Richard Branson built Virgin into one of the world's most recognizable brands and, by his own account, reached his 50s without knowing which of two basic numbers was bigger. "When I was in my fifties, I was sat in a board meeting," he wrote in a blog post, recalling a discussion of Virgin's results. "I must admit I was quite confused — I didn't know if the results were good or bad news." Then came the sentence that gives the story away: "But I'd been rumbled. I couldn't tell the difference between net and gross."
None of this is new. The post is dated Jan. 9, 2019, and the meeting it describes happened years earlier, somewhere in the decade after 2000, roughly three decades after Branson started selling records under the Virgin name in the early 1970s. Branson had told a version of the story out loud before, on the Freakonomics Radio podcast in 2018, and CNBC wrote it up that October. In a genre built on the public's fascination with how the rich handle money, what sets this one apart is that the man who founded an airline wrote the admission down himself.
