$30 As spendaholic Microsoft Billion genius Paul Allen dies ...
geek who never got over Bill Gates plotting against him while he had cancer
FRoM St Barts to Cannes, and every celebrity drenched billionaire watering hole in between, nobody threw a party quite like Paul Allen.
The arrival in port of the Microsoft co-founder’s vast superyacht — he had three to choose from, but usually it was the 414ft, $ 200 million (£ 152 million) octopus — was the signal that other prospective party-givers might as well weigh anchor and put to sea.
After all, who could compete with an eight-deck pleasure palace that boasted a nightclub, spa, recording studio, swimming pool that converted into a dance-floor, two helipads, basketball court and two submarines, one of which — yellow, naturally — could submerge for days at a time.
Nor could anybody compete with the celebrities typically on his guest list. In 1998, he took 400 people — including Jerry Hall, Carrie Fisher and film director James Cameron — on a £5.5 million Alaskan cruise for his 45th birthday bash, during which Lou Reed performed. Two years later, he spent £8 million flying 200 guests, including Sir Paul McCartney and Tom Hanks, to Helsinki and then on to St Petersburg.
Among those who attended his 2008 New Year’s Eve party in St Bart’s were Steven Spielberg, Denzel Washington, rock and pop stars Jon Bon Jovi and Billy Joel, model Linda Evangelista and his fellow billionaire George Soros.
‘He is like a Medici prince, a grand seigneur, someone who entertains in the old style,’ said one Hollywood producer who regularly attended his parties, in the process possibly breaking the nondisclosure agreements that Allen reportedly made guests sign. Such secrecy helped ensure Allen’s relative obscurity compared to the superstardom of Bill Gates, the Microsoft comrade he would later damningly accuse of plotting against him as he battled cancer.
The soft-spoken, shy and reclusive Allen — a generous philanthropist once described as the ‘nicest billionaire you’ll never meet’ — was most at home talking about computers or World War II planes.
However, he would come alive for his other great passion — rock music. Clutching an electric guitar and backed by a house band he kept permanently on call, the thickly spectacled and geeky Allen
loved to rock the house. U2, Johnny Cash, Stevie Wonder and Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics were among stars who reportedly jammed on board.
The show, sadly, is now over for Allen. The man who helped usher in the personal computing revolution died aged 65 in Seattle on Monday after a long battle against cancer. His family said the specific cause of death was complications of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
Allen, who never married or had children, had been dogged by cancer since his first diagnosis in 1982. A year later, the disease prompted him to leave Microsoft, but only, Allen claimed later, after co-founder Gates had ruthlessly tried to exploit his illness to weaken his stake in the company.
The pair met at private school in Seattle and bonded over the school’s first computer, sharing a determination to understand how it worked. Later, Allen persuaded his best friend to drop out of Harvard University and set up a software business with him.
Allen provided the technical genius (writing the computer code that would become the ubiquitous MS-DOS), while ambitious Gates served as the business brains.
He was uncannily prescient, writing in a computing magazine as long ago as 1977: ‘I expect the personal computer to become the kind of thing people carry, a companion that takes notes, does accounting, gives reminders, handles a thousand personal tasks.’
In the same year he predicted the internet, outlining his vision for a network of computers on which people could sell their cars or check the price of groceries.
In a scathing 2011 memoir, Allen portrayed Gates — for decades the world’s richest man — as a slavedriving micro-manager who thrived on conflict. Returning to work after an initial course of radiation therapy and a bone marrow transplant for his lymphoma, Allen said he overheard a conversation between Gates and Steve Ballmer, who had been brought in to manage the company. ‘They were bemoaning my recent lack of production and discussing how they might dilute my Microsoft equity by issuing options to themselves and other shareholders,’ he wrote.
‘Unable to stand it any longer, I burst in and shouted, “This is unbelievable! It shows your true character, once and for all.” ’
Gates, who later apologised, yesterday said he was ‘ heartbroken’ to have lost one of his ‘oldest and dearest friends’.
ALTHOUGH he claimed his memory of events was somewhat different, Gates later sent Allen a six-page handwritten letter. Allen felt it managed to acknowledge his contribution to Microsoft while still belittling it.
Whatever the truth of that conversation and Gates’s intentions, the incident did not result in Allen losing either shares or money.
In their subsequent battle to take the credit over the years, Allen would portray himelf as the one who came up with the breakthrough ideas in Microsoft’s early years.
Allen would later insist he forgave Gates, however he admitted it rankled to be dubbed ‘The Accidental Zillionaire’ — a reference to the fact Microsoft only became really successful, and he super-rich, after he left it. The Press dubbed him ‘the bitter billionaire’ as he saw Gates become the world’s richest man at the same time as his own role in Microsoft was barely remembered.
Yet the decision to leave Microsoft was a simple one. ‘If I were to relapse, it would be pointless — if not hazardous — to return to the stresses at Microsoft,’ he wrote. ‘If I continued to recover, I now understood that life was too short to spend it unhappily.’
However, holding onto his share of Microsoft and his 28 per cent stake made him an instant multimillionaire when it became a publicly traded company in 1986. His wealth peaked at about $30 billion (£23 billion) in 1999, and Forbes magazine estimated his fortune at the time of his death at $21.7 billion (£16.5 billion), making him the world’s 44th richest person.
He was a passionate collector of just about anything money could buy, amassing extensive and hugely valuable art and antiquities collections — the former boasting works by Monet, Renoir, Rodin and Rothko.
In 1998, Allen bought Lucian Freud’s acclaimed painting Large Interior W11 (After Watteau) for just over £3.5 million at auction in New York. It was a record price for a living British artist and is now thought to be worth £60million.
Allen’s mansion in Seattle had a huge underground car park for his vast collection of sports cars. And that was just one of his homes. He had others across the globe including in New York, Holland Park in London, Cap Ferrat on the French Riviera and a 292-acre private island north of Seattle. Inside his own hangar at Seattle airport, he kept various jets including two Boeing 757s ( the 757 Donald Trump used as his personal plane until his election as president was bought from Allen) and a collection of 15 flyable planes from World War II. He had set out to buy one of each of the fighters he built as Airfix kits when he was a boy.
A loyal supporter of his home town, he bought the local American football team, the Seahawks, for $200 million, the nearby Portland Trail Blazers basketball team for $ 70million, and invested $250 million in a music and memorabilia museum in Seattle.
A sci-fi devotee, he invested heavily in space exploration. His rocket, SpaceShipOne, won him a prize for putting the first privately funded craft into space. He was also a major contributor to the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project.
In 2011, he created Stratolaunch, a company that aims to launch rockets from a giant plane. He was one of the key investors in a project that has an estimated cost of $300 million (£227 million).
Despite his army of celebrity friends, he was hardly a lothario. He was briefly linked with Jerry Hall after she split up with Mick Jagger in 1999 and was previously reported to have had a romance with tennis player Monica Seles.
BUT he had a reputation for ending relationships abruptly and was reputedly so socially gauche that if a conversation took a direction he didn’t like he simply walked away.
Insiders say he had few close friends, although he was devoted to his widowed mother, whom he lived with until her death in 2012, and his sister, Jody, who acted as his gatekeeper. ‘My face is not wellknown,’ he admitted. ‘ So if somebody runs into me at a party, typically they have no idea if I’m just one of the guitar players in the band or if I’m the host.’
Allen didn’t reserve his superyacht just for partying with famous ‘friends’. In 2012, and again in 2015, he lent Octopus, its 60-strong crew and — most importantly — its deep- sea sub, to an ultimately successful British effort to recover the ship’s bell from HMS Hood, the Royal Navy’s last battlecruiser, sunk by the Bismarck in 1941.
Allen once complained to his friend, the author Douglas Adams, that he felt frustrated with his wealth. ‘I’ve spent money on jets, boats. I don’t know what to do next,’ he said.
Adams suggested he throw himself into philanthropy. Allen eventually did, giving away almost $2 billion (£1.5 billion) to good causes and helping to ensure that he will be remembered for so much more than being the world’s most unlikely international playboy.