Paul Allen, iconic Seattleite to the end, dies at 65
The Microsoft co-founder died in Seattle due to complications of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He was 65.
Paul Allen was as Seattle as they come:
Co-founder of Microsoft, with his Lakeside School classmate Bill Gates, a partnership that launched Seattle into the tech age;
Vision behind Vulcan, the real estate giant, to rebuild South Lake Union, where Amazon broke ground;
Champion of professional sports in Seattle, and owner of the Seattle Seahawks football team;
Appreciator of art who brought Frank Gehry to Seattle when the city still leaned vanilla, to build a distinctly un-Northwest structure, now the Museum of Modern Pop — one we continue to puzzle out;
Guitar player, band member, unapologetic lover of Jimi Hendrix;
Quiet nerdy guy who never married and shunned the spotlight, ceding it to his sister, Jody Allen.
"My brother was a remarkable individual on every level," Jody Allen said in a statement posted to Vulcan Inc.'s website. "While most knew Paul Allen as a technologist and philanthropist, for us he was a much loved brother and uncle, and an exceptional friend."
Allen was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in 2009. He was treated for the cancer at that time, but announced earlier this month that it had returned.
Former journalist David Postman, who worked for Vulcan from 2008 to 2012, recalled Allen, saying, "I don’t think people even in Seattle know the breadth of what he’s done, you know he mapped the brain, the Allen Institute for Brain Science is this incredible resource around the world.”
He enjoyed his money, which he spent on the arts, properties abroad and lavish parties thrown aboard his 414-foot yacht "Octopus."
1 min
Eric Idle, of Monty Python, describes his good times on Paul Allen's yacht.
Allen was a frequent and generous contributor to political campaigns.
Since 2014, Allen has been among the top donors to three gun control-related ballot measures, beginning with expanded background checks in 2014 and extreme risk protection orders in 2016, both of which passed. This year, Allen wrote the single largest check, $1.2 million, to the I-1639 campaign which seeks to raise the age to 21 to purchase a semi-automatic rifle, among other restrictions.
In 2015, he funded a successful citizen initiative to crackdown on the smuggling of ivory and other products made from animals that are threatened globally because of poaching.
The initiative came about just one year after his bodyguards — a team that included former FBI agents — said that his sister Jody tried to illegally sneak home giraffe bones in his luggage from Botswana.
