Gabe Logan Newell, nicknamed Gaben, is an American businessman, the co-founder and president of the video game developer and digital distribution company Valve. He was educated at Davis Senior High School and attended Harvard University in the early 1980s before dropping out to join Microsoft, where he helped create the first iterations of the Microsoft Windows operating system. Together with Mike Harrington, he left Microsoft in 1996 to found Valve. As of 2020, he had a net worth of approximately US$4 billion .