Paul Allen, Microsoft co-founder and ‘idea man,’ dies at age 65
Los Angeles Times
Paul Allen, the taciturn computer programmer who founded the software behemoth Microsoft with Bill Gates when he was 22 and walked away eight years later with what would become one of the largest fortunes in the history of American capitalism, died Monday in Seattle. He was 65.
The cause was complications of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, according to his financial company, Vulcan Inc.
Although once dubbed the “accidental zillionaire” by Wired magazine, Allen was in fact an essential part of the launch and early success of Microsoft, which thrived on the combination of Allen’s creative programming genius and Gates’ hard-driving business acumen.
“I guess you would call me the doer and Paul the idea man,” Gates said in 1981. “I’m more aggressive and crazily competitive, the front man running the business day to day, while Paul keeps us out front in research and development.”
As early as 1977, Allen was telling Gates and other friends about his vision of a “wired world.” Writing in a trade magazine at the time, he predicted that the personal computer would become “the kind of thing that people carry with them, a companion that takes notes, does accounting, gives reminders, handles a thousand personal tasks.”
The difference between the two Microsoft founders was that “Gates wanted more than anything to make money; Allen wanted more than anything to be the first to spot a technological idea,” Laura Rich wrote in her biography, “The Accidental Zillionaire: Demystifying Paul Allen.” “It was a partnership made in heaven—and it worked.”
Allen left the company’s day-to-day operations in 1983, against the wishes of his friend Gates, a year after beginning treatments for Hodgkin lymphoma. The treatments were successful, but the illness had left him exhausted and also newly imbued with a sense of his own mortality and the need, as he put it, “to re-evaluate your priorities.”
Microsoft stock went public in 1986, and by the end of the first trading day, Allen’s shares were worth $134 million. He kept a substantial investment in Microsoft stock throughout his life, and his net worth at the time of his death was $20.3 billion, according to Forbes magazine, which ranked him as the 21st wealthiest person in the world this year.
After leaving Microsoft, Allen decided he wanted to have fun with his money, to donate to worthwhile causes and to invest in “other people to do exciting, new, creative things,” as he told the Los Angeles Times in 1995. He devoted the rest of his life to spending that vast fortune—on an opulent lifestyle of planes, yachts and fancy homes, on an eclectic mix of philanthropic causes and on myriad investments that included professional sports teams, space travel and technology.
Allen’s largest venture in Southern California was the aerospace company Stratolaunch, which he founded in 2011 with the goal of building a massive aircraft that could launch rockets into orbit from an altitude of 30,000 feet. In the years since, the company has built the largest airplane in the world, with a 385-foot wingspan, at its Mojave Desert facility. Through his investment firm Vulcan Capital, Allen also made major investments in a number of Southern California companies, including TrueCar, Activision Blizzard and nuclear fusion startup Tri Alpha Energy.
He also owned the NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers and the NFL’s Seattle Seahawks and had a stake in the Seattle Sounders soccer team.
Despite his wealth, he retained the aura of the computer geek he had always been. He was a preternaturally reserved man who dressed modestly, appeared uneasy in public and closely guarded his privacy.
Bill Hilf, chief executive of Vulcan, said Allen was driven by a desire to make the world a better place.
“He possessed a remarkable intellect and a passion to solve some of the world’s most difficult problems, with the conviction that creative thinking and new approaches could make profound and lasting impact,” Hilf said in a statement.
Allen’s sister Jody Allen called him “a remarkable individual on every level.”
“While most knew Paul Allen as a technologist and philanthropist,” she said in a statement, “for us he was a much loved brother and uncle, and an exceptional friend.”
Paul Gardner Allen was born in Seattle on Jan. 21, 1953. His parents, who met in their hometown of Anadarko, Okla., had recently moved to the Northwest; his father, Kenneth, was assistant director of libraries at the University of Washington, and his mother, Faye, earned a certificate to teach elementary school.
Like his parents, Allen was a voracious reader, mostly of novels and science fiction. A neighbor’s record collection turned him on to the rock music scene in the late 1960s and especially Jimi Hendrix, also a Seattle native.
“I felt immediately touched” by Hendrix’s music, Allen once told Rolling Stone. “It was like hearing music from another planet.”
Allen was a sophomore at Lakeside School when he met Gates, who was two years younger, and they quickly bonded over their mutual fascination with the then-emerging world of computers.
Allen and Gates’ first venture together was in 1971, when Allen was enrolled in computer sciences at Washington State University. The two teenagers built a simple computer to analyze city traffic data. The venture never made money, but it convinced them that their time was better spent writing software than building computers.
Gates graduated and went to Harvard; Allen dropped out of college and followed, taking a programming job at Honeywell in Boston. On a cold December day in 1974, Allen was on his way to see Gates when he saw a Popular Electronics cover featuring the Altair, a build-it-yourself personal computer kit being sold by two inventors in Albuquerque.
Allen persuaded Gates to help write a version of the programming language Basic for the Altair’s Intel chip, something some experts at the time said couldn’t be done. In a two-month marathon, they did it.
It was the beginning of Microsoft.