NEWSMAKER-JetBlue chief still ahead in tough industry Thursday August 1, 7:13 PM EDT By Julie MacIntosh NEW YORK, Aug. 1 (Reuters) - JetBlue Airways' (JBLU) David Neeleman is showing that it may take someone with self-diagnosed attention deficit disorder and a stream of unconventional ideas to build success in the airline business. The airline industry has never been lauded for its stellar investment returns. But Neeleman, a restless entrepreneur who started his first business before dropping out of the University of Utah, has turned it into an outright goldmine. Neeleman sold a startup discount airline to the industry's low-cost legend Southwest Airlines (LUV) a decade ago for $130 million, and later sold a computerized reservation system to Hewlett-Packard, all before reaching his late 30s. But his current entrepreneurial incarnation -- New York-based JetBlue -- has been his most successful by far, and this time he says he's there for the long haul. Neeleman, one of seven siblings, is a low-key guy who favors khakis to business suits. He tithes 10 percent of his earnings as a devout Mormon, and wears a calculator watch to facilitate spontaneous number-crunching. In his first successful spin around the airline industry's block, Neeleman co-founded Salt Lake City-based carrier Morris Air, which grew into a thorn in Southwest's side and was eventually acquired by Southwest in 1993. Neeleman did a short stint at Southwest, but soon signed a five-year agreement not to compete and left. His hiatus was "miserable," as he made bad investments and struggled against what he calls attention deficit disorder (ADD). "He picked up a book on ADD but couldn't get through it," JetBlue spokesman Gareth Edmonson-Jones joked. LEADING THE BLIND? But that restlessness later served as the spark for JetBlue, and Neeleman followed his idea to the East Coast with his wife and nine kids -- who range in age from 3 to 21. Despite the airline industry's reputation as a haven for boisterous characters in leadership roles, Neeleman's suburban soccer-coach style is surprisingly effective. Two-and-a-half-year-old JetBlue, a low-cost airline growing at warp speed, has posted profits for six straight quarters despite a huge travel slump. And the company is riding high off its monstrously successful initial public offering in April. JetBlue's fame has spread largely by word of mouth, thanks to the leather seats and satellite TVs on all of its planes and its reservation agents, who work from home and answer the phone on its first ring. But it still has its skeptics. Continental Airlines (CAL) CEO Gordon Bethune has said the odds of JetBlue's long-term success are remote, and in a recent Time magazine article he even called JetBlue's staffers "losers" and said they were "smoking ragweed," a slam Neeleman refers to laughingly. For now, Neeleman has teasing rights. JetBlue's market cap has solidly eclipsed that of all of the major airlines except for Southwest. "We could be the best airline out there and still not be that great," Neeleman said. The nation's eight largest airlines racked up $1.4 billion in losses during the second quarter of this year, and most of them have cut back on capacity since Sept. 11 to save money. MIDAS TOUCH JetBlue, on the other hand, is twice as large as it was a year ago, and just became the domestic air carrier with the biggest presence at New York's John F. Kennedy airport. Neeleman says JetBlue is "plane-constrained," and its load factor, which measures the percentage of seats it fills, has hovered so high above the industry average that it recently cut back on advertising. Neeleman, who controls an 8.1 percent JetBlue stake worth more than $150 million, raised $130 million in capital in two weeks from big investors like George Soros and Weston Presidio -- the largest amount ever for a startup airline. JetBlue started with two jets shuttling between New York and Fort Lauderdale. Two and a half years later, the airline is flying 28 Airbus A320 jets, and its shares are trading nearly 60 percent above their IPO price of $27. Neeleman's piece of JetBlue's pie could have been a lot bigger -- he had the chance to buy hundreds of thousands of JetBlue stock options before the IPO at a dollar apiece, which could have translated into another $20 million in his pocket. But he opted against what he said would have been "an embarrassment of riches," and holds no company stock options. The sale of Morris Air was financially lucrative -- Neeleman pocketed about $20 million -- but he said he felt little personal fulfillment, and blamed some of his eagerness to cash out on his young age. This time around, he says he isn't selling -- partly because his cash-strapped competitors can't afford JetBlue. Roger EWROPS