Michael Dell
Founder of Dell Technologies, which he started in 1984 and has led as chairman and CEO, taking it private and back to the public markets and merging it with EMC...
“When you took apart this IBM PC that was selling for about $3,000, as far as I could tell, it was about $600 worth of parts.”
How I Built This (Guy Raz) · Startups & Venture · November 2026
Context
Dell describes his teenage habit of buying an IBM PC just to take it apart, soon after IBM launched it in 1981. The gap between price and parts cost shaped his later idea of selling PCs far cheaper than IBM.
Transcript
Sure. Social enough to make the sale.
Yeah. So you were on the one hand doing this entrepreneurial stuff. And then I guess you were also just really into computers.
…to the late 70s and early 80s, you know, this company, IBM, had a leadership of the part of the economy referred to as information technology, unlike any other company at any other time in history. They were by far the dominant company. So when IBM introduced the IBM PC, this to me seemed to be a very important moment. So I tried to understand everything that was going on about that. And so when you took apart this IBM PC that was selling for about $3,000, as far as I could tell, it was about $600 worth of parts.
Wait, you bought one and you took it apart just to check the insides out?
Sure. Yeah. What else would you do? So you got to take it apart. How can you understand it if you don't take it apart? But
like most people buy computers to like, you know, at that time, I guess, to do basic, you know, accounting and word processing. You bought it to take it apart.
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