SAN FRANCISCO: For two years, Michael Dell was the technology industry’s invisible man, toiling behind the scenes to remake the computer maker he founded three decades ago in his University of Texas dorm room. Now, with his audacious plan to acquire EMC Corp, the largest tech merger in history, Dell is launching a once improbable second act.
Having helped finance a US$25bil deal to take an ailing Dell private in 2013, Dell is teaming up with long-time private equity partner Silver Lake and taking on considerable corporate debt in a US$67bil bet that EMC’s dominance in servers can help him fend off HewlettPackard, Amazon and others in the enterprise computing market.