Straight from today’s Quotle — here’s who really said it, and the story behind it. Play again

Who really said it

What's the quickest way to become a millionaire? Borrow fivers off everyone you meet

Unsourced — never traced to Branson Unknown Circulating under Richard Branson’s name since January 2007 · no primary source ever produced
Disputed Rights unconfirmed

Every trail leads back to quote-aggregator sites and, behind them, a single uncited Wikiquote edit made on 19 January 2007 — which filed the line under a heading that already read Unsourced. No book, broadcast, speech, interview or article containing this sentence has ever been identified, and Wikiquote moved it off Branson’s page in December 2008 for exactly that reason. That is not proof he never said it; it is proof that nobody has been able to show he did.

Last verified 25 Aug 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

For presentations

Put it on a slide

Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“What's the quickest way to become a millionaire? Borrow fivers off everyone you meet” widely credited to Richard Branson, but unsourced: no book, speech, broadcast or interview has ever been produced for it. The earliest known trace is a Wikiquote edit of 19 January 2007, already filed under “Unsourced.” Quotle.info, last verified 25 Aug 2026.

The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Richard Branson. Use the credit shown above instead.

Can you use it?

We couldn’t verify where this wording comes from, so there’s no rights status to give. Safe to present as an unverified or anonymous line — just don’t assert a specific author or source.

Image direction — grounded in this quote’s real context; paste into your image tool

In context

Evoking the themes of success and work. Theme: "What's the quickest way to become a millionaire? Borrow fivers off everyone you meet". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Minimalist

Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "What's the quickest way to become a millionaire? Borrow fivers off everyone you meet". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

The paper trail

Attributed to
Richard Branson
Earliest trace
Wikiquote, revision of 19 January 2007 — already filed as “Unsourced”
Primary source
None located
Current status
Held on Talk:Richard Branson, Wikiquote’s unsourced list, since 6 December 2008

What’s the quickest way to become a millionaire? Borrow fivers off everyone you meet. Unsourced

There is no fuller context to show. No book, transcript, broadcast or article containing this sentence has ever been identified, so the line exists only as a free-floating epigram passed between quote sites.

Talk:Richard Branson — Wikiquote’s unsourced list

How the credit travelled

  • 19 January 2007 — the earliest trace we can find anywhere. An editor adds the line to Wikiquote’s Richard Branson page with no edit summary and no citation, directly under a section heading that already reads “Unsourced.” That revision is still on the public record ↗.
  • 6 December 2008 — Wikiquote cleans house. An editor moves the unsourced quotes off the article and creates Talk:Richard Branson ↗ with the summary “Transferred unsourced quotes to talk page.” The fivers line goes with them and has never come back.
  • Ever since — the quote spreads through commercial aggregators instead. AZQuotes runs it under Branson’s name ↗ with no book, date, interview or source of any kind, and dozens of listicles copy from that layer.
  • Nearly two decades on, the line is still absent from Wikiquote’s sourced Branson page ↗, from his published books as far as anyone has shown, and from every documented interview we could reach. The credit has travelled a long way on nothing.

No rights status can be asserted here, because no source work has ever been identified. If Branson did say this in a modern interview or broadcast, that article or recording would be in copyright to its publisher; because nothing has been produced, quotle.info makes no public-domain claim for this wording.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

The attribution problem

This is not the usual case of the wrong person being credited. It is the case where nobody — not Wikiquote’s editors, not the commercial quote sites that run it daily — can show that anyone said it.

Richard Branson No source

Aggregators run the line under his name with nothing attached: AZQuotes carries it bare ↗, no book, no date, no interview. Wikiquote reached the same dead end far earlier and parked it in its unsourced holding pen ↗, where it has stayed.

Richard Branson Different line

Branson’s genuinely famous millionaire quip is a different sentence — “If you want to be a Millionaire, start with a billion dollars and launch a new airline” — and the two get blurred together in listicles. Wikiquote flags even that one for a better source ↗, but it does carry a secondary citation — a P. Greenberg MSNBC piece quoted in a 2001 Harvard Business School reprint. The fivers line has never had a citation of any kind.

Leo Fuld Older family

The ‘start with a large fortune’ structure behind the airline quip is not Branson’s invention: Quote Investigator tentatively credits the singer Leo Fuld with a February 1950 instance ↗ and does not mention Branson anywhere. No comparable research exists for the ‘borrow fivers’ line, which QI has not investigated.

The honest position is that this is an unsourced quotation rather than a debunked one. It has been credited to Richard Branson since at least 19 January 2007 ↗, and in all the time since, no book, broadcast or article has been produced to support it.

Context

Why this one sticks

Branson belongs to the small set of names — alongside Einstein, Churchill, Twain and Jobs — that act as magnets for orphan quotations. A line only has to sound like the person for the internet to file it under them permanently, and a self-deprecating gag about getting rich sounds exactly like the Branson of the public imagination: the billionaire who plays the chancer.

The joke itself is the sort of bar-room arithmetic gag whose punchline is that the maths technically works — borrow a fiver from two hundred thousand people and you are, on paper, a millionaire. What makes it worth flagging is not that it is funny but that nearly two decades of repetition have never produced a date, a stage, a broadcast or a page number.

Nobody has ever produced a source — only a chain of sites quoting one another.

Why ‘unsourced’ is not the same as ‘fake’

A debunked quotation is one where somebody has found the real author, or shown the supposed speaker was demonstrably elsewhere. This is a different category: a line for which no evidence exists in either direction. Branson has given thousands of interviews across sixty years of public life, many of them on regional radio and television that was never transcribed, so absence of a record is genuinely weaker evidence here than it would be for a writer whose complete works are indexed.

What can be said flatly is that the burden has never been met. Wikiquote’s editors looked, could not source it, and moved it out of the article — the standard route by which unverifiable lines are quarantined rather than deleted. Every commercial quote site that carries it does so without a citation of any kind. Until someone produces the interview, this page treats the credit as unsupported.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Success Work

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Talk:Richard Branson (Wikiquote)en.wikiquote.org

The holding pen where this quote actually lives. Wikiquote states it no longer allows unsourced quotations and invites anyone with a reliable, precise source to move the line back to the article. Nobody has.
Wikiquote revision of 19 January 2007en.wikiquote.org

The earliest appearance we can locate anywhere. The line is added with no edit summary and no citation, directly beneath a section heading reading “Unsourced.”
Richard Branson (Wikiquote, main page)en.wikiquote.org

The sourced Branson page. The ‘fivers’ line is absent; the airline millionaire quip it is often confused with appears here flagged for a better source, though it does carry a secondary citation — a P. Greenberg MSNBC piece quoted in a 2001 Harvard Business School reprint.
Quote Investigator: ‘small fortune / large fortune’quoteinvestigator.com

Traces the joke family behind Branson’s other millionaire line to a 9 February 1950 Earl Wilson column and tentatively credits singer Leo Fuld. Branson is not mentioned in the survey at all.
Losing My Virginity (1998) at the Internet Archivearchive.org

Borrowable scan of Branson’s autobiography, Times Business, 1998 — the obvious place to look for a primary version of any Branson line, and the place to check this one yourself.
AZQuotes entry for the quotewww.azquotes.com

A representative example of how the line circulates commercially: Branson’s name, a stock portrait, and no book, date, interview or citation of any kind.

The name it sticks to

About Richard Branson

Richard Branson

Born 18 July 1950 · English entrepreneur, founder of the Virgin Group

Richard Branson launched the magazine Student in 1966, built a mail-order record operation into the Virgin Records shops of the early 1970s, and started Virgin Atlantic in 1984 — the spine of what became the sprawling Virgin Group. He is also a gifted self-promoter with a taste for the deflating one-liner, which is precisely why sourceless gags about money stick to his name so readily. His autobiography Losing My Virginity (1998) remains the closest thing to a primary record of how he actually talks about getting rich.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

How to cite this page

No primary source located. Earliest documented appearance: “Richard Branson,” Wikiquote, revision of 19 January 2007, listed under the heading “Unsourced”; relocated to Talk:Richard Branson on 6 December 2008, where it remains.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘What's the quickest way to become a millionaire? Borrow fivers off everyone you meet’?” Last verified 25 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/whats-the-quickest-way-to-become-a-millionaire-borrow/

Something wrong on this page?

Tell us what’s off. A link helps but isn’t required — “this is the wrong person” is a useful report on its own. Nothing here changes the page directly; it goes to our review queue and a human checks it.

Only used to tell you if we act on your report. We never sell or share it.

Copied