Paul Allen's IQ is reported at about 170, from testing at Lakeside School in Seattle. The figure appears in his memoir and early Microsoft biographies, but the original record isn't public — and Allen rarely mentioned it.
A school with a computer, and a younger friend
Allen was born in Seattle in 1953 to a university librarian and a schoolteacher. At Lakeside School, the Mothers' Club paid for time on a GE time-sharing computer — one of the first school computer programmes in the US. Allen, two years ahead of Bill Gates, was hooked.
The two became friends over that terminal, reading printouts and arguing about code — the partnership that later became Microsoft.
Education, as a Teletype printout
Lakeside's ASR-33 Teletype printed everything on a roll of paper. Here's his schooling, line by line.
Private prep school. Spent every free hour on the Teletype and the GE time-sharing account.
He and Gates found bugs in a local company's PDP-10 system in exchange for free computer time.
Reported to have scored a perfect 1600 — a figure from biographies rather than a published score report.
Studied for two years, joined a fraternity, then dropped out.
A programming job chosen partly to be near Gates, then at Harvard.
Everything else he learned from manuals, printouts and building things.
From a magazine cover to Micro-Soft
Allen was Microsoft's lead technical architect through its early years and took part in the 1981 negotiations to license MS-DOS to IBM. Diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma in 1982, he left full-time work in 1983, staying on the board. His 2011 memoir Idea Man criticised Gates's early handling of equity and drew a public response; his technical centrality to the first products is generally agreed.
Products and ventures beyond Microsoft's founding
The technology and companies he built or backed, from a teenage traffic counter to a museum of working computers.
With Gates: a device and software to analyse traffic-counter tapes for city engineers. It barely made money but taught them the 8008 microprocessor.
His idea: a card letting the Apple II run CP/M software — one of Microsoft's best-selling products of the early 1980s.
Founded after leaving Microsoft; its ToolBook authoring software was widely used for training.
Founded with his sister Jody Allen to run his investments, real estate and philanthropy.
A Palo Alto lab exploring the future of computing and media; closed in 2000.
Bought a controlling stake in the cable company, which filed for bankruptcy in 2009.
A Frank Gehry-designed museum of music and pop culture in Seattle, now MoPOP.
Funded Burt Rutan's craft, the first private crewed spaceflight; it won the $10 million Ansari X Prize.
A Seattle museum where visitors could use working vintage computers.
Institutes that give their data away
Starting with a $100 million endowment in 2003, the Allen Institutes publish their main output as public datasets and tools, not closed IP. The 2006 Allen Brain Atlas became one of the century's most-cited neuroscience resources.
“Each failure contains the seeds of your next success — if you are willing to learn from it.”
Last years
His Hodgkin's lymphoma returned in 2009 and went into remission again. In 2018 he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma and died in Seattle on October 15, aged 65.
Most of his estate was directed to philanthropy through Vulcan and the Allen Institutes, which continue their open-data work. He is remembered less as a tech executive than as a science philanthropist.
Reading the 170
Widely repeated in biographical writing but without a primary psychometric document. Read it as a school-testing result of its era, not a verified modern measurement.
Sources
- Allen, P. (2011). Idea Man. Portfolio
- Wallace, J. & Erickson, J. (1992). Hard Drive. John Wiley
- Allen Institute for Brain Science publications (Allen Brain Atlas, 2006–)
- Allen Institute for AI publications
- Vulcan Inc. records
- Allen Telescope Array project archives