Paul Allen

Allen never married in his life but had his share of many girlfriends that he was very private about.

He was once romantically connected to Jerry Hall who joined him on his yacht to France after breaking up with Mick Jagger.

Abbie Philips sued Allen for sexually assaulting her. He had hired her to run his film and TV production company called 'Storyopolis.'

Paul Allen was born on January 21, 1953, in Seattle, Washington, to Kenneth Samuel Allen and Edna Faye Allen. His father was an associate director of the University of Washington libraries. His mother also worked as a librarian.

Allen’s parents helped him and his sister Jody develop a wide variety of interests and used to take them to museums, galleries and concerts. He started showing great interest in science from an early age. When he was 10 years old, his mother, Faye used to hold science club meetings for his grade school.

Allen went to the Lakeside School in Seattle - it was a private school and it is here that he met and became close friends with Bill Gates. At that time Allen was 14 years old and Gates was 12 and both were computer enthusiasts. It was in Lakeside’s Teletype terminal that both the friends started to develop their programming skills on numerous time-sharing computer systems.

Allen got admission into the Washington State University after scoring 1600 on his SAT but decided to discontinue his studies after two years in order to work for Honeywell in Boston, as a programmer. He also convinced his close friend and fellow computer enthusiast, Bill Gates, to drop out of Harvard University to work on an innovative project.

In 1975, Allen and Gates started to market a BASIC computer programming language interpreter and co-founded Microsoft in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It was Allen who came up with the name ‘Microsoft’ for the company, as documented in a Fortune magazine article years later.

In 1980, Allen materialized a deal for Microsoft to buy a Quick and Dirty Operating System, which was invented by Tim Paterson, an employ at the Seattle Computer Products. This deal led the company to develop Disk Operating System, which they delivered to IBM and ran it on IBM’s PC line. The IBM deal made Allen and Gates rich and famous.

In 1982, Allen was detected with Hodgkin’s lymphoma and underwent several months of Chemotherapy. Due to his degrading health conditions Allen took himself away from the workings and businesses of Microsoft and resigned from his position on the Board of Directors in 2000. He was still the senior strategy advisor to the company’s executives.

In 1986, Allen founded the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation for the advancement of health and human services - his contribution to the development of science and technology. The foundation gives 30 million US dollars every year as grant to various humanitarian and scientific projects.

In 1992, Allen and David Liddle founded the Interval Research Corporation. It was a Silicon Valley-based laboratory which was finally disbanded after making over 300 patents. Some of these are famous patent infringement lawsuits against big shot companies like Apple, Yahoo!, YouTube, Google, Facebook, Netflix, eBay, AOL, Office Depot, OfficeMax, etc.

In 2008, Allen received an honor from the Seattle-King County Association of Realtors for his distinguishable commitment to the non-profit organizations in the Pacific Northwest and lifetime giving of around 1 billion US dollars.

In 2008, he received the Herbie Hancock Humanitarian Award from the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz for his innovative contribution to the business world and for being a global philanthropist.