Microsoft’s Allen dies of cancer
Paul Allen, who founded Microsoft with Bill Gates in the 1970s and went on to become an investor, philanthropist and sports team owner, died on Monday after his latest battle with cancer, at age 65.
“My brother was a remarkable individual on every level,” Allen’s sister, Jody, said.
“While most knew Paul Allen as a technologist and phiplane lanthropist, for us he was a much-loved brother and uncle, and an exceptional friend.”
In recent years, Allen was known as the owner of the NFL’s Seattle Seahawks and the NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers, and part owner of the Major League Soccer team the Seattle Sounders, along with business and charitable ventures.
One of the world’s wealthiest billionaires, Allen also founded Stratolaunch Systems, which built the world’s largest designed as a colossal rocket-launching aircraft touted as the future of space travel.
The craft was on track for its first launch demonstration as early as 2019.
Allen died just two weeks after publicly revealing that the non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma he fought into remission nine years ago had returned.
The incurable cancer affects white blood cells.
He never married and had no children.
Allen was a high school classmate of Gates in Seattle, and later, while working as a computer programmer, persuaded his friend to drop out of Harvard to create Microsoft, which became the world’s most valuable company in the 1990s.
A “heartbroken” Gates remembered Allen as “one of my oldest and dearest friends”.
“He was fond of saying, ‘if it has the potential to do good, then we should do it’. That’s the kind of person he was.”
Allen had left Microsoft by 1983 for health reasons but held on to shares that made up the bulk of his fortune, estimated at about $20bn (R284.6bn).
In his 2011 memoir Idea Man, Allen described a stormy relationship with Gates in the early days of Microsoft.
Allen wrote that he had expected a 50-50 split in the new company, but Gates insisted on taking 60%, and later raised it to 64%.