Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen's $1 billon art collection is costliest ever in history to be auctioned

Auctioneers on Wednesday revealed the most expensive art collection to be offered for sale. The collection belonged to the late Paul Allen, who co-founded Microsoft with his childhood friend Bill Gates in 1975. The value of the is an incredible $1 billion, reported French news agency Agence France-Presse. It consists of 150 artworks from artists such as Van Gogh, Claude Monet, Paul Gauguin, and Jasper Johns.

Johanna Flaum, who is the vice-chairman of 20th and 21st Century Art at auctioneers Christie's, said, "I think this is a sale that sort of exhausts superlatives. This is... the most valuable collection ever sold at auction. It's really a once-in-a-generation type of event. The collection is quite wide-ranging, it really makes Paul Allen a unique collector in that sense."

Allen's collection dwarfs the previous record-maker, the Macklowe collection, which was sold for $922 million.

The auction will be held in New York on November 9 and 10. The money from the collection will be donated to charity, as was Allen's will. Art enthusiasts will get to see sections of the collection in Los Angeles, London, Paris, Shanghai, and New York before the sale.

Born in 1953, Allen died at the age of 65 in 2018 of septic shock due to complications arising out of Non-Hodgkin lymphoma. He and Gates were responsible for kickstarting the computing revolution in the 1970s and the 1980s. Microsoft became the largest software company in the world. Allen left active work in 1983 after being diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma. He was an investor in industries such as technology, media, science, space, and so on. He was also a noted philanthropist, donating to causes like education, environment conservation, healthcare, and more.

At the time of his death, Forbes ranked Allen as the 44th wealthiest person on the globe, with a net worth of $20.3 billion.