Branson: Behind The Mask Hardcover

It was a mixture of luck and Branson's knack for surrounding himself with good advisers that his Australian airline creation, Virgin Blue, would inherit up to half of the Australian domestic airline market.

All he had to do to turn his $A15 million seeding capital into a $2.5 billion asset was sit on his hands. That meant knocking back a takeover offer from Ansett and staring down the might of Singapore Airlines, the new half-owner of Branson's Virgin Atlantic Airways, through its chief executive, Dr Cheong Choong Kong ("CK" to his friends).