Michael Saul Dell (born February 23, 1965) is an American business magnate, investor, philanthropist, and author. He is the founder and CEO of Dell Technologies, one of the world’s leading providers of information technology infrastructure solutions. He is ranked as the 37th richest person in the world by Forbes, with a net worth of US$20.8 billion as of February 2017.
In 2011, his 243.35 million shares of Dell Inc. stock were worth $3.5 billion, giving him 12% ownership of the company. His remaining wealth of roughly $10 billion is invested in other companies and is managed by a firm whose name, MSD Capital, incorporates Dell’s initials. On January 5, 2013 it was announced that Michael Dell had bid to take Dell Inc. private for $24.4 billion in the biggest management buyout since the Great Recession. Dell Inc. officially went private on October 29, 2013.
On October 12, 2015, Dell Inc. announced its intent to acquire the enterprise software and storage company EMC Corporation. At $67 billion, it has been labeled the “highest-valued tech acquisition in history”. The acquisition was finalized September 7, 2016.
Early life
Michael Dell was born in 1965 in Houston, to a Jewish family whose surname reflects the translation into English of the original German/Yiddish Thal (“valley” or “dale [q.v.]”; modern common-noun spelling Tal) upon the family’s immigration to the United States. The son of Lorraine Charlotte (née Langfan), a stockbroker, and Alexander Dell, an orthodontist, Michael Dell attended Herod Elementary School in Houston. In a bid to enter business early, he applied to take a high school equivalency exam at age eight. In his early teens, he invested his earnings from part-time jobs in stocks and precious metals.
Dell purchased his first calculator at age seven and encountered an early teletype terminal in junior high. At age 15, after playing with computers at Radio Shack, he got his first computer, an Apple II, which he promptly disassembled to see how it worked. He got a job as a dishwasher at age 12 and was quickly promoted to maitre d’. Dell attended Memorial High School in Houston, selling subscriptions to the Houston Post in the summer. While making cold calls, he noted that the people most likely to purchase subscriptions were those in the process of establishing permanent geographic and social presence. He then hired some friends who scoured local court records so he could target this demographic group by collecting names from marriage and mortgage applications. He then segmented those leads by the size of mortgage, calling on those with the highest mortgages first. Dell earned $18,000 that year, exceeding the annual income of his history and economics teacher.
Source:wikipedia