Michael S. Dell

Michael Dell is a shy person who likes to maintain his privacy. He is married to Susan Lynn Lieberman since 1989, and the couple has four children.

Michael Dell was born on 23 February 1965 in Houston to a Jewish family. His father, Alexander Dell, was an orthodontist while his mother Lorraine Charlotte (née Langfan), was a stockbroker.

He received his primary education from Herod Elementary School in Houston. He was a bright young boy who learned several aspects of financial affairs from his stockbroker mother and developed an early interest in business.

He loved earning money and took up a variety of odd jobs as a teenager. He also sold his stamp collection for $2000 which was a huge sum for a young boy. Unusually mature and enterprising for his age, he invested his earnings in stocks and precious metals.

During his teenage years he was drawn towards technology and got his first computer when he was 15. He disassembled it to study the components and see how it worked.

While studying at Memorial High School in Houston, he started selling subscriptions to the ‘Houston Post’ in the summer holidays. He realized that the method of making cold calls was not much effective and devised a new marketing plan which proved to be more successful. Within a year he earned $18,000, which was higher than what some of his school teachers earned in a year.

Michael Dell registered his company as “PC’s Limited” in January 1984. In May 1984, he changed the name of the company to Dell Computer Corporation. By now his business had grown to include a few employees to take and fill orders and upgrade basic machines.

Dell emphasized on customer focus and made quality products and excellent customer service his priorities. His convictions paid off and the company’s sales grew manifold in the months to come. By 1985, the company also began to design and build computers with purchased components.

In 1986, Dell introduced a 12-megahertz 286 processor—the fastest personal computer at that time. The price of this product compared favorably with a competing computer by IBM, and it became a huge success. The product gained excellent performance reviews and the company’s sales surged to $60 million that year.

The company’s profits skyrocketed over the next few years and by 1992, the company was ranked in Fortune magazine's list of the top 500 corporations. Dell, aged just 27 at that time was the CEO of one of the most successful companies in the world.

During the 1990s, Dell realized the need to have an online presence and launched www.dell.com in 1994. Online pricing was introduced in 1995 and by 1996 the company was making online sales. Soon the internet sales reached about $1 million per day which rose to $50 million per day in 2000.

He is the founder of the computer technology company, Dell Inc., which is one of the largest technological corporations in the world, employing more than 103,300 people worldwide. Internationally renowned for its innovations in supply chain management and electronic commerce, Dell Inc. is currently the No. 1 shipper of PC monitors in the world.