Taking the rich to space won’t further humanity, but that’s not the point of Richard Branson’s genius

The Virgin founder’s entrepreneurial talent is not just about promotion, says Hamish McRae. It is also about knowing when to buy, when to sell, and how to use your brand and other people’s money

Richard Branson and Virgin Galactic crew members enter the company's passenger rocket plane, the VSS Unity, at Spaceport America near Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, US. (via REUTERS)

Richard Branson is a pure entrepreneurial genius. Today’s spin into space is just one more example of the way he can take an outlandish idea, create fun, fulfil people’s dreams – and make a profit out of it.

Many people make fortunes for themselves, a few create great businesses, and just a tiny number develop products or services that change all our lives – put the late Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos into that last category. But the genius of Sir Richard is purer. He has made a tidy pot of wealth by most people’s standards, but with $5.9bn (£4.2bn), he is ranked by Forbes at only number 500 in their real-time billionaires’ league table. By contrast, his rival in the space race, Jeff Bezos, is in pole position with $212.4bn (£152.7bn). And with Amazon, Bezos has changed the way the world shops.

Branson on the other hand has created a string of businesses in – until now – conventional areas. His story is well-known, and he’s told it himself in a string of books, all with his cheerful face on the cover. There is the early stuff about Virgin Records, later the move into airlines, the ventures in railways, banking, and so on. He is still at it. He has just gone into the cruise business with Virgin Voyages. His new boat is called Scarlet Lady, a nicely naughty name for a huge but quite ordinary cruise liner.