Michael Dell

Michael Saul Dell (born February 23, 1965) is an American billionaire businessman and investor.

He is the founder, chairman, and CEO of Dell Technologies, one of the world's largest technology infrastructure companies.

He is the 12th richest person in the world according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, with a net worth of $104 billion as of March 2024.

As of October 2023, according to Forbes, approximately $50 billion of his net worth was derived from his 50% stake in Dell and 40% stake in VMWare, with the rest being held by his family office DFO Management.

Dell was born in 1965 in Houston to a Jewish family.

His parents were Lorraine Charlotte (née Langfan), a stockbroker, and Alexander Dell, an orthodontist.

Michael attended Herod Elementary School in Houston.

In a bid to enter business early, he applied to take a high school equivalency exam at age eight.

In his early teens, he invested his earnings from part-time jobs in stocks and precious metals.

Dell purchased his first calculator at age seven and encountered an early teletype terminal in junior high.

At age 15, after playing with computers at Radio Shack, he got his first computer, an Apple II, which he promptly disassembled to see how it worked.

Dell attended Memorial High School in Houston, selling subscriptions to the Houston Post in the summer.

Dell's parents wanted him to be a doctor and in order to please them, he took up pre-med at the University of Texas in 1983.

Dell continued learning to target specific populations for newspaper subscriptions rather than just making cold calls.

He discovered that people who were most likely to get a subscription were newlyweds and people moving to a new home.

After collecting the contact information of this population from public records, he sent direct mail appeals and earned $18,000 in one year.

He hired several employees, and after earning a gross profit of nearly $200,000 in his first year of business, Dell dropped out of the University of Texas at age 19.

While a freshman pre-med student at the University of Texas, Dell started an informal business putting together and selling upgrade kits for personal computers in Room 2713 of the Dobie Center residential building.

He then applied for a vendor license to bid on contracts for the State of Texas, winning bids by not having the overhead of a computer store.

In January 1984, Dell believed that the potential cost savings of a manufacturer selling PCs directly had enormous advantages over the conventional indirect retail channel.

In January 1984, Dell registered his company as "PC's Limited".

Dell’s strategy was to sell directly to customers by manufacturing computers only after they were ordered.

Operating out of a condominium, the business sold between $50,000 and $80,000 worth of PC upgrades, kits, and add-on components.

In May, Dell incorporated the company as "Dell Computer Corporation" and relocated to a business center in North Austin.

The company employed a few people as order takers, a few more to fill the orders, and, as Dell recalled, a manufacturing staff consisting of "three guys with screwdrivers sitting at six-foot tables".

The venture's capitalization cost was $1,000.

In 1992, aged 27, he became the youngest CEO of a company ranked in Fortune magazine's list of the top 500 corporations.

In 1996, Dell started selling computers over the Web, the same year his company launched its first servers.

By March 1997, Dell Inc. reported about $1 million in sales per day from dell.com.

In the first quarter of 2001, Dell Inc. reached a world market share of 12.8 percent, surpassing Compaq to become the world's largest PC maker.

The metric marked the first time the rankings had shifted over the previous seven years.

The company's combined shipments of desktops, notebooks and servers grew 34.3 percent worldwide and 30.7 percent in the United States at a time when competitors' sales were shrinking.

On March 4, 2004, Dell stepped down as CEO, but stayed as chairman of Dell Inc.'s board, while Kevin Rollins, then president and COO, became president and CEO.

On January 31, 2007, Dell returned as CEO at the request of the board, succeeding Rollins.

In January 2013 it was announced that he had bid to take Dell Inc. private for $24.4 billion in the biggest management buyout since the Great Recession.

Dell Inc. officially went private in October 2013.

In 2013, Michael Dell with the help of Silver Lake Partners, Microsoft, and a consortium of lenders took Dell, Inc. private.

The deal was reportedly worth $25 billion and faced difficulties during its execution.

Notable resistance came from Carl Icahn, but after several months he stepped aside.

The company once again went public in December 2018.