Who owns Dell?

Dell, which began operations in 1984 in Michael Dell’s bedroom, is today a rare company in the technology world because it is still majority controlled by Mr. Dell himself. The PC equipment maker went public in 1988, went private again in 2013, then went public again in 2018, with Dell still owning 40% of the company’s overall shares and being described as “the majority shareholder of the company” in its proxy statement. It is important to note, however, that the Dell brand is technically owned by parent company Dell Technologies.

Those who invested in Dell include the usual suspects. BlackRock – one of the companies with massive stakes in many other tech giants – also owns 24.09 million shares of Dell, followed by Vanguard with 19.44 million shares. Overall, Dell is on the rise, with its stock at $468.65 per share at the time of writing, an increase of more than 250% year over year. However, at center stage is Michael Dell, who has overseen its various divisions and companies acquired by Dell over the years. Thanks to the demand for AI data centers and the hardware supplied by Dell, Michael Dell’s fortune has exploded in recent years. He is now the fifth richest person in the world, with a fortune of around $246 billion, and his total wealth is said to have increased by $80 billion this year – all thanks to his ownership of Dell.

Michael Dell became the youngest CEO on the Fortune 500 in 1992, at the age of 27. However, he wasn’t always the CEO of his company. In 2004, he resigned and was replaced by Kevin Rollins, who served as Dell’s COO and president. Dell returned three years later, in 2007, after Rollins oversaw a slowdown in Dell’s growth and poor public relations, with a battery recall. It was here that, under Dell’s renewed control of the ship, the company began to strengthen its business.

In 2010, Dell stopped being just a PC maker and acquired a plethora of business technology companies, including Boomi; KACE; Ocarina Networks; Scalent and Compellent. Most of the other companies subsequently acquired also operate in cloud operations, data center hardware or infrastructure and security solutions. Its largest acquisition came in 2016, when Dell acquired enterprise data storage company EMC Corporation for $67 billion, strengthening its enterprise offering. Dell saw its Infrastructure Solutions group, formed from its EMC merger, reach $60.8 billion, or more than 50% of total revenue for fiscal 2026 financial results of $113.5 billion.

On top of all this growth, according to his wife, Susan Dell, the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation has so far donated $3 billion to various charities. Last December, The New York Times reported that the couple announced a total donation of $6.25 billion to the individual investment accounts known as “Trump accounts” of 25 million children living in low-income areas.

In its early days as PC Limited, Dell was best known for using commercially available parts to assemble prebuilt PCs at reasonable prices. In the early 1980s, an IBM PC cost well over $4,000 once you purchased the monitor, printer, and the PC itself, at $1,565. Dell was fierce with its pricing. The first PC produced, the Turbo PC, sold for $795. It would continue this tradition with the follow-up, the PC’s Limited AT, surpassing IBM’s equivalent price, at just over half at $1,995, compared to IBM’s $4,000 price. This price drop would consolidate Dell’s presence in the world of PCs.

Since then, Dell acquired the gaming-focused Alienware brand in 2006, while continuing to develop its own branded PCs, with popular laptops in the XPS line. Dell’s prices have risen since its cutthroat days, and some of its devices have been hit by the AI ​​data center-driven pricing crisis. However, Dell has seen tremendous success over the past two years, capitalizing on the AI ​​boom and bringing hardware into data centers around the world.