Interesting article about Paul Allen

[THE HCP]

http://www.oregonlive.com/business/index.ssf/2009/11/blazers_vulcan_look_ahead_as_a.html

 

[jlprk]

Informative article. He's kind of living for the moment in a sad, short-term life. Vulcan, with 500-600 employees, is really just a bureaucracy of personal assistants created to run his investments.

Summary: Paul Allen, age 56, childless, with a 50-50 chance of living 5 years, has lost 2/3 of his wealth in the last 10 years. His favorite investment is the Blazers, and when he dies, his sister, who runs Vulcan and may inherit his wealth, may sell the Blazers and Seahawks to focus Vulcan on the artsy investments she prefers.

Fortune magazine pegs his net worth at more than $11 billion, less than a third of his estimated fortune 10 years ago. This year Allen put debt-ridden Charter into bankruptcy, wiping out his $7 billion investment in the business...

Longtime Blazers general manager Bob Whitsitt, now a business consultant in the Seattle area, recalls that when traveling abroad, Allen would make elaborate arrangements to watch each game live--even preseason contests. "One of the things that people would always assume was that Paul wasn't involved and didn't know what was going on. That was very much the opposite of my experience," Whitsitt said. "It could be the color of a new logo. It could be any level of detail. He'd have strong opinions."

 

[jlprk]

I thought he's worth $40 billion, but that was 10 years ago. When he wrote off the $7B for Charter, I thought it was a small portion of his wealth, but it was 7/18 of it. Now he's down to 11, which I know, is a lot, but he's doing much worse than I had thought.