News Sometimes it feels that we ought to have a reporter covering Paul Allen full time. The 48th richest person in the world is a very busy fellow. Here is what the second richest Oregonian has been up to (Nike's Phil Knight just edges him out, according to Forbes, and Allen owns a home in Portland and also the Trail Blazers, but technically, he is from Seattle):*On March 21, Allen announced a $300 million ...   More

News It's premature to say how Paul Allen will go down in history, but it's safe to conclude that, at this point, he's doing a pretty good job of keeping up with his fellow flashy billionaires. His latest pursuit is earning him a lot of attention--and a few skeptics.For the last several decades, the formula for men who have too much money is to spend it on sports teams (Allen has the Trail Blazers, the ...   More

News Earlier this afternoon, the Portland Trail Blazers announced the firing of General Manager Rich Cho after less than a year on the job. Was Cho's firing sudden? Not if owner Paul Allen's whereabouts are any indication.  Allen is in France at the Cannes Film Festival and was spotted recently aboard his boat, the Octopus, hosting a Brazilian-themed party and schmoozing guests Jane Fonda, Jodie Foster ...   More

News Vanity Fair Magazine is out with an excerpt of Paul Allen's memoir and it promises to be a best-seller, perhaps less because of what it reveals about the author than what Allen has to say about Bill Gates. The book, with the rather blustery title Idea Man, isn't due out for another month, but the VF excerpt talks about Microsoft's birth, the obsessively driven and occasionally manipulative Gates, and ...   More

 Among the many toys owned by Paul Allen, the owner of the Portland Trail Blazers, is the Octopus, a 414-foot yacht that is the 11th largest in the world and is often on the seas without the Microsoft co-founder.  This morning, the boat was off the shore of Argentina when one of the two helicopters aboard made an emergency landing, injuring one of the pilots. The boat was reportedly heading ...   More

News [youtube zGi8T8GMCVs] Here's one from the Idle Speculation desk: Trail Blazers owner Paul Allen has expressed some interest before in bringing a National Hockey League team here. And this news about the NHL's Phoenix Coyotes' bankruptcy and search for a new home certainly makes one wonder given the Rose Garden's need to fill dates whether Allen might find a way to throw his wallet into the ...   More

News THURSDAY EVENING UPDATE: Blazers owner Paul Allen has just released this statement about the departure of vice president of basketball operations Tom Penn and what all that means for general manager Kevin Pritchard (My insta-translation of what Allen says below is there's not exactly a long-term vote of confidence in there for Pritchard) The Trail Blazers made a change in the vice president of ...   More

News Ever since the end of 2009, when the Portland Trail Blazers announced that owner Paul Allen had been diagnosed with lymphoma, reporters have been tip-toeing around the issue of the 57-year-old billionaire's mortality. The diagnosis has spawned constant rumors — one of which was that this diagnosis was a death sentence for Allen, who beat Hodgkin's disease more than two decades ago; the ...   More

News Greg Wood, owner of Portland's terrific Roseway Theater (which we named "Best Dork Palace" in our 2009 Best of Portland issue) announced yesterday that he will take over operations of Seattle's 808-seat Cinerama Theatre, pictured below. The Cinerama, which is owned by billionaire Portland Trail Blazers honcho Paul Allen, was opened in 1963 to showcase the reportedly impressive but short-lived Cinerama ...   More