From the Sex Pistols to cellulosic butanol : “I never thought my life would go in this direction,” Richard Branson remarked. PABLO LOBATO

Correction appended.

Richard Branson likes to pretend that business is his hobby; he sees himself as a modern version of a nineteenth-century British adventurer—Phileas T. Fogg, unbound. Rather than travelling around the world in eighty days, however, he appears to be trying to find eighty ways to do it. In 1986, Branson, the founder of the Virgin Group of companies, crossed the Atlantic in the fastest time ever recorded, on his boat the Virgin Atlantic Challenger II. The next year, the Virgin Atlantic Flyer, history’s largest hot-air balloon, became the first to travel the same path. Bad weather and technical glitches forced him to abort several attempts at becoming the first to fly a balloon around the world without stopping. But in 1991 Branson soared over the Pacific Ocean from Japan to the Canadian Arctic, again establishing records while travelling at speeds of more than two hundred miles per hour. Branson may well hold another record: the number of highly publicized near-death experiences. He has been pulled from the sea five times by helicopters (and once from a frozen lake). During one of his attempts to circle the globe, Branson crashed into the Algerian desert. During another, in 1998, the Chinese Air Force threatened to shoot his balloon out of the sky as it crossed the Himalayas. It took Britain’s best diplomats to keep him aloft and alive. Not long afterward, he crashed into the Pacific. Branson, who has now bet much of his fortune on developing ecologically benign sources of fuel, was asked recently if his swashbuckling persona wasn’t simply an advertisement for his airline, Virgin Atlantic. “The P.R. experts actually have said that as an airline owner the last thing I should be doing is heading off in balloons and boats and crashing into the sea,’’ he replied. “And they have a point. When I went over on the Virgin Atlantic Flyer, our airline took a full-page ad which said something like ‘Come on, Richard, there are better ways of crossing the Atlantic.’ ”

There is luck, and then there is Richard Branson’s luck. In 1977, he took an inadvertent spin on a sort of tricycle that had huge wings and an outboard motor—it was called a pterodactyl flying machine. It had been flown only once, but the inventor, a man named Richard Ellis, was seeking investors. He thought immediately of Branson, who saw the machine, jumped on, and started to pedal. Before he knew what was happening, Branson found himself hundreds of feet in the air. He still has no idea how he made it down alive; the next week, Ellis also decided to give it a whirl. He plunged to the ground and died on impact. Branson has even survived a shipwreck. In 1974, he went with his first wife, Kristen Tomassi, to Cozumel, to try and patch up a marriage that had suffered from numerous affairs on both sides. The area has some of the world’s best marlin fishing, and one day they and another couple decided to hire a deep-sea boat. Two miles out, a severe storm began to pound the boat; after a frightening hour or so, the wind and rain subsided, but Branson and his wife concluded that they were in the storm’s eye. Convinced that the boat could not withstand another attack, they urged the others to try to swim with them to safety. Nobody was willing to join them. “We stripped off to our underwear and the fisherman gave us a plank of wood from the bottom of the boat,” Branson recalled. Somehow, despite ten-foot waves, the couple fought their way to shore. Neither the boat nor its occupants were ever seen again.

The adventure didn’t save the marriage. Tomassi ran off with the singer Kevin Ayers and moved to Hydra. Branson followed them, but he couldn’t win her back. Yet, as he noted in his autobiography, “Losing My Virginity,” the marriage may well have failed for an even more fundamental reason. “Kristen and I had a bizarre sexual allergy to each other,’’ he wrote. “Whenever we made love a painful rash spread across me which would take about three weeks to heal. We went to a number of doctors but we never resolved the problem. I even had a circumcision to try to stop the reaction.”

Branson leaves the ground as often as possible—on kite boards, parasails, gliders, bungee cords, wind boards, wake boards—and soon, if all goes as planned, he intends to add rocket ships to his repertoire. He also likes to ski, and this winter he took his family to Zermatt. (He and his second wife, Joan, have two children: Holly, a twenty-four-year-old medical student, and Sam, twenty-one, who has recently begun to work with Virgin Media.) On February 23rd, Branson’s cell phone rang while they were at dinner. He ignored it. Branson is almost absurdly accessible—he treats his e-mail address like a business card, offering it to anyone who asks (and to many who don’t). But, when he goes on a family holiday, he tries to step off the grid. The phone kept ringing, though, and eventually he decided that he had better see who it was. “With most people, when the phone rings at odd hours their first thought is: Oh, I hope the children are all right,’’ Branson told me a few days later. “But, if you happen to have an airline, well, then, there is another call you also fear.’’

It was indeed bad news, but not from Virgin Atlantic. The trouble was in a different arm of Branson’s transportation empire: a nine-carriage Virgin Pendalino train, en route to Glasgow from London’s Euston Station, had derailed on a remote hillside in Cumbria with more than a hundred passengers on board. Initial reports were spotty, but the train, travelling at nearly a hundred miles an hour, had slid down an embankment and flipped onto its side. Branson drove through the night, reaching Zurich at 6 A.M., just in time to catch the first flight to Manchester. From the airport, he went directly to see passengers and crew members in the hospital. A number of people were seriously injured. He also met with the relatives of the only fatality, an eighty-four-year-old woman. When Branson arrived at the scene of the wreckage, he was astonished by its magnitude. “It was as if somebody had picked up some Dinky Toys and dropped them all over the English countryside,’’ he told me. “It was shocking that anyone at all came out alive. We have transported sixty million people in one form or another since we started Virgin Atlantic. Our airlines have a one-hundred-per-cent safety record. The train company had as well. I’m the sort of person who cries at a happy film,’’ he said, swallowing hard. “I cry at a sad film. . . . Of course, I knew this kind of day would come. I have prepared myself for it. But you can’t know in advance of a tragedy how you are going to act. You just can’t know.’’

Reporters were surprised to see Branson at the crash site before the cause had been determined. “It was really the bare minimum one can do in a situation like that,’’ he said. “If my children or family had been in that crash, I would have expected the owner of the train to get there as quickly as possible, find out what was going on, and see how he could help.’’ It soon became clear that track-maintenance workers had failed to secure several bolts at a crucial junction, and National Rail officials acknowledged that they—and not Virgin—were to blame. Police surveying the destruction said that only a “miracle” had prevented greater loss of life. The reason was actually more prosaic: Branson’s trains were built with safety specifications drawn from Virgin’s experience in the aircraft industry. There were no sharp edges on seats or tables. Not a single window broke, and the coaches remained linked, despite the force of the crash. “The one positive thing that came out of it is that the money we spent on building those trains was well worth it,” Branson told me.