Michael Dell turned his dorm-room PC company into the go-to hardware provider for 99% of the Fortune 500. Now the longest-standing founder-CEO in tech has a chance to cash in on the AI boom—and make himself and his company big ger than ever.
IT’S HARD TO GET a splashy sound bite out of Michael Dell, even if you tee him up for one. When asked how big a growth opportunity the AI wave could be for his namesake company, Dell Technologies, the founder and longtime chief executive doesn’t offer up any pithy one-liners but instead ruminates in real time.
“It feels every bit as big as previous waves, but probably bigger,” he says, pondering the question, and then adds, “You know, maybe quite a bit bigger.” He takes another brief pause, reconsiders his own words, and delivers a most inconclusive conclusion: “I don’t know for sure. Nobody knows.”
We’re seated in a conference room at Dell Technologies’ headquarters just outside Austin, where the temperature has hit 88° F in early March. Dressed in dark slacks and a navy blue denim button-down (Texan for business casual, no matter the season), Dell has just emerged from a photo shoot that he tolerated but clearly didn’t relish. It’s not that he isn’t on board with being the name and face of his company. That’s been true for a while—40 years, to be exact. He remains Dell Technologies’ biggest believer—and biggest shareholder, with 53% of the $79 billion company’s stock under his or his wife Susan’s name. But he’s not a natural-born showman. Never was. In fact, he seems to go out of his way to not put on a performance—even as he’s embarking on what could be his greatest act yet.
Unlike some other tech CEOs, Dell doesn’t do bombastic declarations or colorful antics; he doesn’t have a side hustle that involves blasting himself into outer space. Despite having spent his entire adult life in the public eye, he is measured, analytical, and almost intentionally unexciting. So his reluctance to put a ceiling, or even a floor, on what generative AI could mean for his company is not surprising.
But while Dell may prefer to hedge, the market isn’t hiding its exuberance. Just a few days before our interview, on March 1, Dell Technologies’ share price leaped 38%, hitting an all-time high above $131 after the company reported earnings that beat analyst expectations. The announcement generated plenty of excitement about demand for Dell’s growing portfolio of back-end tech products, the kind required for storing and managing the massive data-sets needed to run—you guessed it—generative AI applications. Orders for AI-optimized servers were up 40% in the most recent qu
