Michael Dell

Michael Dell was born in February 1965 in Houston, Texas, and he helped to launch the PC revolution of the 1980s with the inception of Dell Computer. The company was started in Dell's University of Texas dorm room, and it quickly took off- just eight years later, Michael Dell was CEO of a company on the Fortune 500. His success doesn't come as much of a surprise to his family; his mother and father wanted him to pursue a career in medicine, but Dell wanted to focus on technology and business.

Michael DellDell is a very hard worker, and his young life was no exception. He got a job washing dishes in a Chinese restaurant so that he could save money for stamp collecting, and his natural ability to mine data helped him find new subscribers for the Houston Post, a job that helped him earn $18,000 in a year. He was fascinated by computers, and by the time he was 15, he could afford to buy an Apple PC, which he promptly took apart to see its inner workings.

When Dell entered college, the PC world was still in its relative infancy. He realized that no one was marketing directly to customers, and he cut out the middleman and the store markup by building computers for college friends and acquaintances. He placed at least as much focus on customer support and low price as he did on the quality of his machines, and soon he was taking orders for those outside of his school- so many that he had to quit college and focus all his energy on the business.

In Dell Computer's first year in business, $6 million in product was sold. By 2000, Michael Dell was a billionaire, and he had offices in thirty-four countries, populated by 35,000+ workers. The year after that, Dell passed Compaq as the largest maker of personal computers in the world. Dell has grown into one of the world's most successful businesses, even getting the attention of companies like GE and WalMart. Today, Michael Dell lives in Dallas, Texas with his wife Susan, who he married in 1989, and their four children.