[imagesource: Getty Images]

The good news is that Richard Branson has opened a Branson Centre of Entrepreneurship in South Africa.

We could use the help, so fair play to him.

The bad news is that the launch was marked with a tweet that was very quickly pulled apart for rather obvious reasons.

Before we ruin your guesswork, here’s the since-deleted tweet:

If we get in a little closer, and look at just the photo, you may notice the problem:

Has the penny dropped yet? If not, I’ll let CNN do the legwork:

The 69-year-old Virgin Group founder and CEO shared the photo of his all-white South African entrepreneurship team counterparts early Monday morning before deleting it after Twitter users took him to task for it…

“Where did you find so many white people in South Africa???” South African fashion designer Thula Sindi asked Branson in a reply to Branson’s original tweet. “That must have really taken an honest effort [to] exclude the majority of the population, which is just as skilled and talented. Wow. Incredible.”

Branson realised he had dropped the ball, deleted his original tweet, and followed it up with this:

To be fair to Branson, the blog post does contain pictures that (slightly) better represented the country’s demographics.

A spokesperson for Virgin said:

“The tweet linked to a blog about the launch of the Branson Centre of Entrepreneurship South Africa, which assists aspiring entrepreneurs of all backgrounds with the skills, opportunities and inspiration they need to succeed.

“We apologise for the poorly chosen image, but would like to emphasise that this does not reflect the diverse make-up of attendees.

“As the video, other social posts and other images of the event show, many of the diverse group of Branson Centre entrepreneurs, trustees and team were present and the image attached to that particular tweet should have reflected this too.”

A poor choice of photo, but I think we can move past this one and let the Centre get on with the task of assisting entrepreneurs.

On with the day.

[source:cnn]