Mr Viral
> The Living Computer Museum, it turns out, cost millions, over ten million a year
I don’t get how it could cost 10 million / year
Real estate, specialized expertise, expensive repairs. It adds up! I also suspect monthly insurance is insane.
10 million is not even a lot – a typical McDonalds can cost over a million dollars a year to operate.
The Museum of Flight is cool, but you owe it to yourself to get down to the Western Antique Aeroplane & Automobile Museum in Hood River.
Unlike the Museum of Flight, nearly everything at WAAAM is still in flyable condition and they have an amazing restoration team on site.
Jason’s write-up is good. It wasn’t a museum, it was one guy’s personal collection. What happens to your personal collection after you die is up to whoever you leave it to, and they’re far less likely to care about it than you do. If you don’t have a plan for it when you die, then it will almost certainly be scattered to the winds, as happened here. If Allen wanted to start a museum, then he should have started a museum, which includes finding employees and creating a funding model that will keep it running past the death of one particular sociopath. It’s not anyone else’s responsibility to “save” his collection.
As someone who lives a mile from Paul-land (SLU Seattle) we feel the loss and mismanagement of his various cool nerd monuments painfully.
And we came to the same conclusion. There is an impulse to accuse him of negligence for not setting up these trusts. But he died rather unexpectedly, and certainly decades sooner than he’d “want” to. How many people really bother setting up permanent legacy estate systems while young?
He was diagnosed with cancer more than 30 years before his death, which also recurred almost a decade before his death. That kind of thing usually gives one a kick in the pants to get your affairs in order. To have those health incidents, that kind of wealth, and still leave so many loose ends, definitely warrants accusations of negligence.
Negligence of what? Sounds like this guy was doing something as a favor, I don’t see what obliged him to ensure it was kept available after he died.
> But he died rather unexpectedly, and certainly decades sooner than he’d “want” to.
He was diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma in 1983, got non-Hodgkin lymphoma in 2009, and died in 2018. That’s 35 years of reminders—more than half his life!—to plan his legacy.
Something useful I learned recently. It’s a lot more satisfying to share your favorite things while you’re alive. You’re alive to experience the rewards.
Someone close to me wants me to pick out my favorite things from their collection, so they can have the pleasure of giving them to me. Took me a while to understand.
Not everyone is worried about a legacy or where there stuff goes after they’re gone. It’s the least of my worries, personally.
He wasn’t _that_ young, and it’s something literally every person with extreme wealth does as part of their normal financial management process. You frequently interact with lawyers and CPAs who advise you on these things as part of their duties. He would have had a conversation about it at some level. He either wanted to take LCM with him, or someone was grossly negligent.
Yeah, I blame his sister. I don’t know what happened behind closed doors (if anything) but I’m also disappointed neither gates nor balmer seemed to pick up the pieces either, or even Bezos given his presence in SLU
Just having to go through close not-at-all-rich relatives’ ordinary household crap and various beloved (by them) keepsakes and deal with the pain and hassle of that in the wake of their deaths is bad enough. I can’t imagine having a whole friggin’ museum of electronic doo-dads dumped on me. I expect I’d take one turn through it with the best of intentions, and walk out the exit already dialing up an auction house to take care of it for me.
This is exactly what we did to my grandmother’s Barbie collection. Some museum in Thailand bought them all.
Most folks’ lives are just already full, is the thing. We can barely find room for a couple family heirlooms, let alone an inherited hobby, including and maybe especially a collecting hobby.
It’s a little different when we’re talking about someone so rich that they could pay (to them) peanuts to have someone else take care of it for them, but I still get the impulse to just be done with it, permanently.
No one else’s responsibility, but if people care (and there’s obviously a number that do), then it becomes your responsibility if you want to see it still exist.
Having volunteered for a small not-for profit for nearly a decade now, there’s definitely a whole lot of people that just want something with no desire to give back to that community. You really do get what you put in though.
> but if people care (and there’s obviously a number that do), then it becomes your responsibility if you want to see it still exist
Allen’s decision was to require those people who care to pony up millions of their own dollars to acquire his personal collection, and keep it running. I’m glad you volunteer your time, but that’s a whole other magnitude than purchasing and running a multi-million-dollar business. It’s not reasonable to expect volunteers to spring up from nowhere and perform that kind of labor.
Well in this case it’s not just “one guys collection”, many many people donated priceless items to the museum; those items were then unceremoniously auctioned off for money by the billionaire descendants of Paul Allen. Which makes the whole thing much more disgusting in my opinion.
That is kind of crazy to donate something to a museum and they just sell it off
You would think there would be a provision that if they ever close you have the option to take it back.
It’s a genuine tragedy.
We were members. It was a fun and interesting place to go to with kiddos every now and then — particularly on a rainy day. Kids could goof off or, if interested, actually learn. And it was a great resource and community for us local adult nerds.
Okay, one photo of my (then much younger) daughter, for old times’ sake: https://davepeck.org/random/kiddo-lcm.jpg
Even people like Bill Gates, would have more money than knows what to do with. Keeping museum operating would be a rounding error in their fortune ……
That is inaccurate. The executors tried, but they didn’t have the legal ability to do anything but sell the collection. Nobody stepped up to buy it.
Losing the museum was a real heartbreaker. To me it was a really special place because it captured that special feeling of getting access to hardware that isn’t widely available and just fiddling with it. It’s what I remember loving about computers as a kid.
> The museum closed in February 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.[2] In June 2024, The Paul Allen Estate announced that the museum would be permanently closed and that the museum’s collection, most of which was owned by the Estate and not the museum itself, would be auctioned off[3] by Christie’s.[4]
I’m not going to say it was greed on the part of the estate, but they effectively just gave the middle finger to the museum.
> Vulcan LLC, a conglomerate that maintains the Allen family’s estate and many business ventures, has been under the leadership of Paul Allen’s sister, Jody Allen, since the former’s death. A controversial billionaire in her own right, Jody Allen has sustained her brother’s more prominent investments, like ownership of the Seattle Seahawks and Sounders. However, more niche projects like LCM+L and the Cinerama theater in Belltown (also closed indefinitely) seem to be of less interest to Vulcan’s new upper management.
https://seattlecollegian.com/paul-allen-living-computers-mus…
I’m no fan of Jody, but “greed on the part of the estate” misallocates the blame.
It would have been trivial for Paul to, at any point in his life, set up trusts for his various projects – the LCM, Cinerama, the SciFi museum, MoPop, etc.
Paul was surrounded with a fleet of lawyers. These kind of trusts are not esoteric knowledge – they’re something any upper middle class or upper class family is likely using to keep assets intact without going through probate.
Paul could have set up 5 foundations, given each of them an absurd initial donation of $200M each, and not noticed at all. The fact that he did not do even the minimum legal paperwork to keep them intact rather than part of his estate means that Paul never cared about these things as public benefits or experiences and instead just wanted tax dodges for his toys.
This is not a hypothetical. Without doxxing myself too much, I know some people who were involved in running Paul’s household and projects. They tried to convince Paul to set up such trusts prior to his death and were not successful.
Paul’s public image was fairly positive during his life but I’ve soured on him quite a bit as it has become more obvious that it was a facade. Perhaps his plan to turn South Lake Union into a massive park was legitimate, but the other projects were not.
As others were wondering why Bill Gates didn’t step up I figured I should point out, like you did, that wealthy people often have their reputation managed and are often not the people they are widely thought to be.
My impression is that you’re attributing a lot of malice to someone who’s lack of actions seemed more ambivalent than anything. It’s a bit reductionist perhaps, but isn’t it all just buildings and stuff? Would it not be weird to keep all of your collections running in perpetuity after your death, even if people seem to love it? Releasing the items into the world to be part of someone else’s collection seems pretty reasonable. After all, if you’re going to toss $1bn at something, there are plenty of wildly more impactful things you could do with it, not that he’d have been in a position of needing to pick one thing to spend money on.
Projecting a public image of giving back to the community while actually being apathetic and not taking any safeguards is malicious.
Calling something a “museum”, as Paul did multiple times, implies a consistency of existence and a theme that is more than just “my collection”. The LCM, in particular, was unique. The Computer History Museum is great but is primarily a bunch of powered-off piles of metal and silicon. The few things that are running are demos, not interactive.
The LCM let you go up and play with nearly all of the machines. You could write a program on a PDP or an Apple. You could punch cards. You could stand in next to a powered on Cray and a Mainframe and witness how loud they were. More than the exhibits, they had a staff of people who knew the machines – who repaired them, who had worked with them, who could answer your questions about them. That kind of expertise assembled in one place doesn’t exist anywhere now.
So at most that suggests he didn’t care too much about the legal details, liked to make exaggerated claims on the record, and didn’t care too much about what the general public thought of him when he was no longer around.
Which of course doesn’t exactly paint a rosy picture of his character or personality.
But that’s not much different from most other people, including most HN users.
Paul Allen was Seattle’s rich, crazy uncle. He threw money on so many projects (RIP Cinerama, which was my favorite theater).
Jody Allen is a complete black box that answers to no one. She doesn’t care about the sports teams either, so it’s a mystery why the entire org doesn’t just cash out at this point.
Thankfully, SIFF was able to save Cinerama (thanks to another ex-Microsoftie) and it’s back in operation. I agree that it’s a true treasure.
CHM has been my favorite to visit every time I’m in the area. I do wish they would have more modern stuff though. Especially the period between 90s to 2010s. There are some parts (first iPhone, Palm Pilot), but I wish they would continue because the internet age has been incredibly important.
The Museum’s thin profit margin disappeared during the pandemic, and the Allen estate decided they could extract money selling off all of Paul’s vintage computers, rather than take a few years of losses to keep these treasures available to the public.
Unless you were willing to donate your cash to the Allen family so that they could throw it on top of their Scrooge McDuck wealth pile, the museum was doomed. They weren’t interested the actual cultural value of the collection.
With that said, keep a close eye on MoPop’s collection should they ever run into any financial difficulty.
Vultures did not value Paul Allen’s ideas and investments, but are happy to benefit from it while tearing down the pieces they don’t personally care about or benefit from. It’s the same story as anything else, but I agree it is strange someone like Bill Gates didn’t step in to buy out the museum.
Probably a combination of people not having the money to do so right now and the fact that a lot of people would kill to get their hands on some of the stuff in that museum. not sure how much of it was successfully auctioned off but that’s just a guess.
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