[imagesource: HBO]

Sir Richard Branson, one of the world’s most inspiring risk-takers and big-shot businessmen, has a reputation for consistently rolling the dice on new ventures when he could have preserved what he already had.

At 70 he is still risking everything, and even his life by going to space.

But it really ought to be asked what kind of safety net lies beneath him at all times and whether his gambling is a thing worth celebrating.

Director Chris Smith has made a four-part docuseries about Branson called Branson, and it seems subtly keen on unpacking the man and his legend.

The Guardian reviewed the doccie, giving it a solid four out of five stars while asking if it is indeed worth cheering on the Virgin boss.

Overall, the review notes, Branson is an “effective portrait of the sort of contradictions and coincidences that, when revealed, so often recast the legend of an entrepreneurial hero as more of a myth”:

Billionaires are frequently branded with a rags-to-riches backstory but, when we hear that they pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, it is always instructive to look at how shiny those boots were in the first place.

…we spool back to his childhood. His sister Vanessa provides a classic description of humble-ish origins: “We weren’t brought up either super-broke or particularly rich.”

Home video footage shows the Branson gaff, a country house with a considerable garden. The children were privately educated, their father was a barrister, their mother pursued various business opportunities, including renting out spare rooms in the house.

Besides being able to set up his recording studio with the help of a £10 000 loan from his aunt, it’s also been “made abundantly clear that Branson’s genius, if it is that, has been to surround himself with brilliant people,” notes The Telegraph in its four-star review.

Watch the trailer:

It becomes clear that despite the way Branson sweetly stumbles over his words at the beginning of the trailer, it is all a skillfully applied mask for a man who has always remained absolutely focused on the bottom line.

Branson might have branded himself as the adventurer, the iconoclast, and the eccentric, but apparently, those closest to him speak more candidly about him in this doccie, which doesn’t totally let Virgin’s marketing operation take the reins.

Seriously, what kind of person really gets to live their life according to their own book, titled Screw It, Let’s Do It?

Show me someone with genuine challenges and disadvantages with real-world consequences, like a woman of colour, for example, saying screw it to rise to the top and make it big in business and then I will be inspired.

[sources:telegraph&guardian]