Richard Branson, the Virgin Group's founder and chairman, was born in 1950 and began his first business, a magazine called Student, when he was sixteen years old. Virgin began as a mail-order record firm in 1970 and has since grown to include over a hundred businesses in industries such as travel, entertainment, shopping, media, financial services, and publishing. With his wife, Joan, and their daughters, Holly and Sam, he splits his time between London and Oxfordshire.