Michael Dell: an Entrepreneur for Our Time

How the billionaire Dell Technologies founder went from business prodigy to tech iconoclast

- By Keith Gordon

The world today is awash in entrepreneurs. Ambitious people who are willing to risk their own time and money, motivated to create a successful business and reap the subsequent rewards. But not all entrepreneurs truly possess the entrepreneurial spirit, the inner drive that compels the individual to constantly work towards these goals, an unstoppable force confidently seeking out an immovable object to overcome.

It’s the type of attitude that feeds the birth and growth of the world’s most successful and impactful companies and creates billionaires of their founders and investors. It’s the type of attitude that underpins much of the American Dream. It’s the type of attitude that, in 1973, led a precocious young boy named Michael Dell to investigate potential high school equivalency exams in an attempt to move past school and into the business world he was determined to conquer. He was 8 years old.

Michael Dell was born in Houston, Texas into a family with lofty educational and professional standards. His father was an orthodontist and his mother was a stockbroker, his parents were eager for Michael to complete his education and eventually become a doctor.

But Michael wasn’t going to follow this expected path. Before he got close to advanced degrees or medical residency programs, he would find immense success in business and get the insatiable urge to find his marketplace and eventually dominate it.