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Comment by coldpie | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 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.

> 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 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.

> negligence, noun - failure to take proper care in doing something.

Negligence does not mean that he was obligated to show more care than he did. Pick whatever word you want, my point is just that he had ample warning and opportunity to get affairs in order if he cared about the longevity of those projects.

That is a good point, but my reading of “accusations of negligence” (and I think a common interpretation in this context) would be that there was a responsibility for the accused party to do something and they didn’t.

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

I would have thought his sister would have wanted to keep operating as a kind of memorial to brother.

She likely doesn’t have Paul’s passion for computers…not her fault.

Paul Allen could have set up an endowment if he wanted the collection to last. But he didn’t for some reason, despite having founded other formally endowed organizations like the Allen Institute.

I'm surprised Jodi Allen hasn't sold his sports teams yet...things she was reportedly not all that interested in at the time of his death.

Arainach nails this below

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.

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