Michael Dell

Michael Dell founded Dell Computer in his University of Texas dorm room in 1984 with $1,000 and a revolutionary idea: sell custom-built PCs directly to consumers, eliminating the middleman. That direct-to-consumer model made Dell the world's largest PC company and one of the most successful business models of the PC era.

Dell's most audacious move came in 2013, when he took his company private in a $24.4B leveraged buyout — the largest technology LBO in history at the time. Free from Wall Street's quarterly earnings pressure, he rebuilt the company, acquired EMC for $67B (the largest tech acquisition ever at the time), and re-emerged as Dell Technologies — a diversified enterprise technology giant. The company went public again in 2018 at a much higher valuation.

The private-to-public journey is Dell's masterpiece. He bought his own company when Wall Street had given up on it, merged it with the storage giant EMC, and created a company that now generates $100B+ in annual revenue. At 59, Dell is one of the richest people in the world and still runs the company he started as a teenager.