Passion is at the heart of everything we do and the energy that fuels success. This was well demonstrated by Michael Dell, the founder, chairman, and CEO of Dell Technologies, one of the world’s largest technology infrastructure companies with revenue of $101 billion in the year to Jan. 31, 2022. $101.
The billionaire had chosen to pursue his own dreams in spite of his parent wanting another direction from him.
Dell is the number 23rd on the Bloomberg billionaire list with an estimated net worth of $47.2 billion as of 17th May 2022. He is also a shareholder of VMWAre Inc., which was spun off from Dell in 2021 through a special dividend.
Education and foray into business
Michael Saul Dell was born on February 23, 1965, to a Jewish family in Houston to Lorraine Charlotte and Alexander Dell. At a very tender age, he started demonstrating likeness for computing and business.
At age 12, Michael washed dishes at a Chinese restaurant to raise money for his stamp collection and at the age of 15, he sold subscriptions to Houston Post in the summer, which earned him $18,000 in one single year as a high school student in Memorial High School, learning to target specific populations for newspaper subscriptions.
He soon got an Apple II, which he promptly disassembled to see how it worked.
He got admission to study medicine in the University of Texas in 1983, satisfying his parents who wanted him to be a doctor. Meanwhile, he didn’t let that stand in the way of his passion as he started an informal business putting together and selling upgrade kits for personal computers leveraging on the fact that the PC world was still young and that no company had tried selling directly to customers as he sold computers for people he knew at college.
His emphasis, however, was on strong customer support and cheaper prices as well as good machines. Soon, he built accounts outside of school
Building the Dell brand
In 1984, Dell dropped out of school and focused all his efforts on his business. He registered the business and relocated to a business centre in North Austin and employed a few hands to help out.
By 1992, at the age of 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, launching its first servers. The company also improved in sales per day from dell.com to $1 million.
By 2000, Dell became a billionaire and his company had offices in 34 countries with an employee count of over 35,000.
In 2001, Dell surpassed Compaq to become the world’s largest PC maker as its world market share reached 12.8 percent, which marked the first time the rankings shifted over the previous seven years.
Other endeavours
- Michael is married to Susan and they both have four children.
- In 2009, they both established the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation which focuses on grants, urban education, childhood health and family economic stability.
- In 1998, Dell founded MSD Capital L.P. to manage his family’s investments. Investment activities include publicly traded securities, private equity activities, and real estate.
- In 2004, he stepped down as Dell CEO but returned following an accounting scandal in 2007
- In 2015, he agreed to acquire the enterprise software and storage company EMC Corporation for $67 billion, in a deal labelled as the highest-valued tech acquisition in history – the acquisition was completed in 2016.
- In July 2010 Dell Inc. agreed to pay a $100 million penalty to settle SEC charges of disclosure and accounting fraud in relation to undisclosed payments from Intel Corporation.
