Sir James Dyson: Sucking up the cash

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Okay, picture this scene.

It's a Saturday morning at the dying end of the 1970s.

We're in rural England.

And a tall, very tall, slender man in his early 30s, hair beginning to grey a little bit, is vacuuming his living room.

It's a nice living room in a nice house, but this man isn't rich.

In fact, right now, he doesn't even have a job, but he's about to have an idea-one which will gradually become an obsession and will eventually make him a billionaire.

The chain of events will be set off any moment.

He'll become angry, then fascinated, then dedicate years of his life to solving what seems a very simple problem.

And it will all begin as soon as his vacuum cleaner becomes clogged.

Welcome to Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service.

Each episode, we pick a billionaire and we find out how they made their money.

Then we judge them.

Are they good, bad, or just another billionaire?

I'm Zing Sing and I'm a journalist, author, and podcaster.

And I'm Simon Jack, the BBC's business editor.

And on this episode, we're meeting the man with the billion-dollar vacuum cleaner.

A man who, at some point in his career, will literally reinvent the wheel, in a manner of speaking.

Yes, he's the man who invented the world's first bagless vacuum cleaner.

We are talking about Sir James Dyson, a designer, an inventor, entrepreneur, and billionaire business person who is currently worth a cool $13 billion.

That actually makes him one of the UK's richest people.

And Dyson has a 20% share of the global vacuum cleaner market, but he didn't stop with that.

He found other ways to suck up the cash.

Yeah, so now you can find Dyson hair dryers, hand dryers, headphones, air purifiers, lights.

I think during COVID they came out with a headphone slash air purifier mask.

Wow and he even has his own university and as a sideline runs the largest farming business in the UK.

So that's where he is now but let's go right back to the beginning and find out how James Dyson got there.

He was born at home in a coastal town in Norfolk, which is in the east of England.

He was the youngest of three siblings.

They live in this large Victorian house they shared with two other families.

It's 1947, so just a couple of years after the end of the Second World War.

When James is born, his family is just finding their footing after that war.

His mother had been busy serving the country in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force, but just now she's settling into life as a homemaker.

Now, James's father, Alec, had fought in Burma during World War II, but he too was now living a rather sedate post-war life.

So he was the classics master at Gresham's, which is the posh local boarding school founded way back in 1555 during the reign of Bloody Mary.

And that meant James and his older brother also went to that school.

And James remembers his dad as a cheerful polymath, is how he put it.

He was a keen amateur photographer who coached the school's rugby and hockey teams.

But sadly, James's father died of cancer when James was just nine years old, and it left quite a lasting impact on him.

He recently said that his father's death made him become self-reliant very quickly and they learned to take risks.

That death also left the family in a very precarious situation.

So there was no life insurance or any other kind of income.

So James's mum had to find a way to quickly support the family.

And, you know, we've had billionaires before who've overcome huge amounts of family adversity and hardship.

You know, George Soros, for instance, his family survived the Nazi occupation of Hungary.

Yeah, Warren Buffett?

Yes, Warren Buffett, you know, he grew up during the Great Depression when times were tight for almost every family in America.

And I suppose in a way that precariousness can send you in two directions.

Either you want to sort of mitigate risk or you've had a tough time so you don't mind taking it.

Maybe.

Meanwhile, Dyson's mum trained as a teacher, went out to work.

Money was pretty tight, but they made do.

And their shared home had a big garden, so they'd always had chickens and they grew fruit and veg.

And Mary didn't skimp on the family's cultural life.

That's right.

She also took them to operas by a famous composer called Benjamin Britton, who happened to live nearby.

And, you know, even though they could obviously no longer afford the fees for that posh boarding school, the headteacher actually let James and his brother stay on for free.

And that turned out to be a pretty good move by the school because years later, the billionaire James Dyson would end up giving the school 50 million pounds, about 65 million dollars.

Talk about a good investment.

Actually, at the time, however, James was not the best student.

So he did all right in Latin and Greek.

You know, his dad did teach classics after all.

And surprisingly, our future inventor wasn't actually very good at science.

He actually preferred art and sport.

I would have definitely figured him for a sort of science major or something when he was, but it was art that Dyson decided to continue studying.

In 1965, aged 18, he rode down to London on a Honda 50 motorbike to begin a year at the Byam Shaw School of Art.

Now, all these art schools at the time, I think they were really the place to be.

A really fertile ground for creativity.

And he was actually taught by a few artists whilst he was there.

Yeah, so, you know, the op artists, Bridget Riley, Peter Sedgley, you might recognise their work.

It's really bright colours, geometric shapes.

So he was really kind of bubbling in that kind of cauldron of creativity and artistic expression.

But as the end of his course approached, he actually still didn't know what he wanted to do with his life.

The head of the school actually called him to the office to give him some advice.

So we can actually hear Dyson talk about this pivotal moment in a clip from a BBC interview from 1999.

He said, what are you going to do next year?

And I hadn't thought about it at all.

And he said, Well, I think you ought to try design.

And I never thought of it before because actually during that year I was only doing drawing and painting.

And I said, Well, what sorts of designs are there?

What can you design?

And he said, Well, it's furniture, product design.

And I thought,

well, I know about chairs.

I've sat on chairs.

I'll be a furniture designer.

And I quite like the idea.

I quite like the idea of constructing something useful.

Yep, chair pretty useful.

So Dyson starts studying furniture and interior design at the Royal College of Art.

And he signed up for lessons beyond just design.

He attended structural engineering classes given by Anthony Hunt, who was the designer of London's Waterloo Station.

But he faced what he's since called irritating traditionalism.

He was taken aside and lectured on the importance of wood, but all the time he was desperate to work with things like plastic and stainless steel.

And I think that tells us something about him, that he was looking for the next big thing.

He didn't want to be constrained, thinking out of the box wanting to use new materials but bringing design sensitivity and he wanted things to look nice kind of in the same way that steve jobs perhaps did yeah so when dyson was a student we also saw the first signs of dyson the businessman so he had a friend who imported wine from spain so he supplied it to restaurants and dyson got in on this he sold it to his tutors and to the college bar obviously very very eager customers at the university bar and it was during this period he also met a british inventor and engineer called Jeremy Fry, a very important person in Dyson's life because this guy was pretty wealthy, he was very well connected, he was even friends with some of the royal family and he had an engineering company called Rotalk

and gave James Dyson his first job.

Now Dyson was set to work on a new type of boat called the Sea Truck.

So this is a high-speed flat bottom fiberglass boat which Dyson kind of turned into his third year project at university.

And after Dyson finished that degree he moved west to a city called Bath to continue working for Fry.

And his salary there was two and a half thousand pounds a year, which might not sound like much, but it was well above the UK average of that time in 1970, the average being around £1,600 a year.

Now, fast forward a few years, Dyson is at a professional crossroads.

So he's been working for Fry for five years.

He's got a good salary.

He's also married, by the way, to Deirdre, a painter he'd met at art school.

By now, they already had two children.

As a side note, they're actually still married over 55 years later, which is definitely unusual for our billionaires.

Dyson also actually has a nice old house that we mentioned at the start of this show.

It was an old farmhouse in the Cotswolds, which is, if you haven't visited, a very picturesque, very upmarket part of the English countryside.

Classic English, but he also, James Dyson, as well as having a nice house, had lots of debt, big mortgage, and that lovely house was pretty run down, in need of renovation.

So Dyson decided to take a big risk.

He quit his job to start his own company.

And this was risky.

It was 1974, and the economy was pretty ropey in the UK so not a great time to start a business inflation was at 16% it was on its way up to 24% in 1975 but Dyson had a big idea one he'd had while doing some work around the house but that's not the big idea right nope this was another idea this is one we had when he was renovating his house he'd become frustrated with the wheelbarrow he was using it was hard to steer the wheels were always getting stuck in the muddy ground cement stuck to it the metal scratched the door frames and he said, I realized nobody had thought about these problems or bothered to fix them for a very long time.

In fact, wheelbarrows had barely changed since the Roman times.

So he set about redesigning the wheelbarrow and created a lightweight plastic version that pivoted rather than on a wheel on a large big orange plastic ball.

And he called it the ball barrow.

So if you imagine, instead of the wheel, you've got this kind of big orange ball.

And I have to say, I remember my family had one of these.

Yeah, what was it like to use?

It was great because it was easier to maneuver, it was much safer, more stable, and had all sorts of benefits to it.

So as you said, he literally reinvented the wheelbarrow.

Yeah.

So pretty innovative stuff.

But unfortunately, when Dyson tried to get garden centers to stock it, they pretty much laughed in his face because why would anyone redesign the wheelbarrow?

But he crucially didn't give up.

So he started selling direct to consumers, using ads and newspapers.

And then he kept on developing and refining his product, making various versions he even made one for british aerospace which they used to carry missiles i mean i think that would be a significantly bigger ball barrow uh the big orange ball that we talked about was shock absorbent so it's like an inflatable tire but it was also puncture-proof so it was much safer for pushing missiles over rough ground because then the missiles would not go off which is obviously a crucial element of the design pretty important the bbc even featured the ball barrow on a famous tv show called tomorrow's world all about the science of the future and it sold really well.

And the ball barrow soon got 50% of the UK wheelbarrow market, got my family's custom, I can tell you that.

In spite of this, though, he hardly made any money due to its expensive construction and the tiny profit margins.

He'll learn that lesson.

Yeah, Dyson was basically trying to compete on price with the basic wheelbarrows that were out there.

They were cheaply manufactured, obviously, they didn't have a design cost because the Romans had invented one centuries ago.

He simply priced the ball barrow too low to actually make money from it.

And Dyson had formed this first company of his with a £200,000 loan from his local bank and various shareholders.

So despite £600,000, around a million dollars of annual turnover, those high 1970s interest rates, those borrowing rates hit him hard and his debt continued to grow.

And by the end of the decade, it was all going wrong for James Dyson.

There was another company who was copying his idea.

Dyson got ousted from his own company by his shareholders.

And in the process, he even lost a patent for the ball barrow because he'd signed it to the company and not himself.

So he says he never found out why he was kicked out, but it did teach him a valuable lesson.

Yeah, owning the rights, the stuff.

We've come across that countless times.

In fact, in his autobiography, Invention, A Life of Learning Through Failure, he says, I learned the importance of having absolute control of my company and of not undervaluing it.

And this is kind of what you might call the start of his wilderness years.

He describes it as all a bit of a disaster and he spends the next five years with actually no income.

So his wife, Deirdre, has to make clothes and sell her paintings to get cash.

Don't forget, they've also got kids.

And Dyson passes his time in the wilderness working on their house and waiting for inspiration, his next big idea, to strike him.

A patient wife.

I know that if I sat around the house tinkering with stuff, waiting for my next big idea to arrive, my wife's patience would arrive pretty dull.

She'd have words.

She definitely would have words.

But this is when the Eureka moment arrives.

So Dyson's bought what he's been told is the best vacuum on the market, the Hoover Jr.

So when it clogs, he's actually extremely annoyed.

Yeah, and being an inventor, he decides to pull the machine apart to see what's wrong.

And he finds that the bag is full, but he doesn't have a new one.

So he tries emptying the bag and reusing it, but that doesn't work.

So he has to drive a few miles to the nearest store that sells the Hoover bags.

And when he uses one of them, suction returns.

So Dyson figures out that the reason his vacuum was clogged is that the bag also acts as a filter for the machine.

So really, when the indicator on his machine was flashing up bag full, it really meant that it was bag clogged.

But this could also be triggered by even a tiny bit of dust.

So the vacuum regularly lost suction.

And he says, As an engineer, I found this interesting.

As a consumer, I felt cheated, even angry.

This anger lasted for several months.

I mean...

Nursing a grievance of several months over a vacuum that got clogged is quite something.

Yeah, I have to say this is a very particular kind of mentality because when things don't work in my house, I just assume I've done something wrong and I'm at fault.

I have to say I've met him a few times and I can actually see him nursing this anger for several months.

That would bother him for some time.

But this combination of anger and interest set him to work trying to fix this problem.

He wanted to design a vacuum cleaner that users wouldn't need to keep buying expensive branded bags for.

In fact, he soon realized what he wanted to create was a bagless vacuum cleaner.

and he had an idea of how to do it.

The problem that faced him reminded him of an issue he'd actually come up against at the ball barrel factory.

So while spray painting, they used a standard fan to keep removing the flying paint particles, but it kept clogging and stopping the production line.

And Dyson discovered that cyclone separators were the only thing that could do the job.

So a cyclone separator sort of creates a little mini tornado inside a pipe and that pushes the bits of dirt into the middle of this vortex through the pipe and keeps it all away from the machinery.

So everything starts moving smoothly, it stops it clogging.

So if you just picture a tornado,

all the stuff that you're sucking up is kind of trapped inside the middle of the cyclone, keeping it free of the moving parts and the cloggable bits.

I'm not an expert in these matters, but I get that, I think.

I think James Dyson would be happy with that explanation.

But these top-of-the-range cyclone separators cost £75,000.

That would be equivalent to half a million pounds today.

Dyson hadn't been able to afford one for the ball barrow factory, so he decided to build one himself.

So he actually snuck into a local timber yard late at night with a flashlight and a sketch pad to draw the cyclone separator that was in the yard and then using this rough sketch Dyson and two metal workers built a 30-foot cyclone separator for their factory over a couple of weekends and it worked a treat.

I'm just loving the idea of him being caught coming out of this timber yard with a sketchbook.

He said, what have you been doing?

Nothing, nothing.

I've been sketching a cyclone separator.

I'm just a huge fan.

yes anyway he's now convinced that he can make a tiny version of this cyclone separator inside a vacuum cleaner and that could replace the vacuum bag so he set about creating one out of cardboard and gaffer taped it to his machine and it kind of worked so it picked up dust it picked up hair from his pet dog it collected it in the cardboard cone but you know it's made of cardboard so it's pretty clunky so dyson knew he needed to invest in research and development.

So he took this idea to his former C-Truck boss and friend, Jeremy Fry and Fry was more than happy to help.

But remember the experience he had with the ball barrow?

It had taught Dyson to keep control of his company.

So while he accepted £25,000

from his well-heeled friend Jeremy Fry, he insisted that he and his wife would put up £26,000, which is just enough to maintain more than 50% a controlling stake.

To get that money, the Dysons had to sell their vegetable patch and borrow even more money from the bank.

So now he could really get to work refining that design and he was relentless.

So So famously Dyson made over 5,000 prototypes before he found a design that really worked.

But prototype 5127, to give it its

phone number, yeah, it worked.

And in 1982, he finally patented his duo cyclone design.

Eureka, there we go.

He's made his bagless vacuum cleaner.

He's going to start selling it.

And hey, Presto, he's a millionaire, right?

Well, no, actually, it's a little bit more complicated than that.

Yeah, initially, Dyson and his business partner Fry decided they should license his invention rather than manufacturing it.

Why would they do that?

Especially after all the lessons he's learned about holding on to his designs and ideas.

This is interesting because licensing technology means that you own the design for it but you'll let other people manufacture it.

The beauty of that model is that you don't have to have tons of capital to do it.

You've got intellectual property which you'll license to someone else, but you don't have to build a factory, employ the people to make it, whatever.

It's called a capital light model.

A lot of of people like that, as I say, because you don't have to put tons of money into building the actual factories.

And with every unit you sell, presumably you get a little cut of it.

Exactly.

You get a cut of the actual finished product.

So what did Dyson do after he decided to license these designs?

He spent years trying to get a big electrical company to buy his bagless vacuum cleaner, but no one wanted it.

And there was a pretty big reason for that.

It was bad.

for their own business.

That was because selling vacuum bags was a massive part of their business model.

In fact, the vacuum bag market was worth 500 million pounds in Europe alone during the early 1980s.

So if your thing catches on, it could destroy some of our business.

Right.

And Dyson said, I had visions of a vacuum revolution, but the vacuum makers had built a razor and blade business model reliant on the profits from bags and filters.

So if they bought into his invention, they would basically be writing the check for their own demise.

This reminds me of another business parable, which was that Eastman Kodak had the chance to develop the first digital camera, but they decided not to do it because they realized if this catches on, then our products that we've spent decades of being the market leaders in could get completely destroyed.

And so they kind of ignored that market rather than embracing it.

Eastman Kodak is basically no longer with us in the form that it was.

So yeah, they didn't want to embrace a technology that might ruin their own business.

So most of the next next decade was spent trying to license the Bagless vacuum, but with minimal success.

So there were some deals here and there, little ones, enough to keep Dyson going.

Fry's own company, Rotok, where Dyson had worked on the C-truck, actually bought a license and then hired Zanussi engineers in Italy to manufacture a pink vacuum cleaner.

Those were too expensive though, and they never really sold.

Only about 550 were ever made.

He did make a deal with a Japanese company who loved the pictures they'd seen of the pink model.

They made another pink version.

They call that the G-Force.

Now, that one actually ended up winning a design award it became a bit of a status symbol back in japan but that status symbol came with a hefty price tag it cost the equivalent of about two thousand us dollars so it was never a big seller there was also very nearly this big deal with an american company called amway so the north american market was the big one so dyson knew he had to crack it in order to really succeed amway paid an initial hundred thousand dollars but then the deal fell through because the company accused dyson of fraud and misrepresentation They said his machine designs were simply not ready to sell to the public.

And it was at this point his old friend and backer Jeremy Fry pulled out he didn't want a lengthy court case.

He just wanted to retire.

So Dyson agreed to buy his old friend out.

This time Dyson had to sell his office building, get yet another loan from the bank to pay.

So by the mid 80s Dyson owned 100% of that business.

Having said that, he also didn't own very much else.

And he couldn't afford to fight Anway in court, so he agreed to give them back the hundred thousand dollars they'd given him up front and it's at this point I find myself comparing our billionaire sometimes to to my to myself and it and believe it I come up pretty unfavourably he went through 5,000 prototypes yeah I would have been out by eight I would have done maybe 15 and then thought you know what this cardboard coin's not going anywhere and then every time you have to sort of remortgage this borrow more money get into more debt your rich back is now pulled out he's gone to retire Yeah, your wife is giving extra art classes around the clock.

And it's not like this is a solid gold proposition here.

You know, this is still a moonshot in many ways.

And in fact, the 1980s sound a bit desperate for James Dyson.

Apparently, at one point, a squirrel chewed through a pipe in his home.

The ceilings collapsed.

The house flooded.

He had to wait for the money to come through from the Japanese deal just to pay for the repairs.

And remember, he was turning 40 in 1987.

And I don't think we've had a billionaire who still hadn't made a million million by the age of 40.

So he's still taking big risks at a time when most people are thinking, I've kind of settled into my life.

But it was in 1987, the year he turns 40, things took a bit of a turn.

Yeah, so Dyson was about to sign a license agreement with a Canadian company called Iona Appliances.

And that's when he discovered that Amway, that's right, the company that accused him of fraud, they'd launched their very own cyclone vacuum cleaner anyway.

And this time, Dyson was ready to fight.

He was seeing red.

He took Amway to court.

Iona agreed to help with the legal fees.

But remember, this isn't a done deal.

He's still risking bankruptcy.

He was still in debt.

So this legal battle was really high risk.

It had the potential to sink him for good.

Yeah, and as these legal tussles can, it took a long time.

It took five years.

He was cross-examined for days by lawyers trying to trip him up.

He says just the use of the wrong word at this point could have cost him the case and the validity of his patent.

And that's the very valuable thing.

But his wife, good old Deirdre, encouraged him to fight it through and they never did manage to trip him up in court.

In 1992 Amway settled.

He received $1 million.

Now most of that went back to legal fees but at least he'd halted the copy of his product.

And meanwhile the company that licensed his designs in the US had launched their Bagless vacuum so he was finally getting a bit of money from that.

Let's just take another moment to hear it for Deirdre because she encouraged him to fight on at this point.

So I praise hats off to Deirdre once again.

Things are finally looking up for James Dyson, but he realized he needed to change his whole business plan, his model, and manufacture the Baglass vacuums himself.

So in 1991, he launched a company to manufacture them, and he calls it, huge leap of imagination here, Dyson.

Why mess with a good brand name?

But yet again, he needs money and he can't get any venture capital funding.

So he goes to the bank to take out yet another loan.

And at first, the bank manager is not sure, but then the bank manager consults his wife, who thought the Baglass vacuum cleaner was a great idea.

So the bank manager was convinced and gave Dyson the loan.

I love that credit process they go through at that bank.

Yeah.

So Dyson still had to put up the family home as collateral, much like Jim Ratcliffe, one of our other billionaires.

And, you know, this is a major bet in your 40s, especially if you've got kids and a wife.

No kidding.

You know, putting your house on the line when you're 40 is an incredible roll of the dice.

In fact, it feels a bit like the last roll of the dice.

So he's got a team of four working out of his own home.

Remember, he sold off his office to raise money.

And in 1992, Dyson is now 45.

In fact, on his 45th birthday, they released the first fully operational bagless vacuum built by Dyson.

And it was called the Duo Cyclone or DC-01.

Do you remember this vacuum cleaner at all?

I remember the colour scheme.

It was kind of grey and yellow.

It was quite different looking than anything else.

How old would I have been then?

I would have been 22.

So vacuum cleaners weren't my top priority at that age.

No.

In fact, I don't think they're the priority of any 22-year-old.

The one thing I will say is that when I looked up pictures of this vacuum cleaner, it's got this clear bin so you could see all the dirt that accumulated.

That's kind of fascinating, seeing what's inside the vacuum cleaner.

If you hoover up an earring or a key or something like that, you can look right through it and say, there it is.

Apparently, Dyson actually insisted on this design quirk because they'd done market research saying that consumers would be put off by seeing all the dirt in their own home.

But him and his team apparently enjoyed seeing it so much that they thought customers would too.

And I

would like that.

I like to examine my own filth.

Yeah, yeah.

Say goodbye to it before you toss it out of your home one more time.

So he starts selling it himself?

Yeah, he actually makes personal trips to retailers to convince him to carry his new vacuum.

And he used interesting techniques, which actually became quite standard in the vacuum world, like making a bit of a mess on someone's carpet, then cleaning up right in front of them, convincing them that it actually worked.

Impressed, but not convinced.

One catalogue executive asked why people would buy his machine rather than famous brands like Hoover and and Vax.

Dyson replied that the execs catalogue was boring.

And after a brief silence, the guy agreed to sell the Dyson.

Now, this is the stuff of legend, I think.

Yeah, I mean, it's kind of interesting that his answer was that the execs catalogue was just boring.

I think if you're selling what's essentially a technological product, a lot of the appeal comes from the fact that it's cool.

You know, like I think of those old iMac computers, the kind of brightly colored ones.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

And, you know, they were considered kind of cool and sexy and futuristic.

But computers are cool and sexy and futuristic.

Vacuum cleaners, not so much.

Hey, if you need to vacuum all day, you'd want to look at the vacuum version of an iMac too.

So in 1993, the Dyson dual cyclone vacuum cleaner goes on sale to the public.

It was nearly £200, £199.

That was about twice what a cheap vacuum cleaner would cost.

But this was a top-of-the-range vacuum cleaner.

And don't forget that Dyson had learned his lesson about underpricing his product with the ball barrel.

I do remember people saying having a Dyson was a bit of a status silver.

Oh, gosh, you know, Dyson, you know, moving up in the world, aren't we?

Exactly.

Eventually, all this persistence by Dyson pays off.

18 months after it launched, all the mainstream chains were stocking it.

They had cornered 20% of the vacuum cleaner market and a turnover of £10 million.

So he's got to be a millionaire by now.

Well, millions were generated in sales of the Bagless vacuum cleaner, but it wasn't until 1995 after he'd paid back the bank loan, the manufacturing costs, and finally paid off that original overdraft he took out as a newlywed, that James Dyson was officially a millionaire.

He's 48 years old, he's nowhere near a billion, but he is financially stable.

So he's got a long way to go to get to that billion, but I think he now believes he's going to make it.

In 1995, 48

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Eight-year-old James Dyson is a millionaire and a ruthless focus on expansion is set to take him all the way to a billion.

He starts by building his own factory near his home in the the English countryside and he works on improving the designs.

He reduces the weight, he increases the power.

And Dyson starts releasing new models of vacuum cleaners with new designs to serve kind of different customers.

Soon there was a small cylindrical Dyson for the 50% of the UK market who preferred smaller vacuums and to appeal to the European market where people mostly use cylinder vacuums, think products like Henry Hoover's.

That's as opposed to upright vacuums, which is what the Dyson Doe Cyclone had been modelled on.

And these expansion plans are starting to work.

They triple their production output year on year from 1993 onwards.

And Dyson opens offices across Europe in France, Germany, Spain, the Benelux countries, Italy.

And while he was also launching in Japan and Australia, he really had eyes on the big prize, the US market.

So the US was the biggest market for vacuum cleaners.

Americans were buying nearly 18 million vacuums a year.

But Dyson had been in court fighting yet another legal battle against the US giant Hoover.

In 1999, they'd launched their very own bagless vacuum called the Triple Vortex, and Dyson accused Hoover of infringing his patent, and again, he won his case.

The court ordered Hoover to stop selling the Triple Vortex.

Hoover appealed, but lost, and in 2002, they had to pay a total of $6 million in compensation and costs, which was one of the highest settlements for a patent case at that time.

So Dyson have gone from newcomer to taking on the biggest names in vacuum.

cleaning, the biggest in fact in Hoover, and winning.

Now, at the same time, the company that Dyson had been licensing his designs to in America went bankrupt.

So, all this meant that the way was clear for Dyson to launch Dyson the brand stateside.

After a successful trial run, the US chain Best Buy, you'll see their Best Buys all across America, they agreed to stock his product right across the country.

But there was one condition that Dyson ran a national advertising campaign.

And this may be the moment that makes James Dyson so famous, and perhaps the reason we're talking about him today.

Because the creative company Dyson employed to make the ad suggested that Dyson himself should be in the ad.

Now he was a great salesman as we've seen.

He knew the product better than anyone so he agreed.

I mean do you think this is just ego or you know do you think he really was such a brilliant salesman that an advertising team said you should be the face?

I think there's something about Dyson.

He's posh.

Yes, he's very

sound posh.

You know, he's a crazy inventor.

I can see that you know there's probably a bit of ego at work there, but there's probably some smarts as well.

Yeah, some advertising savvy.

Americans do go crazy for a British accent.

I mean, Branson, for example, was very successful in doing that.

And maybe he thought, you know, British guy out there, entrepreneur selling direct to Americans, like the way Branson did with Virgin and what have you.

He knew it could definitely work.

I mean, those first Dyson adverts, which you can still watch online, they are just really surprisingly simple.

It's literally him in his own home explaining the product.

You know, in one of these adverts, he tells the story of the clogged machine from the 70s, plays up all the prototypes he made, and it ends with the tagline, I just think things should work properly.

I mean, who could disagree with that?

Can't disagree with that.

So he spends 20 million on TV advertising in the US.

Now, that might seem a lot, but this is lower than average for a nationwide product launch.

And, you know, it's not a commercial with whiz-bang explosions.

It's just him talking things through.

So it was pretty cheap as well.

Yeah, but they were a great success.

And in fact, soon they're being parodied on late-night comedy shows like Saturday Night Live.

So they really worked.

They made Dyson and his products big in the USA.

US immigration officers started recognizing him.

Oh, you're the 5,000 prototypes guy when he arrived in the country.

And most importantly, they really started to sell.

Dyson vacuum cleaners became so ubiquitous, they featured on sitcoms like Friends, Will and Grace, Ellen.

And a Dyson was even included in the celebrity goodie bag at the 2005 Oscar ceremony.

Talk about the irony of a bagless vacuum cleaner appearing in the bag.

Goody bag.

I like it.

Full circle.

So not only is Dyson getting famous, he's actually getting really, really rich.

So in 2005, two years after launching in the States, Dyson was the number one selling vacuum in the US, beating Hoover.

In fact, one in five of all floor cleaners bought in the US were made by Dyson.

You know, given the fact that people use the word hoovering as a verb, the fact that it became bigger than Hoover is massive.

It's like becoming bigger than Google when it comes to Googling.

Exactly.

Dyson joked that he was the first Brit to conquer America since the Beatles.

And sure enough, he's on his way.

Pretty soon, Dyson is a billionaire.

Forbes, the Financial Magazine, put him on their billionaire list in 2006.

Now, they estimated his fortune to be $1 billion.

Although Dyson is still a private company, so that really is an estimate.

But don't forget, at this point, Dyson owns the whole company.

So yeah, James Dyson is definitely a billionaire.

But while Dyson was getting rich and famous in the US, he wasn't quite as popular back in the UK.

In 2002, Dyson announced they were moving the manufacturing from England to Malaysia.

The site near his home remained as a sort of research and development harbour, Skynet Brains Trust, but it meant the loss of 800 British jobs.

And the trade and industry minister of the UK at the time was annoyed.

A union leader said Dyson had betrayed British manufacturing and British consumers.

Dyson said the move was purely practical.

He needed more factory space and more staff for the big US demand, and that just wasn't possible in the UK.

But cheaper labor costs abroad also meant significantly reduced production costs, and that move really boosted profits in those days when he was becoming a billionaire.

And for his part, Dyson said of the move, I invested £40 million into a vacuum cleaner factory, and I would love to still be there now, but it simply wasn't possible.

If anybody else thinks it is, then they are welcome to have a go.

But I wasted a lot of money money on the factory trying to do it.

Nice words, but when Dyson personally took a £17 million dividend, many more union leaders were angered.

Yeah, Dyson's reputation took a bit of a hit during this period.

I remember in 2003, he became a government-appointed innovation czar advising on Britain to become more competitive.

And that was seen as a bit hypocritical.

It says, oh, you're teaching Britain how to be more competitive whilst at the same time you're moving your manufacturing to the Far East.

Later on, he supported Britain leaving the EU after he previously lobbied for the UK to join the Euro in the 1990s and this was seen as a conflicting position.

So there was a kind of tension between Dyson trying to talk up Britain but at the same time moving most of his manufacturing base out of Britain.

Yeah in fact after Brexit happened he moved his headquarters to Singapore which led some newspapers to call him a hypocrite, even a traitor.

He was called disgraceful.

And actually Dyson sued the Mirror Group newspapers over these accusations, saying it was not only wrong, but incredibly harmful to his reputation.

But Dyson lost a libel case.

And the High Court ruled in 2023 that Mirror Group newspapers had successfully argued its defense of honest opinion.

Now, whatever people's feelings about Dyson the man were, once he actually hit that billion, he continued to be an incredibly successful businessman and made Dyson the company even more successful.

Yeah, he's not going to stop at vacuum cleaners.

He diversified his range of products.

We probably all all know about the, if you've been to a bathroom lately, you know about the air blade.

You put the little hands in and out.

That came out in 2006.

That's everywhere, right?

Yeah, I really struggled to think of the last time I even saw a regular hand dryer in a toilet.

But it was interesting because he really did give a kick up the backside to the toilet hand drying market.

Because in the old days, you used to press that button, you get this little wheezing sound.

You'd be there for ages trying to dry your hands.

Like a machine trying to...

cough.

Yeah, exactly.

This is going to sound so silly, but I remember the first time I used one of these Dyson air blades and I put my hands in and I thought, wow, this is the future.

Which just goes to show even the most mundane technological product can always be made better.

Well, it claimed to reduce hand-drying time from 40 seconds to 10 seconds.

It made Dyson a major player in the international hand dryer industry.

And they've got other products, a bladeless air fan, a supersonic hair dryer.

And one of Dyson's most profitable products are actually air purifiers.

With all these products in lines, he uses the same Dyson approach that he did with the vacuum.

So he looks at how these pre-existing products are made and then he picks it apart.

So that research and development, that R ⁇ D really pays off.

So Dyson comes up with designs that look not a lot like what the competition put out.

Not everything was a success, though.

They tried making a washing machine.

That was too costly.

And I reported on this at the time.

He invested up $3 billion in trying to build an electric car that was quite quietly abandoned.

He had big plans.

I actually went down to the plant with him to see where he was going to make this car.

I mean, he does say that a lot of the technology developed for that that failed electric car has actually helped his other projects.

He also, and this is one of the things he's been in the news for recently here in the UK, he got into farming, not the first of our billionaires to do that.

He's also got Dyson University in the UK which has the power to award degrees.

It's an engineering school which actually pays students as employees and 2025 this year will see the second wave of graduates with a Dyson Institute degree.

And actually in 2024 it was revealed Dyson's invested about half a billion on household robots and artificial intelligence.

So he's still looking towards the future.

And design and innovation still at the heart of what they do today.

Yeah so Dyson owns 10,000 patents and patents pending and it spends $11 million a week on research and development.

He definitely doesn't seem to have lost that obsessive drive and determination that made him a billionaire.

What is he now?

In his 70s, I'm guessing.

Late 70s, 70s.

He's still active in his company.

Not only is he still chairman, but he's also the very public face of Dyson.

He's out there on the chat show circuit.

You'll see him yapping away.

And let's face it, if I was in my late 70s, I'd be hanging my boots up to dry.

Okay, well, listen, that's James Dyson's story to becoming extremely rich, one of the richest men in the UK.

I think it's time to judge him.

This is where we judge people on a number of categories and then we figure out whether they're good, bad, or just another billionaire.

So let's start with wealth.

So currently about $13 billion,

but Dyson has set 2025 as as the completion date for a five-year plan to double his product portfolio.

So you can expect even more Dyson launches, which could potentially raise his wealth even higher, assuming they don't end up on a scrap heap like that electric car.

And he's come a long way since, you know, he made his first million when he was 48, as we've said, a late bloomer in this sense.

So he's come a long way very quickly.

I mean, he's definitely one of the richest British people.

In fact, I think he was the...

richest person in Britain a few years ago.

He's fallen down the list a little bit.

So I'm going to give him, in UK terms, he's at the top of the tree.

In global terms, he's miles off the Musks and the Bezoses of this world.

So I'm going to give him a solid

five.

Yeah, I think a solid five out of ten, you know, while we like to think that Britain is the centre of the world, unfortunately, if you're a rich, very rich person in Britain, it doesn't mean you're in the big leagues at all.

Fair enough.

Okay.

Let's judge him on villainy.

What have they done to get to the top?

Who suffered along the way, if anyone?

so he's actually laid off quite a few people recently in 2024 a thousand job losses were announced at dyson in the uk i think that one of the things counts against him in many people's minds is that he was you know pro-britain britain should go its own way and brexit yeah but this is a man who moved his manufacturing base to the far east with you know lower costs and he also said you know better quality of engineers coming out of asian universities and i think a lot of people found that a bit hypocritical so there's that He's not been universally loved by many of the people who actually work for him.

And I think definitely if you want to take a public political stance as a business person and then you quite publicly seem to do something that goes directly against your stance, I think, you know, you should receive some criticism for that.

And he's become quite vocal in this debate about taxing farmland, a recent change that when farmers, you know, if they die, farmland used to be exempt from inheritance tax.

That is no longer going to be be the case.

He came out very strongly against it.

And people say, well, you would say that.

He's got quite a lot to lose as one of the biggest landowners in the UK.

Some accusations that he only bought all this farmland in order to avoid inheritance tax.

Others would say, well, actually, given the stuff they've done in terms of trying to pioneer new methods of farming, that, you know, just that certainly isn't the full story.

So a bit of debate there.

But, you know, we've had billionaires before who've tried to flex their political influence and muscle in quite public ways.

Maybe part of the criticism against him is because people don't like to see billionaires flexing that muscle quite so publicly.

Yeah, especially when they're pleading a case which you know is going to affect them personally.

Yeah.

But at the end of the day, these are, you know, political spats, arguments where reasonable minds can differ on some of this kind of stuff.

He's not a drug dealer.

No, he's certainly not an arms dealer like some of the billionaires we've covered on our podcast.

So if to the extent it's villainy, it's pretty low-level villainy, if it is there at all.

So I'm going to give him a

three for villainy.

I'm going to give him a four out of ten.

Okay.

All right, we go on to philanthropy.

He's given away quite a lot of money.

Let's just recap where it's gone.

So £50 million to his former boarding school, Gresham's.

£100 million through his foundation to educational and medical research, mostly to cancer and meningitis.

He contracted meningitis himself when he was 45.

That's old to get meningitis.

I know while he was still trying to build Dyson the brand.

Wow.

Wow.

And Dyson has funded engineering education programmes since 2002.

And since 2009, there's been an increase of engineering graduates in the UK.

There's no doubt he is held up as a kind of modern day, I don't know, James Stevenson or Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

He became the most famous engineer in Britain.

And engineering, you know, not usually the sexiest of subjects.

He's probably done quite a lot for that kind of degree and discipline.

I mean, he's given a lot of money away.

He has got a lot, so I'm going to give him a six for philanthropy.

Yeah, I think I would give him a six for philanthropy too.

It's very targeted towards his interests and also his local area.

Exactly.

Okay, six each on that one.

But some of those comments take us neatly into power and legacy.

I mean, he's changed marketplaces pretty drastically.

When he launches a product, the market usually remains permanently changed by his designs.

Nearly all electrical companies now sell a bagless vacuum cleaner, including his old enemy Hoover.

The Airblade has seen most hand-dryer manufacturers increase their airspeed.

They're pretty ubiquitous.

Yeah, so where Dyson goes, others follow.

Interestingly, by 2008, more men were actually seen to be vacuuming.

So an estimated 50% of male partners do the household task.

Asked why more men were now vacuuming, Dyson at the time said, probably because I've turned what's seen as a humble domestic appliance into an exciting machine.

I think there's all sorts of problematic things with that sentence.

I know, yeah.

And also, in terms of legacy, I think he made engineering sexy again.

He made being a designer something that people wanted to get get into.

I think that was quite inspirational to quite a whole generation of kids and young designers.

In terms of power, he's still trying to wield that political power.

He's getting involved in political debates in the UK.

He writes editorial leaders for newspapers, laying out his opinions on things.

He's got some political muscle, I think.

Yeah, on power and legacy, I think Dyson will go down as one of the most important engineers in British history.

So I'm going to give him

an eight in the UK and a six worldwide.

Okay, so the average of that is what, seven?

Yeah, I would give him a seven out of ten.

Okay.

And then we have to decide: is he good, bad, or just another billionaire?

Well, now I have to confess that I have never used a bagless vacuum cleaner.

So I cannot comment on whether it's better or worse.

So I feel like my decision will be, would have been influenced if I did have a bagless vacuum cleaner and thought it was terrific.

I've never used a Dyson vacuum cleaner myself, although he did let me have a go of one of his whilst he actually did a demonstration of hoovering stuff off in one of his showrooms.

But I think that we can all say, for those people coming out of the loo with wet hands, that he has made a sizable difference to the hand-drying routine.

And the earlier comments about what he's done for British engineering and aspiration and design and whatever.

I'm going to say he is marginally.

There are some problems, but I'm going to say, James Dyson, you are a good billionaire.

Oh.

You seem torn.

Yeah, I'm kind of torn because to me, this is a story of just another billionaire.

But then I will admit that, you know, the things that he has invented, even though I myself have not personally experienced it, the hair dryer or the fans or the

purifier.

I've used the hand dryer and the bladeless fan.

Yeah, I mean, it is good, isn't it?

They are good products.

And not to make this sound like SponCon, but you know, nobody's coming.

SpongeCon is that sponsored content.

Sponsored content, yes.

I've never heard that abbreviation before.

You learn something new every episode.

With you, I always do.

I would say, yeah, maybe he does marginally edge into the good billionaire category.

We've not had very many inventors, and I do think inventing things should be applauded.

Inventing is cool.

We need inventors.

And this guy's basically reinvented the wheel, sort of.

The wheelbarrow.

So, Sir James Dyson, you are officially a good billionaire.

Zing and I have more intriguing billionaires lined up for the new season.

Join us each week for a closer look at the lives of some of the world's richest people.

From Minecraft creator Marcus Persson to basketball star LeBron James, we've got comic book mogos, film directors, computer programmers, sports stars, and lots of other very, very rich people lined up too.

So don't forget to subscribe to Good Bad Billionaire wherever you get your podcasts.

Good Bad Billionaire is a BBC World Service podcast.

It's produced by Mark Ward with additional production by Tamzin Curry and Sarah Joyner.

Paul Smith is the editor and it's a BBC Studios audio production.

For the BBC World Service, the senior podcast producer is Kat Collins and the commissioning editor is John Mannell.

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