on the Blue Origin flight in place of an anonymous auction winner who paid $28 million for the seat, only to reportedly have "scheduling conflicts." Daemen's seat has been paid for by his father, a private equity CEO, making him Blue Origin's first paying customer.)īezos, who stepped down as Amazon's CEO earlier this month, announced his July 20 spaceflight a month ago.
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