What does a day in the life of billionaire gaming boss Gabe Newell look like? Speaking to Zalkar Saliev from one of his yachts, the Valve co-founder said he enjoys the benefit of living on a boat while maintaining a fairly regular work schedule.
“I get up, I work, I go scuba-diving, work some more, [then] either go on a second scuba dive or I go to the gym and work out. I live on a boat so I just hang out with everybody on the boat. Then I work,” he said, and PC Gamer confirmed with Valve that this interview is real. “I work seven days a week: I’m working from my bedroom as you can tell. I like working, it’s fun, to me it doesn’t feel like work. The kinds of things that I get to do every day are super-awesome.”
Newell said the traditional idea of retirement is that you “stop doing your horrible job and go do what is most fun and entertaining,” and in that sense, he said he feels like he’s been retired for a while.
“I’ve said it before but, when you retire, you want to like stop doing your horrible job and go do what is sort of most fun and entertaining,” says Newell. “In that sense I’ve been retired for a long time.
In addition to his responsibilities at Valve, Newell started the neural interface company Starfish Neuroscience, a competitor to Elon Musk’s Neuralink. He’s also working with a company that is creating an “aerosol pathogen detection device” that reveals what pathogens may be in the air.
“I just work all the time,” he said. “But it’s not like, ‘Oh my god I’m up late at night slaving away on stuff.’ It’s more like, ‘I can’t go to sleep because I’m having fun,’ you know?”
Newell dropped out of Harvard in the early ’80s to join Microsoft, leaving the company as a millionaire with Mike Harrington to form Valve. He’s now a billionaire, with Forbes estimating his net worth at $9.5 billion. Despite his immense riches, he still gets out there and talks to fans, as he personally delivered Steam Decks back in 2022.
