San Francisco (CNN Business) For the last 35 years of his life, Paul Allen lived large and unapologetically.

He bought sports teams, airplanes, an island, and one of the world's largest mega-yachts. He traveled the world, hung out with celebrities, SCUBA dived, and started a band. A billionaire philanthropist with varied hobbies and interests, he paid for expeditions to find lost WWII shipwrecks, funded brain disease research, and opened a museum dedicated to his idol, Jimi Hendrix.

He was an active businessman, too. Allen started multiple technology companies and invested early in AOL and Ticketmaster.

But Allen, who died Monday at age 65 from complications with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, was still best known as the co-founder of Microsoft, the company he started with Bill Gates in 1975 and left eight years later.

Allen's stake in Microsoft funded his full and lavish life. An early brush with cancer, and his contentious relationship with Gates, pushed him to live like it wouldn't last forever.

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