Michael Dell

Michael Saul Dell was born on February 23, 1965, in Houston, Texas. The son of an orthodontist and a stockbroker, Dell demonstrated entrepreneurial instincts from early childhood, running a mail-order stamp trading business at age 12 and earning enough from newspaper subscription sales at 15 to purchase a BMW before he could legally drive. He enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin in 1983 as a pre-medicine student but quickly redirected his energies toward the personal computer market, recognizing a structural inefficiency in how PCs were manufactured and distributed. He dropped out of UT in May 1984 at age 19 to run PC's Limited full-time, reportedly telling his parents he intended to compete with IBM.

Michael Dell is the founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer of Dell Technologies Inc., a position he has held since the company's founding in 1984 with only a brief interlude during a period of co-CEO structure. He built Dell Computer Corporation from a dorm-room startup into the world's largest PC manufacturer by the late 1990s through the pioneering of the configure-to-order direct sales model. Dell took the company private in a $24.9 billion leveraged buyout in 2013, executed the landmark $67 billion acquisition of EMC Corporation in 2016, and guided the company through its return to public markets in December 2018. He has been recognized with numerous industry awards including the Horatio Alger Award and has received honorary doctoral degrees from multiple universities. Dell is also a prominent philanthropist through the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, which has committed over $2 billion to education and health programs globally. He remains the company's largest individual shareholder and one of the most influential figures in the global technology industry.