Why Famous: Dell is the founder and namesake of the Dell computer company, which he started in 1984.

With a net worth around $24 billion, Dell is also one of the richest people in the world.
Dell was born in 1965 in Houston, to a Jewish family. His parents were Lorraine Charlotte (née Langfan), a stockbroker, and Alexander Dell. Michael Dell attended Herod Elementary School in Houston. He would go on to attend Memorial High School. In a bid to enter business early, he applied to take a high school equivalency exam at age eight.[citation needed] In his early teens, he invested his earnings from part-time jobs in stocks and precious metals.

Dell purchased his first calculator at age seven and encountered an early teletype terminal in junior high. At age 15, after playing with computers at Radio Shack, he got his first computer, an Apple II, which he promptly disassembled to see how it worked. He got a job as a dishwasher at age 12. Dell attended Memorial High School in Houston, selling subscriptions to the Houston Post in the summer. Dell’s parents wanted him to be a doctor and in order to please them, he took up pre-med at the University of Texas in 1983. Dell continued learning to target specific populations for newspaper subscriptions rather than just making cold calls, and earned $18,000 that summer. He hired several employees, and after earning a gross profit of nearly $200,000 in his first year of business, Dell dropped out of the University of Texas at age 19. In January 1984, Dell banked on his conviction that the potential cost savings of a manufacturer selling PCs directly had enormous advantages over the conventional indirect retail channel. In January 1984, Dell registered his company as “PC’s Limited”. Operating out of a condominium, the business sold between $50,000 and $80,000 worth of PC upgrades, kits, and add-on components. In May, Dell incorporated the company as “Dell Computer Corporation”.In 1992, aged 27, he became the youngest CEO of a company ranked in Fortune magazine’s list of the top 500 corporations. On October 12, 2015, Dell Inc. announced its intent to acquire the enterprise software and storage company EMC Corporation. At $67 billion, it has been labelled the “highest-valued tech acquisition in history”. The acquisition was finalized September 7, 2016.