According to Forbes of March 5, 2016, the billionaires in my home state, Washington, had a combined wealth greater than that of the billionaires of Texas and one-third that of the billionaires of California. One of our signature tycoons, Paul Allen, reportedly worth $20.3 billion, has just died.
Allen was partly an accidental billionaire. At Lakeside, Seattle’s old private high school, Allen had a pal named Bill Gates. Together in 1975 they dropped out of college and founded Microsoft. Gates stayed on and built Microsoft into a global company. Allen left in 1982, four years before the company went public. He became rich because of what Gates and others did afterward.
Did he deserve his wealth? Unlike Gates, Allen appears to have worked for only a small part of it. He performed the initial role in a system that creates great wealth for people who start great things, and a bunch of that wealth fell in his lap. Seattle is full of people who made money on Microsoft stock, and I can’t argue that their capital gains are directly proportional to their value added. Still, it was his money.
Allen was partly an accidental billionaire. He became rich because of what Bill Gates and others did at Microsoft after he left.
Paul Allen had a fabulous life. He bought the Portland Trail Blazers basketball team and the Seattle Seahawks football team. He funded a museum that collected the memorabilia of Jimi Hendrix and another that collected the aircraft of World War II. He spent money on rockets into space and on a telescope array to look for life on other planets.
He spent — I hesitate to say invested — in all manner of wonderful projects.
And some of them right where I live. Seattle Times business columnist Jon Talton wrote that Allen “may be the last of the great moneyed stewards who invested deeply and with abiding person affection for the city of Seattle.”
I was fine with Allen wanting a stadium for his football team, but I thought he should pay for it himself. For this, I was denounced by football fans.
One of his hometown projects was buying, restoring, and preserving Seattle’s curved-screen Cinerama Theater, which is where I watched the Lord of the Rings movies. Another was funding the Seattle Public Library’s purchase of thousands of DVDs, many of which I watch. Another was funding the Allen Library at the University of Washington, where I do historical research.
I have benefitted from this guy. I am sad to see him go.
Allen has had a respectable send-off, but not from the Seattle Left. Kshama Sawant, our city councilwoman, posted on Facebook:
He spent $250 million on the biggest yacht in the world in 2003; he also owned two more yachts and a fleet of private jets, several sports teams. He paid to put the Qwest Field on the ballot so that working people picked up most of the $425M tab. He spent half a million dollars to defeat the I-1098 Tax the Rich statewide initiative in 2010.
This is posted above an image that says, “Remember the Greediest.”
Sawant is right about Allen paying to put a measure on the statewide ballot to subsidize a football stadium. I was a newspaper columnist at that time, and denounced the ballot measure vehemently, and the state lawmakers who voted for it. For this, I was denounced by football fans. I was fine with Allen wanting a stadium for his football team, but I thought he should pay for it himself.
Sawant derided her colleagues as chickens, which they were.
But I never denounced Allen for what he was, which is what Sawant does. She doesn’t believe people like Paul Allen should exist. (He would be replaced by what? Workers’ committees?) I find her attitude distasteful — and I note that on my neighborhood blog, nextdoor.com, in this left-progressive town I am not the only one down on Sawant.
Some examples:
- “She is repulsive and needs to be removed ASAP.”
- “I am very eager to see her out of a $123k a year job.”
- “I’m one of the misguided people who voted for her . . . She seemed so grounded, solid when I heard her speak in person. Boy, oh boy, was I wrong!”
- “If it wasn’t for Paul Allen, she wouldn’t even be here. She came to the US after marrying a Microsoft engineer. Show a little gratitude, Kshama.”
Much of the annoyance is for disregarding the taboo against abusing the freshly dead. I hope that’s not all it is.
Sawant, who may be the only hard-socialist councilwoman of a major American city, was at the losing end of the big political battle of 2018 — the Seattle City Council’s “head tax” on large private employers. Her target was Amazon, the company founded and headed by Jeff Bezos, a man even richer than Paul Allen. After the tax passed with the support of Sawant and the council’s progressive Democrats, Amazon, the city’s #1 employer, donated money to an effort to put the ordinance up for a public vote. (We have the initiative and referendum in Washington, and you can do that.) When pollsters discovered that the people of Seattle didn’t support the head tax, the council reluctantly repealed it.
Sawant voted not to repeal it. She derided her colleagues as chickens, which they were.
Sawant demonized Bezos as the greedy rich, particularly when his company said that if the head tax passed, it would not build a planned office tower. When Sawant led a demonstration of her left-wing supporters in front of Amazon’s new headquarters, she faced a counter-demonstration from union ironworkers who wanted to build Amazon’s new tower.
Sawant is up for reelection in 2019. Maybe voters will remember her nastiness at the death of Paul Allen.
Recalled one of the nextdoor.com bloggers:
“I do still get a kick out of seeing the footage of construction workers shouting ‘No Head Tax!’ when she was trying to speak in front of the Amazon spheres. Funny watching her getting completely drowned out by their chants.”
Sawant is up for reelection in 2019. It’s a year from now, but I think people will remember the head tax. Maybe they will also remember her nastiness at the death of Paul Allen.
I think of it every time I get a DVD from the library.
