Richard Branson reveals his 89-year-old mother has died of COVID
Billionaire business magnate Sir Richard Branson revealed that his mother has died of coronavirus.
The founder of the Virgin Group shared the news Sunday in a blog post that Eve Branson, 89, “held on for one last victory, managing to fight off the virus, but had expended all of her energy in the process.”
“I’m sorry to share that, sadly like a lot of people’s mums and dads right now in these days of Covid, my mum Eve has also passed away,” Branson wrote on Twitter with a photo of him embracing his mother on Monday. “Rather than mourn her loss, I wanted to celebrate her wonderful life & the joy she brought to so many.”
I’m sorry to share that, sadly like a lot of people’s mums and dads right now in these days of Covid, my mum Eve has also passed away. Rather than mourn her loss, I wanted to celebrate her wonderful life & the joy she brought to so many https://t.co/i7rHAnBtBD pic.twitter.com/iDGASlAS0M
— Richard Branson (@richardbranson) January 11, 2021
In the blog post, the British billionaire said that one of his sisters, Vanessa, and his nephew, Lewis, were with her “until the end” as well the “wonderful nurses who she entertained with tales from her life and much laughter over glasses of whisky.”
Reflecting on her long life, Branson wrote that his mom taught his siblings the “importance of hard work, of not taking yourself too seriously, of treating people how you wish to be treated, of entrepreneurship, and so much more.”
His mother, he shared, was “always working on a project” when he was young and that she was “inventive, fearless, relentless — an entrepreneur before the word existed.”
Branson credits the sale of a necklace she made to give him the £100 he used to start of the Virgin conglomerate.
The name of one of Virgin Galatic’s spacecrafts, VMS Eve, is named after her and that she “will always be my mothership.”
During the 1970s, the London-born Branson, now 70, founded the Virgin Group, which today controls more than 400 companies in various fields, most notably Virgin Atlantic airlines and Virgin Records.
According to Forbes, he has an estimated net worth of 4.1 billion.
