Paul Allen

Allen, whose full name was Paul Gardner Allen, was born on January 21, 1953, in Seattle, Washington; his father, Kenneth Sam Allen, was associate director of libraries at the University of Washington, and his mother, Faye, was a teacher. His parents regularly took him and his sister, Jody, to museums, libraries and concerts, and the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair made a strong impression on him; from an early age he loved drawing rockets and reading science fiction, and at 10 he started a science club in his basement.⁠[1][2][2][2][2]

In 1965 Allen entered the seventh grade at Lakeside School, a private school in Seattle. In 1968 the school used proceeds from the Mothers Club rummage sale to lease a Teletype terminal for computer time-sharing, and Allen became hooked on programming and met Bill Gates, two years his junior, at the terminal. The pair later struck a deal with a nearby company, Computer Center Corporation (C-Cubed), to get free, unlimited computer time in exchange for trying to find bugs in the operating system of its new PDP-10 mainframe, often cutting gym class to take the bus there; Allen also went through the company’s garbage for operating system source code and taught himself assembly language.⁠[1][3][3][4][4][4][4]

In 1972 Allen enrolled at Washington State University and left after two years; at Gates’s urging he moved to Boston, taking a $12,500 programming job at Honeywell, reuniting with Gates, then at HarvardHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry, and working with him on side projects.⁠[1][3][3][4]

In December 1974 Popular Electronics featured a new personal computer, the Altair 8800. Without a machine of their own, Allen and Gates told Ed Roberts of its manufacturer, MITS, that they had BASIC running on it, and then wrote a BASIC interpreter in eight weeks; Allen flew to Albuquerque to demonstrate it, realized just before landing that he had forgotten the bootstrap loader and wrote it out by hand, and the demo succeeded. He convinced Gates to leave school, and on April 4, 1975, the two founded Microsoft in Albuquerque; the name “Micro-Soft,” from microprocessors and software, is credited to Allen, and MITS was the company’s first customer.⁠[4][4][4][4][1][4][4]

Allen wrote in his memoir that he had assumed the two would split the company equally, but Gates, arguing that he had done most of the BASIC work in Boston without a salary, proposed 60-40, which Allen accepted as fair; soon afterward, on a walk-and-talk, Gates asked for 64-36, and Allen, though surprised, agreed without haggling. Their formal partnership agreement, signed on February 3, 1977, included a clause allowing Gates to demand that Allen withdraw from the partnership in the event of “irreconcilable differences.”⁠[3][3][3][3][3][3]

By the end of 1978 Microsoft had 13 employees and its first international office in Japan, and in January 1979 it moved to Bellevue, east of Seattle, with Allen overseeing technology. In 1980 IBM sought an operating system for its personal computer, code-named “Project Chess,” and Microsoft, led by Allen, met IBM’s demanding requirements and aggressive timetable, giving birth to MS-DOS. Allen said that before DOS Microsoft was an important software company, and after DOS it was the essential one. In April 1980 Gates recruited his Harvard classmate Steve BallmerSteve BallmerSteve Ballmer is an American businessman and philanthropist who joined Microsoft in 1980 and succeeded Bill Gates as its chief executive officer from 2000 to 2014. After stepping down he bought the NBA’s Los Angeles Clippers, co-founded the philanthropy Ballmer Group with his wife Connie Ballmer, and founded the government-data website USAFacts.Open the full entry to run the business; Allen wrote in his memoir that he had agreed to offer Ballmer up to 5 percent of the company, but Gates offered 8.75 percent while Allen was away on a trip, which angered him.⁠[4][4][4][4][4][3][3][3]

On September 25, 1982, Allen, then 29, underwent a biopsy at the Swedish Medical Center in Seattle and was diagnosed with Stage 1-A, early-stage Hodgkin’s lymphoma; he went through six weeks of radiation therapy and stayed on at Microsoft during treatment. He wrote in his memoir that during this period he argued that MS-DOS should move from flat licensing fees to per-copy royalties, but was opposed by Gates and Ballmer (Microsoft later switched to per-copy licensing); soon afterward he told Ballmer he might start his own company and told Gates that his days as a full-time executive were probably numbered.⁠[3][5][3][3][6][3][3][3]

In his 2011 memoir, Idea Man, Allen wrote that one evening in late December 1982 he overheard Gates and Ballmer speaking heatedly in Gates’s office, bemoaning his recent lack of production and discussing how they might dilute his Microsoft equity by issuing options to themselves and other shareholders, something they had clearly been thinking about for some time. He wrote that he burst in, told them it showed their “true character,” and walked out; as he saw it, he was a co-founder and still an active member of management despite his illness, yet his partner and colleague were “scheming to rip me off,” which was “mercenary opportunism, plain and simple.”⁠[3][3][3][3][3][3]

According to the memoir, Ballmer called Allen’s home that evening and came over to apologize, saying they had just been letting off steam, that the stock idea was not fair and that neither he nor Gates would have anything to do with it; a few days later Allen received a six-page handwritten letter from Gates dated December 31, 1982. Before the memoir’s publication in 2011, Gates told The Wall Street Journal that his recollection of many of these events might differ from Allen’s but that he valued Allen’s friendship and his important contributions to technology and to Microsoft; Microsoft told CNET it had nothing to say, having earlier told the Journal that Ballmer had no comment.⁠[3][3][3][3][6][6]

On February 18, 1983, Allen’s resignation as Microsoft’s executive vice president of research and new product development became official, but he kept his board seat and was voted vice chairman. He wrote in his memoir that before he left, Gates offered to buy his shares for $5 each, that he refused to discuss anything below $10, and that looking back he was glad he had not sold. He served on Microsoft’s board from June 1981 to April 1985 and again from May 1990 to November 2000, and afterward as a senior strategy adviser to its executives; his friendship with Gates lasted until his death.⁠[3][4][3][3][3][4][4]

In 1986 Allen and his sister Jody Allen founded Vulcan Inc. in Seattle as an investment and project-management firm. When Microsoft went public that year he became a multimillionaire overnight and decided he wanted to buy an NBA team.⁠[1][7]

In May 1988 Allen attended his first press conference as the new owner of the Portland Trail Blazers, where previous owner Larry Weinberg introduced him as “first of all a fan.” The same year he established the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, beginning a philanthropic effort through which he eventually gave away more than $2 billion, and bought and restored Seattle’s Cinerama theater, which faced demolition.⁠[7][7][1]

In the 1990s Allen believed humanity was on the cusp of a high-speed connected “wired world” and invested in more than a hundred internet, media and communications companies. In 1992 he founded Asymetrix, his first post-Microsoft company, a web presentation and e-learning software firm, and put about $100 million into Interval Research to develop next-generation technology; early investments by his firm Vulcan Capital included AOL, Ticketmaster, DreamWorks and Starwave, parts of which later evolved into ESPN.com. In 1995 he invested $500 million to help Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen create DreamWorks.⁠[8][8][8][9][8][10]

In 1992 he loaned $20 million (later committing up to $30 million) to buy land for a proposed Seattle Commons park in the South Lake Union neighborhood, agreeing to donate the money if the public approved the project; voters rejected it in 1995 and 1996, and the land reverted to him. In 1998 Vulcan adopted a “Connected Community” vision, leading to a roughly two-decade redevelopment of the area into a dense urban neighborhood; from 2007 Amazon leased space there, forming its headquarters campus.⁠[11][11][1][11][1]

In the mid-1990s Ken Behring, then owner of the NFL’s Seattle Seahawks, began moving the team to Southern California, and local politicians turned to Allen, who already owned the Trail Blazers. Allen said that if he entered the NBA out of passion, he was called to the NFL out of civic duty. He made the purchase contingent on statewide voter approval of a new stadium, and on June 17, 1997, Referendum 48 passed by a razor-thin 51.1-to-48.9-percent margin, creating a public-private funding arrangement; he then bought the team from Behring for $194 million, keeping it in Seattle.⁠[12][12][12][12][12][13][13]

In 1998 Allen spent $4.5 billion to buy a controlling interest in Charter Communications, making it the centerpiece of his “wired world” vision. Charter went public in 1999 and became the fourth-largest cable company in the United States, but acquisitions at top-of-the-market prices brought heavy debt, and Allen reportedly clashed repeatedly with its chief executive. In 2009 Charter filed for bankruptcy reorganization and Allen gave up control, with his loss estimated at $7 billion; ForbesForbesForbes is an American business media brand that began with Forbes magazine, founded by B.C. Forbes in 1917. It is known for rankings such as the Forbes 400, the World’s Billionaires list and 30 Under 30, and operates Forbes.com, ForbesLive events and licensed editions in 81 countries. Since 2014 a majority stake has been held by the Hong Kong investment group Integrated Whale Media; a 2021 plan to list on the New York Stock Exchange through a special purpose acquisition company was terminated in 2022. It is headquartered in Jersey City, New Jersey.Open the full entry called it “his biggest disaster” and one of the most stunning individual investment losses ever.⁠[14][14][14][14][14]

In 1996 Allen and Jody hired architect Frank Gehry to design a nonprofit museum centered on music exploration; Gehry cut electric guitars into pieces for inspiration. The 140,000-square-foot Experience Music Project (EMP) opened in June 2000 below Seattle’s Space Needle alongside the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame, later expanding to cover film, television, games and other popular culture and renaming itself the Museum of Pop Culture (MoPOP). Allen himself was a Jimi Hendrix fan and rock guitarist who played in bands including Grown Men and The Underthinkers and recorded albums.⁠[15][15][15][1][1][16]

In 2003 Allen founded the Allen Institute for Brain Science. Its first project, the Allen Brain Atlas, produced a genome-wide map of gene expression in the mouse brain in three years and released it to the public, followed by the Allen Spinal Cord Atlas in July 2008 and the Allen Human Brain Atlas in April 2011. He went on to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in further institutes, including the Allen Institute for Cell Science (December 2014), the Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group (March 2016) and the Allen Institute for Immunology.⁠[17][17][17][17][17][17][17]

Earlier, at astronomer Carl Sagan’s urging, Allen and other partners donated $1 million to keep the SETI Institute running, and he later underwrote the Allen Telescope Array, which began operating in 2007. In 2004 he teamed with aerospace engineer Burt Rutan to build the air-launched SpaceShipOne, the world’s first private spacecraft to carry an astronaut into suborbital space, which won the Ansari X Prize; three months later its technology was licensed to Richard Branson for Virgin’s SpaceShipTwo line, and SpaceShipOne itself went to the National Air and Space Museum.⁠[18][18][18][18][18][18]

In 2009 Allen was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and underwent chemotherapy. In July 2010 he joined the Giving Pledge launched by Gates and Warren Buffett, saying he had long planned for the majority of his estate to go to philanthropy to continue the work of his family foundation and fund nonprofit scientific research, and that net worth is ultimately defined not by dollars but by how well we serve others. The same year he gave $26 million to his alma mater, Washington State University, then the largest gift in its history.⁠[5][19][19][19][1][20]

On April 19, 2011, Allen published his memoir, Idea Man: A Memoir by the Cofounder of Microsoft, through Portfolio, an imprint of the Penguin Group, after Vanity Fair ran an excerpt on March 30. He wrote it after the second recurrence of his lymphoma and chose the title because it reflected how he saw himself, always looking for the next big challenge. Its portrayal of Gates drew wide attention.⁠[6][3][2][2][6]

On October 12, 2011, Allen and his colleague Mark Greaves published “The Singularity Isn’t Near” in MIT Technology Review, arguing that the technological singularity described by futurists such as Ray KurzweilRay KurzweilRay Kurzweil is an American inventor, author and futurist and a principal researcher at Google. He was the principal inventor of the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, omni-font optical character recognition and the CCD flatbed scanner, and is known for Kurzweil synthesizers and speech recognition systems; in books such as The Singularity Is Near he predicted that artificial intelligence would reach human level by 2029 and that humans would merge with machine intelligence around 2045 (the “Singularity”), making him a leading figure of techno-optimism and transhumanism, while his predictions have also long drawn criticism.Open the full entry, even if it eventually occurs, is not near, that the so-called Law of Accelerating Returns is not a physical law, and that the 2045 prediction seemed quite far-fetched. Kurzweil responded that Allen appeared not to have read his book. The same year Allen founded Stratolaunch Systems to develop a giant airplane for launching rockets from the air.⁠[21][21][21][22][1]

In 2013–2014 Allen created the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (Ai2), a nonprofit research institute in Seattle, to find transformative ways to develop AI to address the world’s biggest challenges. After the 2014 West African Ebola outbreak he gave $100 million to support an international collaborative response, the largest single private donation to that effort, and a year later awarded a further $11 million in grants for innovations to shorten epidemic response times. In 2015 he received the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy for his work on Ebola, brain research and the environment.⁠[1][23][23][24][24][1]

The 2013–2016 Great Elephant Census that Allen funded enlisted park and wildlife staff from 18 countries to survey Africa’s savanna elephants. His team explored the deep ocean from the yacht Octopus and the research vessel R/V Petrel, locating in 2015 the wreck of the Japanese battleship Musashi, sunk in World War II, and helping the UK Royal Navy raise the bell of the battlecruiser HMS Hood the same year.⁠[25][25][26][26][26][26]

In 2018 Allen’s non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma recurred for the third time. On Monday, October 15, 2018, he died of complications of the disease at the Swedish Cancer Institute in Seattle, aged 65. He left a $20 million personal bequest to the institute, announced in November 2021, which established the Paul G. Allen Research Center. Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella called his contributions to the company, the industry and the community “indispensable.”⁠[2][2][5][5][4]

On April 13, 2019, the Stratolaunch aircraft that Allen founded and funded made its first flight from the Mojave Air and Space Port in California. The six-engine aircraft, with a 117-meter wingspan, the largest of any airplane, was designed to launch satellite-carrying rockets from airliner cruising altitude. The team dedicated the flight to Allen, saying he would have been exceptionally proud to see his aircraft take flight.⁠[27][18][27][18][27][27]

On November 9, 2022, Christie’s in New York auctioned Allen’s art collection; all 60 lots in the first sale found buyers for a total of $1.5 billion with fees, the highest sum ever achieved for a single-owner sale, with five works selling for $100 million or more. The proceeds went to philanthropic causes Allen had established. The same year his estate sold the research vessel R/V Petrel.⁠[28][28][28][28][28][26]

After Allen’s death, the Seahawks and Trail Blazers were overseen by his sister, Jody Allen. In September 2025 the estate agreed to sell the Trail Blazers to an investment group led by Tom Dundon, a deal completed in March 2026. After the Seahawks won their second Super Bowl in February 2026, the estate began the sale process on February 18, signed an agreement with the family of Vinod and Neeru Khosla on July 11 at a league-record price of $9.612 billion, won unanimous approval from NFL owners on August 26, and the team officially changed hands in September 2026.⁠[13][13][7][12][13][13][13][12]

Allen’s philanthropy helped save endangered species, deepen understanding of climate science, improve ocean health, develop new technologies, create museums, tackle epidemics, research the human brain and invest in sustainable communities. His large gifts to education in his home state included $14 million to the University of Washington in 2002 to build the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science and Engineering and a further $40 million in 2017; Vulcan Productions, the film company he and his sister formed in 1997, was known for documentaries on environmental and other issues and ceased operations in early 2021.⁠[2][2][20][1][20][10][10]

The Paul G. Allen Estate and Trust: Official website: https://paulallen.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[2]

Allen Institute for AI: Official website: https://allenai.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[23]