"People looked at us like we were buying real estate in Cleveland," Durban says of the 2013 Dell buyout.
"A Dell-EMC merger fell through in 2009. 'I have an above-average appetite for risk,' Dell says. 'Not all participants had the same.'
Quote:
In 2015 Michael "Dell helped orchestrate a $67 billion merger with EMC, a leader in data storage, in the biggest tech deal in history. That transaction closed in September [2016], and the combined Dell-EMC, now dubbed Dell Technologies, is—for now—the world’s No. 1 seller of storage systems, No. 2 of servers, and No. 3 of PCs, according to research firm IDC. And thanks to Dell’s financial engineering, it has a Texas-size pile of debt [$57b] stuffed into its saddlebags.
"His [Dell's] corporate maneuvering over the past decade has been guided by his belief that Dell can dominate as a one-stop tech shop for corporations * * * His new company, which carries nearly $57 billion in debt, will be searching for growth in industries [PCs, servers, and storage systems] largely in decline [in sales]. * * * Integrating the companies [Dell computers and EMC], with a combined workforce of 140,000, will also be an exercise in moving mountains. Customers' needs, meanwhile, are rapidly evolving. Servers * * * along with storage systems for companies' data, are Dell Technologies' new bread and butter [not PCs]. But they face an enormous threat from the public cloud * * *[Michael Dell has] an estimated net worth of more than $20 billion
"as a University of Texas at Austin pre-med freshman [Dell started his computer company] * * * Mom and Dad caught on and insisted he quit the computer biz and focus on school. By the end of the school year, Dell had dropped out and started his company. He never went back to graduate. ('I'm still living with the Jewish guilt for not being a doctor,' he jokes.) * * * In the late 1990s, as Dell’s fortune grew, he set up a firm called MSD Capital to manage his personal wealth (the letters stand for 'Michael Saul Dell'). One of MSD’s first investments was in an unknown, tech-focused private equity firm called Silver Lake, which at the time was raising its first fund.
Note:
(a) This is one of the two feature stories in this issue. It is long, and unless you work in this field (computer hardware), you may not be willing to read it from start to end.
(b) The story highlights the first sentence of the article: "Everything's bigger in Texas—even the deals.
(c)
(i) saddlebag https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddlebag
(ii) catch on (vi): "to become aware : LEARN <didn't catch on to what was going on>" https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/catch%20on
(iii)
(A) Michael Dell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Dell
("Michael Dell was born in 1965 in Houston, to a Jewish family whose surname reflects the translation into English of the original German/Yiddish Thal ('valley' or 'dale [qv]'; modern common-noun spelling Tal [the first letter of a German noun is always capitalized]) upon the family's immigration to the United States") (brackets in original]
(B) Saul is a Jewish given name.