Richard Branson, one of the UK’s most successful business minds, has revealed one of the biggest failures of his career after being ‘kneecapped by Coca-Cola’ following a provocative stunt.

The Virgin magnate has conquered the record label business, the media and travel markets and has even entered space on his Virgin Galactic venture but there is one ill-fated 90s effort he still wonders ‘what if?’ over.

Not many would be brave, or daft, enough to enter the soft drinks industry with corporate monolith Coca-Cola, one of the world’s most recognisable brands, reportedly taking up almost half of the entire market space.

However, that’s exactly what Branson did in 1994 when he launched Virgin Cola, a carbonated soft drink launched by his Virgin Group as a direct challenger to Coca-Cola and other rivals such as Pepsi, initially finding success in the UK.

Speaking to American journalist Graham Bensinger in 2021, Richard Branson, who has an estimated net worth of £2billion today, admitted Virgin Cola was his biggest failure but placed some of the blame on tactics used by Coca-Cola.

“I suspect the most notable failure has been not knocking Cola-Cola off their pedestal…we had a good try,” the London-born billionaire admitted with a grin.

“For a year or two, it looked like we were going to take Coca-Cola for everything they had. We were outselling them in Britain in all the retailers [where] we were stocked, and we were outselling Pepsi.

“I then got a bit too big for my boots and I arrived in Times Square with a Sherman Tank…crushed all these Coca-Cola and Pepsi cans…then turned the tank to the Coca-Cola sign in the middle of Times Square.”

Richard and his team had ‘pyrotechnics up’ the Coca-Cola sign the night before, without telling anybody, in the publicity stunt which helped launch Virgin Cola in the U.S., on May 12, 1998.

“Coke didn’t take that too kindly,” he laughed during his interview with Bensinger, before outlining the fierce tactics used by Coca-Cola to exact revenge.

“The next day in Atlanta headquarters, they [Coca-Cola] got bags and suitcases full of money…arrived in England, and retailers suddenly became very wealthy and all our Virgin Cola disappeared off the shelves.

“They kneecapped us very systematically, and we did not know this was going on.”

To kneecap a rival company means to deliberately sabotage or weaken the competition, and Richard seems to have got over the original disappointment.

“I would ring up Tesco and say, ‘What are you doing? You’ve taken Virgin Cola off all the shelves.’ And they would come up with some excuse, so it wasn’t until about a year later that a lady arrived who announced to me that she was the new manager of Virgin Group at Lloyds Bank.

“We went out for dinner, and it turned out she was the lady at Coca-Cola at the time who’d been in charge of the kneecapping exercise…and now she was my bank manager.”

Virgin Cola struggled on in the UK for several years after the incident, eventually ceasing domestic distribution by 2009 and globally by 2014.

By this time, Branson and Virgin were well into their space tourism operation, as well as other media, hospitality and charitable ventures.