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TECH TITANS WITH BABY FACES: (From left) At the 1992 PC Forum in Arizona, Bill Gates talks with a 27-year-old Dell and Sun Microsystems cofounder Bill Joy, while Prediction Company’s Doyne Farmer chats up influential tech newsletter editor and conference organizer Esther Dyson. “They don’t realize that Dell has quietly amassed the market share in enterprise technology.” “Everybody’s eyes are on Amazon, Microsoft and Google,” says billionaire Marc Benioff, the cofounder of Salesforce and a friend of Dell’s. Both will hold manageable debt levels and a valuable currency for growth and acquisitions. Soon Dell will sit at the helm of two separate public companies: Dell Technologies, his personal computer and IT infrastructure giant, and its spinoff, VMware, a mainstay in cloud-computing infrastructure. His rivals have aged out or moved on, whether tech billionaires Bill Gates or Larry Ellison or Steve Ballmer, who have shifted course to philanthropy or trophy assets such as Hawaiian islands and NBA teams. With hindsight, his timing looks pretty perfect to me.”Īt 56, Dell is technology’s last man standing, the final original founder of the computer era still running his baby. “He bought the company back at the right time. He’s not a technology geek by any stretch of the imagination,” says George Roberts, the billionaire cofounder of private equity giant KKR and a pioneer of the leveraged buyout, who marvels at the deal. And cheap money provided the ideal conditions to finance a corporate gut renovation.
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Dell gushed cash and sat on plenty of valuable software assets to sell. “It didn’t feel that risky to me,” he says. In many ways, he was the architect of the biggest buyout coup of all time. Dell’s personal net worth has risen to $50 billion. Because of all that leverage, Dell, Durban’s Silver Lake and co-investors have done far better, with total gains of more than $40 billion, according to Forbes’ calculations. In turn, Dell Technologies, at $75 billion, is worth more than four times what it was before it went private. “It’s doubling every seven or eight months.” “The amount of data being created in the world is just astounding,” he says. Dell now sits at the helm of the world’s largest infrastructure provider for this activity. Automobiles, telecommunications, energy grids, hospitals and logistics networks have all become digital businesses, producing ever-increasing reams of data that need to be managed and stored. Dell Founder and CEO Michael Dell poses at the Austin, Texas headquarters of the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation in July 2021.
