[imagesource: Virgin]

Richard Branson, or Sir Richard Charles Nicholas Branson if you recognise his 1999 knighthood, has had some success in the business world.

He also bears a striking resemblance to Austin Powers in that photo above.

The Forbes real-time billionaire tracker lists his net worth at a cool $5,1 billion, up $183 million over the previous 24 hours.

Imagine checking in now and again, and seeing 24-hour fluctuations in the hundreds of millions of dollars. What an existence.

Along the way to becoming a multibillionaire, the son of a barrister and a flight attendant has had a few missteps, starting off with an attempt to breed and sell budgies.

In a LinkedIn post from 2013, Branson elaborated:

When I was 11, I decided it was time to start my own small business. With my best friend Nik Powell as my partner, we set about breeding budgerigars. We saw a gap in the market to sell budgies as they were very popular with kids in school at the time. However, they kept multiplying quicker than we could sell them, and the school holidays were coming to an end…

We went back off to boarding school and left my parents to look after all the birds. We lived in the countryside, and I think the rats got to some of them. As for the rest? My mum opened the cages and set them free!

Following on from that, the duo had an idea to grow and sell Christmas trees. Suffice to say this endeavour was also something of a flop.

This from Posiarc:

…they planted 400 seeds and planned to sell them during the Christmas holidays as Christmas trees. The idea was to sell every tree for £2 and make £800.

Unfortunately, rabbits ate the seedlings, and even after successfully hunting down several rabbits and selling them to the butchers, Richard and Nik could not regain what they had lost.

However, Branson has noted that both were learning curves, and it wasn’t long before he launched his first reasonably successful business, selling mail-order records. However, at the age of 21, Branson was arrested for a tax evasion scheme involving the records.

That’s where having a barrister as a parent comes in handy, I guess.

In 1972, he launched Virgin Records, with the name based on the fact that his business partners, as well as himself, were light on experience.

The rest is history, as detailed in this short Forbes video:

A fun fact – when Branson sold Virgin Records for $1 billion in 1992, he broke down in tears.

He recounted the story a few years back to Entrepreneur:

“Of course, it was very hard – it’s like selling your children. I mean, you build something from scratch, we had just signed Janet Jackson, we had just signed the Rolling Stones when we sold it, and I remember running down Ladbroke Grove, tears streaming down my face with the check for a billion dollars.”

My heart aches for him.

Now he spends much of his time on Necker Island, his Caribbean retreat, as well as launching Moskito Island, which is open for business.

[sources:linkedin&posiarc&forbes&entrepreneur]