Paul Gardner Allen (born January 21, 1953) is an American investor and philanthropist, best known as the co-founder, with Bill Gates, of Microsoft Corporation. As of March 2012, he was estimated to be the 48th-richest person in the world, with an estimated wealth of $14.2 billion.

He is the founder and chairman of Vulcan Inc., which manages his various business and philanthropic efforts. Allen also has a multi-billion dollar investment portfolio which includes technology companies, real estate holdings, and stakes in other technology, media, and content companies. Allen also owns two professional sports teams, the Seattle Seahawks of the National Football League (NFL), and the Portland Trail Blazers of the National Basketball Association (NBA). He is also part-owner of the Seattle Sounders FC, which joined Major League Soccer(MLS) in 2009. Allen's memoir Idea Man: A Memoir by the Cofounder of Microsoft was released on April 19, 2011. The paperback version of Idea Man, which included a new epilogue, came out on October 30, 2012.

Early life and career
Paul Allen was born in Seattle, Washington, to parents Kenneth Samuel Allen, an associate director of the University of Washington libraries, and Edna Faye (née Gardner) Allen, on January 21, 1953. Allen attended Lakeside School, a private school in Seattle, and befriended Bill Gates, who was almost three years younger and shared a common enthusiasm for computers. They used Lakeside's Teletype terminal to develop their programming skills on several time-sharing computer systems. After earning a perfect score of 1600 on the SAT, Allen went to Washington State University but dropped out after two years in order to work as a programmer for Honeywell in Boston, placing him near his old friend again. Allen later convinced Gates to drop out of Harvard University in order to create Microsoft.