David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. There’s two deals that happen. The first one is a press conference that they have that basically announces that Sir Richard has seen the innovation that’s happening here, and even though he didn’t decide to fund the XPRIZE originally, and even though he doesn’t have a competing team here, he sees the future and he wants to buy the assets, all the intellectual property, and partner with Scaled, to take everything they’ve built and build a venture out of it after they complete this flight and win the XPRIZE. The second thing that happens is overnight, he pays Paul Allen $2 million or he cuts a deal to pay $2 million to put a gigantic Virgin decal on SpaceShipOne. Everyone who’s coming in for the flight the next morning, including Peter Diamandis, the whole XPRIZE team, they come in and the plane now has a Virgin logo on it. It has prominent placement on the runway. Richard Branson also has another project that’s going on that’s got a Virgin logo on it, on another plane that’s also out on the runway, front and center in front of all the press. Suddenly, all this media attention is descending upon the XPRIZE, hopefully about to be one, and boom there’s Virgin branding everywhere. Yeah. I think the amount is the XPRIZE. They’re pretty gracious about this. They’re like, oh well, cool. Good for space. The goal is to evangelize space and that is happening. After the flight, Branson holds a press conference with Rutan, and says that Virgin is going to be buying this technology. People were like, wow, okay. Well why? Virgin could be an episode all on its own. I think Branson actually got a start in the magazine industry, then moved into the music industry with Virgin Records, and then retail with Virgin Megastore. But at this point in time, probably the biggest and best-known part of the Virgin empire, are the airlines, the Virgin Atlantic in the UK, and then Virgin America which is now a big part of Alaska here in the US. What is he going to do with the space technology? He’s going to form the world’s first space line. What a brilliant marketing move. Airlines have been working well for us. Let’s do it on a grander scale.…

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