The billionaire put another $500,000 into selling the package to voters, declaring in a television ad that “I can’t do it without you.” Seattle Times sports columnist Blaine Newnham insisted that the deal was a good investment for taxpayers because Allen was a proven winner. “My guess is that within five years Paul Allen's Seahawks will be in the Super Bowl,” he wrote,” and have at least as great a hold on the community as the Mariners do now.” Then he floated the fear forever lurking in the background whenever Seattle was afforded the opportunity to rid itself of a professional sports franchise: that the team would move elsewhere and immediately win the championship that could have been Seattle’s. “But then someone in Quebec probably said that of its long-struggling hockey team, the Nordiques, who left anyway for Colorado, where, of course, they would win a Stanley Cup and break more than a few French-Canadian hearts.”
The weirdest and most telling thing about the debate was the assumption by proponents and opponents alike that Allen was a successful man. The mere fact that he had $13 billion in Microsoft-minted money conferred on him the status of a can’t-miss genius. Yet his wealth had been made not by him but by Gates, who built Microsoft into the money machine it became after Allen left the company in 1983. And Allen’s record as an entrepreneur was terrible: None of the more than 20 companies he started had been even mildly successful, and his most successful investments—in TicketMaster and America Online—had been in already-established companies that he bought and sold at the right times. Wired Magazine , in a 1994 feature, called Allen the “accidental zillionaire,” and seemed thoroughly puzzled by his image as a brilliant success. “Allen’s own companies,” wrote the magazine’s Paulina Borsook, “suggest that if he hadn’t hooked up with the Jay Gould of our era when they were both teenagers, he might have ended up no more than, say, an engineer at Boeing or an employee at a software company.”
There always seemed to be complications with Allen’s enterprises. What he first called the Jimi Hendrix Museum project became mired in a lawsuit with the musician’s father over the rights to Hendrix’s music, with the result that the museum’s name was changed to The Experience Music Project. The first company Allen founded, Asymetrix, was known in Seattle as “the reorg of the month club,” and had not produced a market success in its ten-year history. Virtual Vision parlayed a hefty investment from Allen into laughter (one of its ads showed a golfer standing on the links, club in hand, while watching television on his Virtual Vision headset, blinded to the course around him) and bankruptcy. An employee from Vulcan Ventures, one of Allen’s investment companies, told me that his term for any Allen-owned company was “black hole.” Yet, declared the Seattle Times in instructing its readers to vote for the stadium referendum, “Allen is the reason to vote yes, his willingness to buy the team, to pay a portion of construction costs, to cover cost over-runs and, most of all, to provide the best product money can buy.”