Billionaires Unleashed

Paul Allen (Nati Harnik/Associated Press)

By TIMOTHY EGAN
NYT

SEATTLE — The loneliest man in this city may be the pear-shaped billionaire whose yacht occasionally glides across Lake Washington at dusk, heading for a big empty house filled with stuff to keep him distracted.

On the surface, Paul Allen lives an enviable life. The fruits of his passions are all around Seattle: a stylish stadium that sells out every soccer game, one of the nation’s largest urban makeovers, in the South Lake Union area, and a research center trying to unlock secrets of the human brain.

The co-founder of Microsoft has gone from state-school dropout to one of the world’s richest men, and twice had the kind of serious cancer scare that makes people think hard about the randomness of death. For all of that, there’s a hole in his soul — at least that’s one way to read the cri de coeur of his new book, “Idea Man,” to be published later this month.

Behind every great fortune, goes the Balzac maxim, lies a great crime. But also, a great hurt. The nasty news from a book excerpt in Vanity Fair was Allen’s claim that his longtime friend and partner Bill Gates tried to cut him out of a much larger share of Microsoft billions.

(More here.)