Paul Allen Dies: Microsoft Co-Founder and Philanthropist

Paul Allen co-founded Microsoft at 22, then left it at 30 when Hodgkin's lymphoma forced him to step back. He recovered and spent the rest of his life doing almost everything else: funding neuroscience research, oceanographic exploration, commercial spaceflight, and the Allen Telescope Array for SETI. He owned the Seattle Seahawks and the Portland Trail Blazers. He restored a WWII aircraft carrier as a museum. He died in October 2018 at 65 from non-Hodgkin lymphoma, leaving behind a philanthropy portfolio of two billion dollars. His Microsoft stake, cashed out over decades, had made the philanthropy possible. Allen was born on January 21, 1953, in Seattle, Washington, and met Bill Gates at Lakeside School, where both boys were drawn to the school's teletype terminal. Allen was two years older and, by most accounts, the technical visionary of the pair: it was Allen who showed Gates the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics featuring the Altair 8800 microcomputer and proposed they write a BASIC interpreter for it. That partnership launched Microsoft in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and the subsequent development of MS-DOS and Windows made both men billionaires. Allen's departure from Microsoft in 1983 was acrimonious; his memoir Idea Man described a conversation he overheard in which Gates and Steve Ballmer discussed diluting his equity. Allen retained a significant Microsoft shareholding and invested heavily in technology ventures, cable television, real estate, and sports. His philanthropic focus included the Allen Institute for Brain Science, a $500 million research center in Seattle that has produced the most detailed maps of the mouse and human brain, and the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. His yacht, Octopus, at 414 feet, was one of the largest in the world and carried two helicopters, a submarine, and a remotely operated vehicle used for deep-sea exploration.