Paul Allen’s $2 Billion in Lifetime Gifts Went to Eclectic Mix of Causes, From Brainy to Whimsical

Paul Allen, who died Monday at age 65, was one of America’s most prolific and eclectic donors.

In his lifetime, Allen gave a total of more than $2.3 billion starting in 2002, the first year he landed on the Chronicle’s annual Philanthropy 50 list of the biggest donors. He appeared on the list annually over the next 16 years for the large sums he gave to nonprofits, including, in recent years to his own grant maker, the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation.

Allen was a passionate lover of arts and culture, science, and technology and often directed his considerable fortune to unusual and creative programs in those areas, including pioneering work on brain research and the fight against Ebola. He also gave extensively to human-service charities in the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere and to education, economic-development programs, environmental causes, health care, and youth groups, among other causes.

Now the big question many are asking is how much else will go to charity through his estate. Allen had no children and was not married — and he left behind an estate Forbes says is worth $20 billion. No immediate word on his estate plans were available, but he had signed the Giving Pledge, committing to contributing at least half of his wealth to charity as part of a pact his Microsoft co-founder, Bill Gates, had long been promoting.

Rock Music and Brain Science

While much of his giving demonstrated the passion for science that drove his work with Gates to found Microsoft, Paul Allen was interested in so many other areas, and some of his gifts could even be called whimsical. He was a fan of rock music and science fiction and created museums to honor both. In 2000, he created the Experience Music Project to celebrate the music he loved so much and did the same three years later when he created the Museum of Science Fiction to highlight that genre of writing.

But he dedicated the bulk of his considerable fortune to trying to solve some of the most mysterious and vexing aspects of human life.

In 2003, Allen established the Allen Institute for Brain Science to carry out neuroscience and genomics research. One of the institute’s signature programs is the Allen Brain Atlas project, an effort to map gene activity in the brains of both mice and humans. Another is a 10-year project to examine how the brain works and what causes neurological disorders, to which he devoted $300 million in 2012.

In 2014, he directed $100 million through his foundation to tackle the Ebola outbreak that had hit West Africa the year before. Also in 2014, he gave $100 million to start the Allen Institute for Cell Science to understand how human cells work and their role in human diseases.

In 2016, he awarded another $100 million grant to launch the Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group, an effort to foster bioscience discoveries through new and unconventional practices; and in February of this year he gave $125 million to his Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, which he created in 2013, for a new research program.

In his Giving Pledge essay, Allen made clear that was the kind of philanthropy that he thought was most important. “My philanthropic strategy is informed by my enduring belief in the power of new ideas,” he wrote. “By dedicating resources that can help some of the world’s most creative thinkers accelerate discovery, I hope to serve as a catalyst for progress — in large part, by encouraging closer collaboration and challenging conventional thinking. When smart people work together with vision and determination, there is little we can’t accomplish.”