Less than a decade ago, the world seemed ready to leave stodgy, hardware-heavy personal computing-and Dell Computer, its leading exponent-behind for good. Dell's namesake chief executive begged to differ. Not content to sit on the sidelines giving away his sizeable fortune, Michael Dell teamed up with billionaire Silver Lake dealmaker Egon Durban in 2013 to pull off a $24.9 billion leveraged buyout, the biggest in tech history. Then, using a bold series of debt-fueled moves, Dell tripled his net worth to around an astonishing $50 billion. With the renamed Dell Technologies now back on the public markets and its VMware spinoff a cloud mainstay, the 56-year-old Dell says he isn't going anywhere. (And certainly not, he hastened to add, into orbit, unlike some of his peers.) "A great entrepreneurial vision and execution ability-that's Michael Dell," tweeted an admiring @KarlHeinzKrug. More surprised at Dell's Promethean rebirth was reader Pat Loughlin. "Extremely impressive," he observed on Facebook. "Everyone thought he was a relic."
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