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> At that level, and sitting on top of a multi-billion dollar fortune, it almost never behooves you to say anything negative about anybody -- least of all one of your former partners. I also think complaining about not getting a bigger share of MS stock, when you've got 14 billion in the bank...not exactly the stuff of which Jedi are made. At that level, money is more about points than bucks. He's not upset he can buy fewer baseball teams, he's upset that his status was being lowered and he was being disrespected and treated as prey/ As far as the former partners go, Cringely claims Allen has been dissociated financially for a long time: > Maybe that�s just the sort of fiduciary discussion board members have to have, but it didn�t go over well with Paul Allen, who never returned to Microsoft, and over the next eight years, made huge efforts to secure his wealth from the fate of Microsoft. He sold large blocks of shares on a regular basis no matter whether the price was high or low. Then in October and November of 2000, just as he was finally leaving the Microsoft board, Allen did a series of financial transactions involving derivative securities called �collars,� that are a combination of a right to buy and a right to sell the stock at different prices such that both his upside and downside financial potential are limited. By the end of 2000, though Allen technically still owned 136 million Microsoft shares, his wealth was for practical purposes separate from that of Gates, Ballmer, and the rest of Microsoft. Inasmuch as Cringely reported essentially the same anecdote as in the _Vanity Fair_ excerpts, I'm inclined to take him at his word when he writes about Allen's finances. |