Michael Dell
Founder, Chairman & CEO, Dell Technologies. On 4 shows, 5 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveinvestorauthor@MichaelDell ↗LinkedIn ↗dell.com ↗Wikipedia ↗
Michael Dell is the founder, chairman, and CEO of Dell Technologies, which he started in 1984 from his college dorm room. He also oversees his family office DFO Management and the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation.
4shows
5appearances
66statements
21resolved
17supported
0contradicted
81%fully supported
157said about them ↓ Everything Michael Dell said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Dell: Incumbents Failing to Adopt AI Will Be Destroyed in 3-5 Years
“These companies have an incumbency of sorts, right? They have data, they have customers, they have brands, they have IP, et cetera. But if they don't move quickly to re-imagine their businesses, given all this technology, they will be destroyed by new companie…”
Michael Dell: Only 10-15% of large companies have figured out AI
“Maybe 10 or 15% of large companies have really figured this out. And the rest of them are kind of fumbling around.”
Dell: AI will expand output and problem-solving rather than just cut headcount
“When I hear people say, oh, you know maybe we're just gonna have all these great tools and we won't do more things. We'll just do the same things with fewer people. It doesn't sound right to me. I mean, there'll be some of that, but I think most of it will be,…”
Michael Dell: Hiring incumbent industry veterans fails when creating novel businesses
“And if you hire the people from the adjacent, you know, industry companies
And ask them to go do it.
Well, they're just going to go do what they were doing before, right?
And so that's not going to work. So you need a lot of creativity, and you need to sort of…”
Michael Dell: Legacy companies ignoring new tools will fall to startups
“If we keep doing what we were doing before, We're gonna be in serious trouble, because some new company's gonna come along, and yeah, they're gonna have all these new tools. They're not gonna have this legacy of crap from the past, right, and old ways of doing…”
Michael Dell: Leaders should manufacture a crisis to drive necessary organizational change
“I also believe in this idea that if you don't have a crisis, make one, right? You know, you get people excited, motivated, and To drive the necessary change.”
Dell: AI productivity gains will be far bigger than the PC's
“Oh, it's far bigger. It's far bigger. Yeah, I feel 98% confident that it's far bigger than the PC.”
Dell: AI infrastructure business will reach ~$50B this year
“The progression of our business in that area sort of gone from like two billion to ten billion to twenty five billion to This year it'll be like fifty billion.”
Dell: Stripe data shows 2025 startups growing 4x faster than 2018 cohort
“When you talk to the Collison brothers at Stripe, they'll tell you that the Rate of growth of the 20, 25 cohort companies is about four times faster than the 20 18 companies.”
Michael Dell: Lowest cost AI token will be generated locally on-device
“The lowest cost token is going to be the one that's generated right where the data is on the device.”
Michael Dell: AI lets Dell teams finish months of work in days
“When I listen to what our teams are able to accomplish in a day or two weeks that would have taken them, you know, a few months or nine months time, you know, it's just amazing the speed of innovation.”
Dell pledges $6.25B to fund seed accounts for 25M children
“Well, it's 250 dollars to twenty-five million children ages two to 10 in zip codes where the median income is a 150,000 dollars or less. It's 6.25 billion dollars.”
Michael Dell: It is advantageous when competitors ignore your operational wins
“I think there's a human instinct to say, hey, look at me. I'm doing this great thing. Isn't this cool? Right? But actually in business, it's better if the competitor doesn't understand or doesn't see you.”
Dell: US has a government spending problem, not a loan-to-value problem
“I've sort of stepped back from the hysterics and you say, we don't have a loan to value problem as a country. We have a spending problem.”
Michael Dell Realized the $3,000 IBM PC Contained Only $600 in Parts
“And so when you took apart this IBM PC, you That was selling for about 3000 dollars. As far as I could tell, it was about 600 dollars worth of parts.”
Michael Dell: Texas has more NYSE companies than New York or anywhere else
“More New York Stock Exchange companies in Texas than in New York or anywhere else.”
Michael Dell: Dell has deployed over 4,000 AI Factories in enterprises
“So about two years ago, we put together this product that we called the Dell AI factory. And now we've got 4000 plus of these and it's kind of running rampant across enterprises.”
Dell's infrastructure business grew 73% last quarter
“Our infrastructure business last quarter grew, 73%.”
Michael Dell: Dell guided infrastructure business to grow ~100% this quarter
“This quarter we Guided that it would grow even faster, like a hundred percent.”
Michael Dell: Founders should make small, novel mistakes and fix them quickly
“Go make some mistakes nobody's ever made before. Try to make them in small increments. Fix your mistakes as fast as you find them, and you actually want to make mistakes. You just want to make them small and, you know, iterate and fix them quickly.”
Dell: Dell Technologies would not exist today without mastering its supply chain
“I think if we had not figured out how to do our supply chain well you know, we would not be here today. It's as simple as that.”
Michael Dell: Negative cash conversion cycles generate massive internal growth capital
“What we figured out was that if we could dramatically shrink our inventory and get paid from our customers faster and, you know maybe not pay our suppliers, you know, instantly pay them a little bit later, then If you're growing and you have a negative cash co…”
Dell operated on five days of inventory while competitors held ninety days
“They had like, 90 days in their collective supply chain. And we figured out how to have like, five days. I mean, it was crazy. It was like a massive advantage.”
Fast inventory turns create massive structural cost advantages in deflationary hardware markets
“Now, the other reason this is important is because it turns out that the price of electronic components Generally goes down, right? And, you know, it's a pretty predictable thing. And so if our components are five days old, and the competitor's components are …”
The other half of the tape: Michael Dell's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 153 times in 38 episodes across the shows. 4 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most David Senra 62Zach Dell 18Guy Raz 18Jason Calacanis 14Brad Gerstner 14John Mackey 13Michael Ovitz 3Sundeep Madra 2
Statements about Michael Dell, by other people (4)
Gerstner: 83% of CIOs plan to repatriate workloads on-prem
“So this among enterprise CIOs moving back to hybrid and on-prem, the number was the 83% of respondents said that they were going to repatriate at least some of their workloads. Right. Back to on-prem and that was up from 49% or 43% in 2020.”
Mackey: Most Founders Are Short-Term House Flippers, Not Long-Term Builders
“The most common entrepreneur is a serial entrepreneur. They just start businesses, and they do them for five years and flip them. They're like somebody remodeling a house and then flipping it. And so in these cases, they're really creative. They're good at ger…”
Michael Dell temporarily pulled out of due diligence before acquiring Alienware
“Well, the funny thing is that we come to terms. He sends his guys over. They start doing the due diligence. Then, a month or two into it, all of a sudden, Michael sends, you know, calls me and says, hey, we're gonna have to pull out.”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
David Senra 97
All-In 25
How I Built This 19
BG2 Pod 12
2026 94 mentions in 20 episodes 5 per episode
- Building a Power Company for the Next 50 Years | Zach Dell, Base Power
- John Mackey: The Dropout Who Changed How America Eats
- Evan Spiegel, Snapchat: Building a Multi-Billion Dollar Company
- Building One of AI’s Fastest-Growing Companies | Mati Staniszewski, ElevenLabs
- OpenAI vs Anthropic IPOs, Anthropic $3T, Zuck's Price War, China Ends Open Source?, Trump Accounts
- How to Dominate for Decades | Doug Leone, Sequoia Capital
- Building Defense Technologies to Protect Democracies | Torsten Reil, Helsing
- Mark Cuban on the AI Bubble: Who Actually Gets Wiped Out?
- 12 more episodes that year, every mention in 2026 →
2025 26 mentions in 10 episodes 3 per episode
- How Todd Graves Built Raising Cane's
- How Brad Jacobs Built 8 Billion-Dollar Companies
- CAA Co-founder Michael Ovitz: Failure Is Not an Option
- Daniel Ek, Spotify | David Senra
- James Dyson: 5,127 Prototypes
- Scott Bessent: Fixing the Fed, Tariffs for National Security, Solving Affordability in 2026
- All things AI w @altcap @sama & @satyanadella. A Halloween Special. 🎃🔥BG2 w/ Brad Gerstner · Bg2 Pod
- Arm CEO Rene Haas on AI: Nvidia Lessons, Intel’s Decline and the US-China Chip War
- 2 more episodes that year, every mention in 2025 →
2024 11 mentions in 5 episodes 2 per episode
- Ep19. State of Venture, AI Scaling, Elections | BG2 w/ Bill Gurley, Brad Gerstner, & Jamin Ball · Bg2 Pod
- Ep8. AI Models, Data Scaling, Enterprise & Personal AI | BG2 with Bill Gurley & Brad Gerstner · Bg2 Pod
- BG2 Thanksgiving Roundtable: DOGE, EV Tax Credit, Tariffs, Conspiracy Theories, Invest America · Bg2 Pod
- Ep20. AI Scaling Laws, DOGE, FSD 13, Trump Markets | BG2 w/ Bill Gurley & Brad Gerstner · Bg2 Pod
- Ep5. Stock Comp, AI Cold War, Valuations for LLM | BG2 with Bill Gurley, Brad Gerstner, & Bob Mylod · Bg2 Pod
- every mention in 2024, scene by scene →
2023 3 mentions in 1 episode
2022 18 mentions in 1 episode
2021 1 mention in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Michael's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| HOW I BUILT THISLEDGER | Founder, Chairman & CEO, Dell Technologies | 2 | 25 | 75% 9/12 | full record on How I Built This → |
| DAVID SENRALEDGER | Founder, Chairman & CEO, Dell Technologies | 1 | 17 | 100% 4/4 | full record on David Senra → |
| ALL-INLEDGER | Founder, Chairman & CEO, Dell Technologies | 1 | 13 | 100% 3/3 | full record on All-In → |
| BG2LEDGER | Founder, Chairman & CEO, Dell Technologies | 1 | 11 | 50% 1/2 | full record on BG2 Pod → |