Microsoft co-founders Allen, Gates reportedly reconcile following book flap
Nov 1, 2012, 7:19 AM | Updated: 8:40 am
Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen has written an epilogue to his controversial memoir, indicating he's reconciled with Bill Gates following a year-long rift.
Microsoft co-founders Paul Allen and Bill Gates have apparently made up after a year-long rift in their friendship that Allen feared “might be permanently ruptured.”
GeekWire reports Allen writes about the relationship in an epilogue to his memoir, “Idea Man,” which is out in paperback this week.
Allen pulled no punches in the original book writing about Gates, accusing him of trying to wrest control of Allen’s share of Microsoft, even while he was battling cancer.
“I helped start the company and was still an active member of management, though limited by my illness, and now my partner and my colleague were scheming to rip me off,” Allen wrote in the book. “It was mercenary opportunism, plain and simple.”
In the new epilogue, Allen admits there was plenty of unhappiness about what he wrote.
“Not everyone loved everything I wrote,” writes Allen. “Some of my Microsoft friends were piqued that I’d cast the company’s recent history in ‘not the most favorable light,’ as one of them told me. But almost everyone soon got past their unhappiness — with the exception of Bill Gates.”
Allen writes that he and Gates had no contact for more than a year, and he feared that their friendship would never be restored. But Allen says that after his mother, Faye Allen, passed away in June, Gates told him how sorry he was to hear the news and that he hoped to renew their friendship.
“I believe we will be friends again,” writes Allen. “The history we share is more powerful than whatever comes between us.”
The epilogue is dated June 3. Gates reportedly visited Allen’s yacht when it was moored off London during the Olympics.
