Michael Dell

Michael Dell began his entrepreneurial journey early, at age 12 netting profits from selling stamps and coins, and later using public records to target newspaper subscriptions to newlyweds via direct mail, hiring friends to assist. In 1984, at age 19 while a pre-med freshman at the University of Texas, he started a business in his dorm room with $1,000, buying unsold IBM PCs at cost, upgrading them with memory and disk drives, and selling them 10-15% below retail prices. Despite parental pressure to focus on studies and pursue medicine, his sales hit $80,000 monthly by spring, leading him to drop out, incorporate as PC's Limited, and pioneer telephone-order sales with toll-free technical support by 1986. The company, renamed Dell Computer, exploded in growth by bypassing retailers to sell customized PCs directly, optimizing supply chains to build to order and minimize inventory, which undercut competitors like IBM. By 1992, it entered the Fortune 500, making Dell the youngest CEO ever at 27; by 2001, it was the world's top PC maker and a leader in Internet commerce, servers, and IT services. Challenges arose in the 2000s, including a PC market slump prompting Dell to adapt beyond the 'direct model' with new strategies amid perceptions of decline. Mobile phones proved a misstep, as Dell's Venue devices failed against dominant OS like Android and iOS, leading to discontinuation in 2012. In 2013, Dell took the company private in a $24.4 billion leveraged buyout with Silver Lake, the largest since the financial crisis, enabling a pivot. This set up the 2015 $67 billion acquisition of EMC (history's largest tech deal), merging with VMware to form Dell Technologies, the world's largest privately held tech firm, relisting publicly in 2018 with a market cap reaching nearly $90 billion by late 2024. Today, as chairman and CEO, Dell oversees an $88 billion revenue giant focused on IT infrastructure, AI, cloud, servers, storage, and data solutions, having navigated four decades of trends from PCs to AI.