Entrepreneur: Richard Branson
Company: Virgin Group

Whatever else he may be doing at any moment (the "whatever else" here being preposterous understatement), Richard Branson is also cutting a figure. That figure he cuts is anything but irrelevant. Beginning with a student newspaper at age 17 and a record label to which he signed the Sex Pistols in his mid-20s, Branson has built the Virgin Group into an international conglomerate of some 350 companies, many of them still tiny but all of them combining for more than $8 billion a year in sales. "The conventional wisdom is you should specialize in what you know and never stray from that," says Branson. "but no other brand has become a way-of-life brand the way Virgin has. And it wasn't us setting out to become a way-of-life brand, it was me continually being interested in learning new things."

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