Chairman & Chief Executive Officer, Dell Technologies
Bill Discussion with Michael Dell
CNBC interview with Michael Dell.
About Michael Dell
Michael Dell, chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies, said during a May 2026 keynote at Dell Technologies World that the company's AI business has moved "from testing and evaluating into production," citing deployments with Eli Lilly and Samsung as examples. He stated that Dell had 5,000 enterprise customers for its AI Factory and expected $50 billion in AI server revenue for the year. In a separate interview, Dell described supply chain constraints, particularly for memory and advanced-node semiconductors, as the biggest bottleneck to AI growth, noting that it takes about four years to build a new fabrication plant. In April 2026, Dell and his wife, Susan, announced a $1 billion commitment to the University of Texas at Austin to support a new medical campus and student housing, with the Dobie Residence Hall renamed Dell House. The previous December, the couple pledged $6.25 billion to seed investment accounts for approximately 25 million American children. Speaking at a TIME100 Impact Dinner in May 2026, Dell said the gap between potential and opportunity is "one of the greatest challenges of our time" and that his philanthropy is guided by the principle to "bring others with you" when doors open.
Transcript (15 segments)
✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
I
Interviewer0:00
I said all along I thought you paid a very fair price for the company, and I admire how you hung in there against some of the folks out there. Do you think that people like Carl Icahn were ever serious about coming in and running the company with their quick-fix solutions, or do you think they were just looking for a couple bucks a share more out of this thing?
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Michael Dell0:19
No, they were just trying to talk the price up. Ultimately, that all got resolved. The person in question didn't own a share of the stock until after the deal was announced, and I think had no long-term intentions or good intentions for the company or its shareholders or the people inside the company.
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Interviewer0:45
I like what Warren Buffett said on the station, that he thinks you ought to run the company for the shareholders who are going to stay, not those who are going to leave. So do you think more companies are going to start considering going private, or those entrepreneurs like yourself where you were 30 years ago will think about staying private indefinitely?
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Michael Dell1:05
Maybe. Out in the startup world, and I've been spending more time with a number of the interesting new startups in our industry, there's a desire to stay private longer. Certainly, there's a role that the public markets play, and that's an attractive step at some point for companies. But companies have a desire to stay private longer, and they're not so entranced by the public markets here. With the availability of debt capital at very attractive rates, and I think the increasingly burdensome layers of governance and compliance and related issues that have been placed on companies, it's a challenge.
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Interviewer2:03
Michael, is the goal ultimately though to take Dell private or public once again down the road?
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Michael Dell2:10
I don't have any plans to do that, Becky. We're a family-owned company, and we'll stay that way until we decide to do something different.
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Interviewer2:22
Michael, assuming other companies take your lead and also pursue going private, what is the right model to do it? Because I will say one of the criticisms of this particular process that the Dell situation was involved in was that once you teamed up with Silver Lake, it became very complicated and challenging for other bidders to emerge. And that was always something that people like Carl Icahn, who I agree with you was not a long-term shareholder, but it was very hard to find others who wanted to be or could be long-term shareholders to compete with what you put together.
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Michael Dell2:54
Well, not to rehash the past, but the process was led by the independent directors, and I was willing to partner with any participant who was willing to pay the highest price. That was the case then, and that's absolutely what occurred. Ultimately, the bid by myself and Silver Lake was the highest price available for the company.
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Interviewer3:17
Let's talk tech for a little bit. We spent a lot of time around this table talking about Microsoft and the future of Microsoft. Your PC business at some level is dependent, I imagine, a little bit at least on Microsoft. What is your take about the direction of that company and who should run it after Steve Ballmer?
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Michael Dell3:36
I think the board is going through a thorough process, and I'm impressed with what I'm hearing so far. We'll wait for them to reach their conclusions. Microsoft's an important partner for Dell, an important company in the industry, and I'm sure they'll come up with a great solution there. Our business, of course, is not as dependent on the PC as it was 10 or 20 years ago. We've broadened our business considerably in the enterprise and solutions, services, software. I will tell you though that we're seeing renewed growth in what we think of as the client part of our business. Emerging markets are coming back. We have this whole move to the virtual client, which is quite strong and really helping our customers adopt to all of the opportunities that are out there with cloud, with mobile, taking advantage of their data. So Microsoft's a very good partner for us. They're not the only partner. We're really a customer-focused company, and that has us partnering with lots of great companies out there in the industry.
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Interviewer4:51
Hey Michael, just as someone that, you know, is—I mean, you're in a college dorm or something. I mean, you're a visionary obviously, but can you just tell me your opinion on whether social ever is able to be monetized to the point where the valuations we're currently seeing make sense?
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Michael Dell5:10
It's hard for me to adopt new things, and I look at what's happening, and maybe I'm not that good at it at this point, but it's hard for me to really see that I'm going to be tweeting 20 years from now a thousand times a day. I just don't know. Are they going to figure out a way to make money on all this stuff? I think what we're seeing inside companies is the collaboration among teams and the sharing of information is incredibly powerful, and this is where you see the applicability in business. Certainly, whenever you have a new idea like social, you get excitement in the market, you get whatever you guys are talking about in terms of the latest IPOs and stock movements and that sort of thing. But what we see is how this is improving the speed at which teams collaborate, share information, and progress occurs. We see it in our own company, and we're helping our customers do it. And then now that you have all this data, how do you take advantage of it at speed and get the knowledge quickly disseminated? This is always a big challenge, and tools like the kinds that are being developed now are really going to accelerate that kind of progress.
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Interviewer6:41
Right. Michael Dell, thank you for joining us. It's one of the great American success stories of our time. Started virtually in a garage, and he's doing it all over again one more time.
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Michael Dell6:51
Couldn't afford a garage, did it in a dorm room.
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Interviewer6:53
Dorm room, not a garage. We appreciate it. We hope to see you again, sounds like in about a month. Thanks.