As one of the most talked-about figures, Paul Allen has built a significant fortune. Our team analyzed the latest data to provide a clear picture of their income.

What was Paul Allen's net worth?

Allen and Gates trademarked Microsoft on November 26, 1976. The company IPO'd on March 13, 1986. After the first day of trading, Allen's 25% stake was worth $195 million. He was 33 years old. As you know by now, over the next few decades Microsoft became one of the most valuable companies in the world and made its founders extraordinarily rich. Paul left Microsoft in the mid-1980s after a management dispute with Bill Gates, but he stayed a member of the company's board of directors until 2000.

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Paul Allen was an American industrialist, investor, musician, sports team owner, and philanthropist who had a net worth of $20 billion at the time of his death on October 15, 2018. Paul Allen earned the majority of his personal fortune by being a co-founder of software conglomerate, Microsoft. Allen co-founded the software company with his childhood friendBill Gates.

Allen received a perfect SAT score of 1600 and enrolled at Washington State University, where he joined the Phi Kappa Theta fraternity. He dropped out of college after two years to work as a programmer for Honeywell in Boston near Harvard, where Gates was a freshman. Allen convinced Gates to drop out of Harvard to found a software company together. That software company was Microsoft.

Paul Gardner Allen was born on January 21, 1953, in Seattle, Washington, to Kenneth and Edna Allen. His sister Jody was born in 1959. He attended Lakeside School, a private high school in Seattle, where he met and befriended Bill Gates. The two shared an interest in computers. Despite their two-year age gap, they became fast friends who got their start programming and hacking, thanks to the access they had to a mainframe system owned by their school. The school infamously bought what it expected would be a year's worth of time on the mainframe, only to find Allen and Gates had used up that time in just three weeks. Not long after, Allen was finding ways to sneak into computer labs and logging in as an administrator. Allen even passed himself off as a graduate student at the University of Washington so he could get in some extra programming time. Eventually, he was caught and banned from the lab.

On the day Microsoft went public in 1986, Paul Allen owned 25% of the company's equity. Paul Allen's exact stake in Microsoft was not known at the time of his death. His stake dipped below 5% in 2000, and from that point, the company no longer needed to report his holdings. At the time of his death, Paul Allen's fortune was mostly tied to the real estate, private equity, and energy sectors. Allen owned more than 1 million square feet of retail, office, and industrial space in California, New York, Washington, and Oregon. Through his investment vehicle, Vulcan Capital, he was an early investor in Uber, DreamWorks, Plains All America, and Ticketmaster. Allen is said to have lost $8 billion of his own money trying to expand broadband too early.

Allen and Gates set up shop in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1975. Their big break came when they saw an article about the Altair 8800 in Popular Electronics Magazine. The computer was small and inexpensive and was ideal for home computing. The two men got in touch with the computer's manufacturer and offered to design a programming language for the Altair 8800. That language was called BASIC, and its development opened their eyes to the potential opportunity that existed in creating a programming language. Oh, and yes, they designed it for a computer they not only didn't own but one they had never even seen before. Incredibly, it was a success, and their language worked.

Ultimately, Paul Allen's financial journey is a testament to their success.

Disclaimer: All net worth figures are estimates based on public data.