Nothing but the best

You may have read that I'm selling my Virgin Active chain of fitness centres. I recently concurred with my advisor's recommendation to have Goldman Sachs lead the banking end of the deal. They're top-tier bankers. Until I manage to get around to starting my own Investment Bank, they're the ones I prefer to deal with for my deals. Nothing but the best for my companies. (Especially when the cash is coming back to me!)

Bob Rubin was the Treasury Secretary during Bill Clinton's administration, and he's one of the legendary GS lads... so I figure I can't go wrong.

Warm regards,
Sir Dick

Conference

Hello, everyone. For the Americans out there, I hope you had a good Thanksgiving holiday. (Remember you can work those extra calories off at Virgin Active!)

I was trying to keep this quiet, but some jackass posted about it on the internet, so I can't any longer.

I'm hosting a very exclusive conference for CEO's at my Necker Island paradise. It's a time where I can get a group of high-powered visionaries like myself around my big dining room table and talk about important stuff. Unfortunately, so many of these other CEOs came from consulting backgrounds, so they don't actually know how to do anything. They're great on the vision thing, but most have no idea how their products or companies work. Oh, well... that's what I'm there for, to teach them about real people.

Anyway, I'll try to keep you updated on details, but no guarantees.

Warm regards,
Sir Dick

World Leadership

So I was in Darfur with Jimmy Carter, and it got a little tense. You can read about it in this AP article.

Jimmy's a great guy, but he was President and is also getting a little old. This means that he wants to get stuff done while he's still fairly spy, and when things don't go his way he gets angry.

Luckily, he does end up remembering that:

a- he's a Nobel Peace Prize winner, and
b- he's got more power and influence politically than anyone in Darfur.

So I helped calm him down, and we all worked things out.

It's a sad situation in Darfur, and I hope you all take some time to learn a little bit more about it.

The story of the four Steves (Fossett, Jobs, Ballmer, and Colbert)

I've been dealing with a lot of "Steve"s in my life this past couple of weeks, and wanted to give you all a re-cap.

Steve Fossett - Stevie - He's a hell of an adventurer, and has been an inspiration for me. (Which, by the way, says a lot about his reputation.) Most recently he flew around the globe without refueling, alone in his plane (the Virgin Global Flyer). But as I stated in my earlier post, I've said my last about the search for Stevie.

Stephen Colbert - Codfish - Our interview was finally aired, and the truth is out. He was a slimy operator, but I got my revenge. Did you see how disrespectful he was?? What he thought was promotion of Virgin America was just boasting of the fact we named a plane after him. NOTHING of the amazing airline and all the cool stuff you can find on our planes! I'm a business warrior, and I used the best weapons I had at hand: a cold glass of water and public shame. (Plus, a S**T-ton of publicity around it, my personal favourite.)

Steve Jobs - So Jobs got annoyed last year when during one of my brainstorms I rang him up to chat about an iPod Class on our Virgin America airplanes. Of course, I had forgotten he was a raging a**hole who only cares about design and nothing about his customers. (F**king over the early iPhone adopters, anyone?)

So I got the phone with him, and immediately called my Virgin America design team. They had been planning on basing the in-flight computer system around Mac OS X. No more, and all because of that bloody idiot. The engineers said I couldn't use anything Windows because it could crash. And I said that Virgin planes don't crash, so we're not using Windows! Then they showed me this computer that had a penguin, and there was a big hit film about penguins recently, so I told them to go with that. And now I find out we're geek cool.

Once again, my business intuition is correct, and I'm staying away from raging a**holes like Steve Jobs.

Steve Ballmer - So I never told Steve Ballmer about using the penguin computers on Virgin America instead of his plane-crashing software. That guy can gets as dangerous as a drunken Scot, especially when he starts throwing all his weight around. Would you want to get into it with someone weighing 22 stone?? I didn't think so.

That said, he's a nice enough guy if he's been taking his medication. We occasionally exchange e-mails, and he said he'll take a flight with me on Virgin America or Virgin Atlantic sometime. Let's just say there's an obvious reason why. Not that he'll be able to do what I did at 19, especially at 22 stone.

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So those are the Steve's that I've been dealing with recently. Now it's back to the hammock to do some more strategic thinking and napping. I've got three new companies to start next week.

Warm regards,
Sir Dick

Stevie's still not back

Well, Stevie's a survivor. While we still haven't found him, I know he's a tough old sod, and is out there somewhere waiting for us.

I'm going to start talking about other things in the next few days, but most of my thoughts and focus these days are all on my fellow adventurer, Steve Fossett and the search for him and his plane. I'll be posting updates as I get information.

(By the way, the search teams have been absolutely fantastic. We should have more of these guys around.)