Michael S. Dell

Age: 43

WHAT HE DOES
Dell founded his eponymous computer company in 1984. He appointed Kevin Rollins CEO in 2004, but resumed the role in early 2007.
 
WHAT HE’S KNOWN FOR
He’s the guy who tried to convince millions that, dude, you gotta get a Dell. While Dell himself didn’t appear in his company’s commercials, his idea from the beginning was to sell computers directly to consumers, eliminating the middleman and his added costs. It’s a notion he had as a freshman at the University of Texas. He hatched a novel plan from his dorm room in 1984 to assemble P.C.s and put them in the marketplace. He soon became one of the tech world’s favorite college dropouts.

As Dell gained market share against industry stalwarts I.B.M. and Compaq, the media fell in love with its leader. Dell was successful, photogenic, and didn’t have gray hair, even if he was a little shy and rarely talked about his personal life. At age 27 he was the youngest C.E.O. of a Fortune 500 company. Ten years later, in 2002, he was worth $16.3 billion, topping Fortune’s list of the richest self-made Americans under 40. That year the company pulled in $35 billion in revenue, and shipments grew while the rest of the industry shrank. In 2004 Dell was the world’s largest P.C. maker.

Exceedingly self-confident and competitive (even at age 18 he told his father he wanted to compete with I.B.M.), Dell also gained a reputation for what BusinessWeek called his “egoless” management style. The company’s early trademark was customer service, and Dell extended that philosophy at the company’s Round Rock, Texas, headquarters with a 360-degree evaluation process among employees. He opted against a door to his office, a reserved parking space, or a chauffeur. He also won points for the “awww factor”—he left his office in Austin early enough to be able to read to his four children before they went to bed.
 
WHERE HE’S FROM
The son of an orthodontist, Dell grew up in Houston and showed early entrepreneurial instincts. In grade school he started a direct-mail stamp business. As a high-schooler he sold subscriptions to the Houston Post, and made $18,000 by finding an untapped customer base in newlyweds for the Post. The windfall earned him a BMW and a new computer.

WHERE HE’S GOING
Dell hopes he’s headed into the arms of investors and customers. In Dell’s three-year hiatus from his position as C.E.O., the company took significant hits. In the summer of 2006, pictures of a Dell laptop that caught fire at a conference in Japan circulated on the internet, prompting a recall of 4.1 million laptop batteries. A 50 percent drop in quarterly profits followed. Dell is in the midst of an S.E.C. accounting probe, and its once-lauded customer service faces pressure from cutbacks and offshoring. Michael Dell came back in February 2007 with promises to turn things around. His first moves included poaching top executives, such as Ron Garriques from Motorola to run his consumer operations.. Making money is in Dell’s blood, and he hates to lose. He’ll fight to make Dell 2.0 work, but it’s up to investors to decide if it actually will.—Beth Kwon