business information

Forbes Lists

• #22 in 2012

• #21 in United States

After months locked in battle with activist investor Carl Icahn, PC entrepreneur Michael Dell won shareholder approval of his final $24.9 billion offer to take his eponymous company private in what will be the biggest leveraged buy-out in recent years. The Texan, who started the PC maker in his dorm room 29 years ago and remains Chairman and CEO, believes pulling out of the public markets will help Dell shift from a struggling personal computer business into a business software giant. Today the bulk of Dell's own fortune is tied up in his investment firm MSD Capital; its $12 billion portfolio includes banking, property, dental practices and landscaping companies. On the charitable front, the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation has committed more than $900 million to eradicating urban poverty and improving child health. In January 2013, the foundation said it will donate $50 million to the University of Texas to build its new medical school, which will be named after Dell.


Born in 1965, Michael Dell was interested in business at a very early age. He also had expensive collections and understood that he had to save money and use it toward investments. When he was twelve, he took a job washing dishes in a restaurant so that he could maintain his stamp collection. Not long after, while he was still in high school, he developed a method of finding customers to sign on for newspaper subscriptions. That endeavor made him a whopping eighteen-thousand dollars in one year.
To broaden his interests, he decided to purchase an Apple computer when he was fifteen. Oddly, his curiosity was not in learning the computer or wondering how it worked. On the contrary he was intrigued by its instrumentation. Specifically, he wondered how the computer was made and assembled. Dell wanted to see how the parts fit together to work as a computer. Once he understood the mechanism, he was ready to take his knowledge, and seize an opportunity. That came when he was in college.

Dell quickly realized that no-one was selling computers directly to the masses. He felt that if he purchased the components, and built the computers himself at reduced prices, he would have many instant customers. He was right, because the other students at the college were placing orders in droves. Before long, students from nearby schools heard about his quality machines, excellent customer service, and cheaper prices, and they wanted computers, too. At this point Dell knew that he could no longer continue with college study, so he left and devoted his time to the business of building computers. That was in 1984, when he was nineteen, and the company was called PC's Limited. This was, unquestionably, the defining moment. Michael Dell and the future Dell Computer Corporation were poised to make history.

With an initial investment of one-thousand dollars, the company grew to conglomerate status with over thirty-five thousand employees in thirty-four different countries. It even blew Compaq Computer out the water by grabbing the top spot as the world's largest PC builder. Michael Dell's business methods were so common sense, yet revolutionary, that many others could not believe the meteoric rise of the company. And, to provide a blueprint of the company's unbelievable success, Dell published a book in 1999 entitled "Direct from Dell: Strategies That Revolutionized the Industry".
People close to Michael Dell say he is quite shy, which makes his rise to super-entrepreneur that much more incredible. In the early days, he was the only one doing the marketing and promotion, and he obviously served both the customers and the company well. And, even though he had retired from the company a few years ago, the board encouraged him to return.
Michael Dell changed how we bought computers, by in fact, making them available to the masses at large, and at affordable prices. Not only did he sell the computers by word-of-mouth, but he encouraged the public to buy from the company's online store, which is reputed to sell forty million dollars worth of inventory on any given day.