Richard Branson says he came close to losing Virgin Group empire during pandemic

Billionaire tells of personally losing £1.5bn and ‘painful’ backlash after plea for state loan for Virgin Atlantic

Sir Richard Branson has revealed that things got so bad for his businesses during the Covid-19 pandemic that he feared he would lose his entire empire of planes, trains, hotels, health clubs and spaceships.

“There was a time when it really looked like we were going to lose everything,” the British billionaire told the BBC. “We had 50, 60 planes all on the ground, and the health clubs all closed, the hotels all closed, and the worst [case] would have been 60,000 people out on the streets. I was certainly a little depressed.”