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American businessman (born 1962)
Gabe Logan Newell, known by his nickname Gaben, is an American video game developer and businessman who is the co-founder and president of the video game company Valve.
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Gabe Logan Newell was born on November 3, 1962, at Aspen Valley Hospital in Aspen, Colorado, as the son of Donald Newell. He attended Davis Senior High School in Davis, California. He began computer programming in high school, at a time when programming was not an established career path, and imagined he would become a doctor. He worked as a paperboy, and later a telegram messenger for Western Union. In 1980, Newell enrolled at Harvard University to study programming.
In October 2017, Forbes listed Newell among the 100 wealthiest people in the United States, with an estimated net worth of $5.5 billion. In December 2021, Forbes estimated that Newell had a net worth of $3.9 billion and owned at least one quarter of Valve. According to Charlie Fish, the author of The History of Video Games, as of 2021 Newell was the richest person in the video game industry. In 2025, Forbes estimated that Newell owned at least half of Valve and had a net worth of $11 billion.
In 2020, Newell and the Valve employee Yahn Bernier created a car racing team, the Heart of Racing, to raise funds for children's charities in Seattle and New Zealand. In the same year, Newell worked with Wētā Workshop and Rocket Lab to send a gnome figure from Half-Life 2: Episode Two into space. Newell donated $1 for every person who watched the launch video in 24 hours. The money went to the pediatric intensive care unit at the Starship Children's Hospital in Auckland, New Zealand.
Newell formerly suffered from Fuchs' dystrophy, a congenital disease which affects the cornea. He was cured via two cornea transplants in 2006 and 2007. On the same day he founded Valve with Harrington, Newell married Lisa Mennet. They have two sons; their eldest, Gray, is a professional race car driver. The birth of Gray in the late 1990s inspired the final boss of Half-Life, as the couple considered childbirth the most frightening thing they could think of at the time. Newell and Mennet divorced around 2016. In 2011, Newell said his favorite games included Super Mario 64, Doom, and a Burroughs mainframe version of the 1971 Star Trek game, which was the first game he ever played. Doom convinced him that games were the future of entertainment, and Super Mario 64 convinced him that games were art. Newell was a fan of the animated series My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. Within the gaming community, Newell has the nickname Gaben, derived from his work email address. Newell said that he tried to grow into his public image: "[Fans] hug me when they run into me. I'm not a hugging person, but that's what they want. I was with my kids the first time that happened in public, and my kids were pretty cool with it. But I wasn't. 'Dad, roll with it.' Even now, I'm learning from our customers." In 2018, he also recorded a "deadpan" self-referential voice pack for the Valve game Dota 2. Newell was visiting New Zealand with friends when the COVID-19 pandemic emerged, and stayed in Auckland once travel restrictions were eased. As an expression of gratitude for New Zealand's hospitality, he and others arranged a free event, We Love Aotearoa, with live performances from musicians across New Zealand. It was accompanied by VR stands for Valve games such as Half-Life: Alyx and The Lab. The event was postponed from August to December due to a lockdown induced by a second wave of COVID-19. Newell applied for permanent residency in New Zealand in October 2020, but had returned to Seattle by 2021. Since the 1990s, Newell has owned and sold several homes in Seattle, including a home in Capitol Hill, two homes on Lake Washington and a holiday home in Long Beach Peninsula. He owns several ships and has lived mostly at sea since the pandemic. In June 2026, he purchased a 20,000-square-foot mansion in Florida for $70.8 million, with 7 bedrooms, 13 bathrooms, an 8-car garage, an outdoor pool, a dock, a boat lift, an elevator, and a private tunnel to a beach.
Biographical detail compiled from Wikipedia and Wikidata, which are edited openly and may be incomplete or out of date. Fleet data is our own. Source →
