Sitting at the headquarters of his Austin, Texas–based philanthropic foundation, personal computer pioneer Michael Dell is acutely aware that on tha

Deal Of The Century: How Michael Dell Turned His Declining PC Business Into A $40 Billion Windfall

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2021-08-04 12:00:05

Sitting at the headquarters of his Austin, Texas–based philanthropic foundation, personal computer pioneer Michael Dell is acutely aware that on that very morning in that very state, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has rocketed himself into space in his Blue Origin space shuttle as millions of viewers around the world looked on. “I’m perfectly happy staying on planet Earth,” Dell, shrugging, says with a chuckle.

The previous week, fellow ten-figure mogul Richard Branson had kicked off the billionaire space race. Some people saw innovation and ambition. Others saw ego and hubris. Dell saw . . . opportunity.

“We’re selling to a lot of the emerging space companies,” he says matter-of-factly. “You can’t do all those engineering feats without an incredible amount of computing power, data and artificial intelligence.” 

Dell has been publicly quiet for most of the past decade, muzzled by fierce takeover negotiations or simply uninterested in the spotlight, or both. His business has done the talking instead. Nine years ago, Silicon Valley and Wall Street alike had written off Dell, the person and the company, both tethered to the then-cratering personal computer market, as en route to the same technological irrelevance as Palm or BlackBerry. Yet even then Dell saw opportunity: He enlisted private equity firm Silver Lake and its billionaire co-head Egon Durban to sidestep the public cynicism, taking his company private for $24.9 billion in 2013, the largest technology leveraged buyout ever. Three years later, he and Durban conjured $67 billion to engineer the acquisition of IT infrastructure giant EMC Corporation. In all, Dell piled an astronomical $70 billion in leverage on his empire, shoveling on debt unlike any thing ever witnessed in corporate America. 

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