Michael Dell spent 40 years preparing for an AI boom no one expected
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. If you hear Dell and think of the supplier of the PC at your office desk, you’re out of touch. Michael Dell is pulling off one of the most surprising transformations in the history of tech at the company that bears his name, all without changing his approach to business.
He is now the world’s 13th-wealthiest person—neck and neck with Nvidia founder Jensen Huang. He is also the second-longest serving chief executive of any big U.S. company, after Warren Buffett—if you elide a three-year break from 2004 to 2007, when he was the chairman of Dell’s board.
He remains the youngest CEO of a company to enter the Fortune 500—a record even Mark Zuckerberg couldn’t break. He is, somehow, not yet 60 years old. His company has transitioned from a nostalgic mid-90s PC maker to a globe-straddling AI-supercomputer builder that operates in 180 countries.
While selling PCs and peripherals still accounts for about half of the company’s revenue, the real business of Dell is infrastructure—the digital kind. The transition of Dell, the company, mirrors the evolution of Dell, the person. He was once a boyish entrepreneur in thick-framed glasses who started his upgraded-PC company in a college dorm room.
He is now a gravelly voiced, contacts-wearing CEO who not only bested corporate raider Carl Icahn in a brutal fight to buy his own company from shareholders in 2013, but also tripled his ownership, so that he now owns about half of the company. “Michael once said he’ll care about Dell even when he’s dead—and I believe him," says Marc Benioff, CEO of cloud enterprise-software company Salesforce and a friend of Dell’s. “He may seem like a nice guy, but underneath is the spirit of a WWE wrestler." In a recent
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