Aaron retweeted
Paul Allen gave Bill Gates the idea for Microsoft. Gates gave him 36% of it.
Then Allen got cancer. Still in radiation, he says he heard Gates planning to cut even that “down to almost nothing.”
In the video below, Allen tells 60 Minutes: “They were basically talking about how they were planning to dilute my share down to almost nothing.”
They met at a private school in Seattle. Allen was 15. Gates was 13. They dug through dumpsters for computer code because nobody would give it to them.
In 1974, Allen saw a magazine cover with a new computer called the Altair. He ran to show Gates at Harvard. “This is the computer we’ve been waiting for.”
That idea became Microsoft.
Gates was the sharper businessman. He asked for 60% of the company. Then 64%.
The fights could last for hours. “We’re just screaming at each other for hours,” Allen says.
Then, in 1982, Allen was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. One night, still in treatment, he walked past Gates’s office and heard Gates and Steve Ballmer talking.
He burst in. That night, someone came to his house to apologize. It was Ballmer.
“Bill didn’t come. He sent Steve.”
Allen left Microsoft in 1983. He kept his shares, nearly a third of the company, and later became worth an estimated $40 billion.
In 2009, his cancer came back. This time Gates came to his house, more than once.
“There’s a bond there that can’t be denied.”
Allen died in 2018. Gates wrote that personal computing would not have existed without him.
The case for Gates: Allen was stepping back. Gates was the one working nights and building the company, and Allen still left with a fortune.
The case for Allen: the idea was his, he was sick, and his best friend was talking about his shares instead of his health.
One friend had cancer. The other had a plan for his stock.
So was Bill Gates protecting Microsoft, or betraying his best friend?
Aaron retweeted
Bibi Jones was 19 when, she says, an agent took her to bars after Diamondbacks games and introduced her to baseball players. Over 10 in one year. He was using her to sign clients. A year later she posted photos with a shirtless Gronk, and Gronk had to apologize to his owner.
In October 2011 the photos came out: Rob Gronkowski shirtless, Bibi in his Patriots jersey. She was 20 and already working in adult films. The pictures went viral, and Gronk had to go explain himself to the owner of the team.
Then she went on Boston sports radio, and the story went somewhere nobody expected. Back in 2010, she said, when she was still a teenager in Arizona, an agent would "kind of use me to get baseball players to sign him as an agent." How many players? "Over 10." All in 2010. Did they sign with him? She believed "a couple" did. Was she paid? She said no.
And Gronk? She swore nothing had happened between them. "I really, really, really wish it would have happened," she said. The agent refused to comment. Gronk said he never meant to hurt the team's reputation. The story moved on.
Nine months later she sat in front of a webcam in her kitchen and read a page from The Power of Now out loud. Then she started crying. "I was promised a lot of things whenever I got in that industry," she said. "Nothing's happened. I can't do it anymore. I'm only 20 years old. And the earlier I get out of this industry, the better it's going to be." The video has almost 900,000 views.
Two months later she posted another photo with Gronk from the same day. Topless this time. By February 2013 she was back to performing.
Half the internet says she chased athletes for clout and cried when the clout ran out. The other half says a grown man in the sports business passed a teenager around after ballgames to land clients. Almost nobody remembers the agent. Gronk got a meeting with Kraft. She got a crying video. He got "no comment."
The players got contracts. She got a reputation.
Was Bibi Jones a clout chaser who went after athletes, or a teenager the sports business used as bait?
Aaron retweeted
Christopher Reeve was 42 when a horse threw him and broke his neck. The man who played Superman couldn't move or breathe on his own. He told his wife maybe they should just let him die. She answered in seven words. He lived nine more years. She outlived him by less than two.
Superman made him a household name in 1978. He was paid $250,000 for the first film and about $1 million each for Superman III and IV. He was 6'4", an athlete, a pilot, a sailor and a serious horseman. He had trained at Juilliard, where his classmate and best friend was Robin Williams.
On May 27, 1995, he rode in a cross-country competition in Culpeper, Virginia. At the third jump his horse stopped dead. Reeve flew over its head, landed on his head and shattered the top two vertebrae in his neck. He was paralyzed from the neck down and could not breathe without a ventilator.
His care was expected to cost around $400,000 a year. Lying in the hospital, unable to move, he told his wife Dana that maybe it wasn't worth everyone's trouble, and that he should be allowed to go. She looked at him and said: "You're still you, and I love you."
He later told Barbara Walters that the thought disappeared when his kids walked into the room, and it never came back. One of the first times he laughed again was when Robin Williams burst into his room in scrubs and a thick accent, pretending to be a crazy Russian doctor who had come to examine him.
He spent the next nine years fighting for spinal cord research, raising money, testifying before Congress and learning to move one finger at a time. He died on October 10, 2004. He was 52. Seventeen months later Dana, who had never smoked, died of lung cancer. She was 44. Their son Will was 13.
Half the internet calls Christopher Reeve the real Superman. The other half says Dana was the real hero of the story. Almost nobody talks about the fact that she was 34, with a 3-year-old son, when she chose to answer "let me die" with "I love you."
He played a man who could fly. The bravest thing he ever did was stay in a bed he couldn't leave.
Is this what real love looks like, or is that kind of love simply gone today?
Aaron retweeted
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Aaron retweeted
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Aaron retweeted
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