Bill Gates Tried to Screw Paul Allen? What's the Surprise?
Frederick E. Allen Former Staff, Leadership Editor of Forbes.
Bill Gates Tried to Screw Paul Allen? What's the Surprise?
Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft, says that in 1982 he overheard Bill Gates, the other co-founder, discuss with Steve Ballmer, now the company's chief executive, how they could reduce Allen's share in the company by issuing themselves stock options. Hearing this, Allen charged into the room and broke up the conversation. Later Gates and Ballmer backed down and apologized. "I had helped start the company and was still an active member of management, though limited by my illness, and now my partner and my colleague were scheming to rip me off. It was mercenary opportunism, plain and simple," Allen writes in his autobiography that goes on sale next month, Idea Man: A Memoir by the Co-founder of Microsoft. This is all reported today in The Wall Street Journal. Allen's illness was Hodgkin's disease, a form of cancer, with which he had been diagnosed earlier that year, and which has always been understood to be the reason he left Microsoft.