The Dell Dude
28.
That was Mark Zuckerberg’s age when Facebook ($FB) went public back on May 18, 2012.
When Michael Dell took his synonymous company, Dell, public back on June 22, 1988, he was 23.
Fun fact: one of the first (intermediate) HQ Trivia questions I ever answered correctly was: Under what name did Michael Dell first register his company? Answer: PC’s Limited.
Anyway, in the most recent podcast episode of How I Built This, Michael Dell discussed the origin story of his company and credited being born in the United States as a blessing that led him to take risks with creating and growing his business, though I still think his parents want him to be a doctor:
There had been recent rumors that Dell had been thinking of returning to the stock market because keep in mind that it bowed out back in 2013:
Furthermore, the rumors had assumed that Dell would use some of the new public money to buy the 20% of VMware ($VMW) that it didn’t already own.
But today, there are contrary rumors that say VMware — the IT company that lives on the boring side of the cloud (see: Oracle, Cisco, Hewlett Packard) — may buy out Dell, in a reverse-merger of sorts:
As the current chairman of VMware, Michael Dell is not a fan of the recent “tax reform” that limits deductions:
“Last year, just before he closed the biggest technology merger in history, Michael Dell was asked how he would feel waking up and being nearly $50 billion in debt. His reply: ‘We do everything bigger in Texas.’”
Maybe Michael should’ve campaigned to rephrase the “Don’t Mess with Texas” (anti-littering) slogan to “Don’t Mess with Taxes” (please don’t make me pay huge annual interest payments!).
For better or worse, Dell and VMware will be in the news this year in a deal that will cost (or gain?) one side a lot of money.
