Richard Branson dropped out of school at age 16 to start his first business, Student magazine.
Since then, the entrepreneur has built eight billion-dollar companies in eight different sectors and accumulated a fortune of approximately $5 billion.
If the 67-year-old lost all of his money overnight and had to start from scratch, he knows exactly what he would do: Start all over again as an entrepreneur, launching a new business he hasn't tried yet.
For starters, "I'd have to make sure I went bust in the most spectacular, exciting failure in history," Branson writes in his new autobiography, "Finding My Virginity." "Then I'd autograph lots of £10 notes and sell them (hopefully for more!)."
Branson, a devoted note taker, would then "go through all my notebooks, find the best ideas that had fallen through the cracks and start them up."
That strategy has worked for him in the past. The billionaire credits much of his success to the simple habit of jotting down ideas: "Some of Virgin's most successful companies have been born from random moments — if we hadn't opened our notebooks, they would never have happened," he writes on LinkedIn.