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22. Michael Dell
Oracle PR/Flickr
Net worth: $18.9 billion
Age: 50
Country: US
Industry: Technology
Source of wealth: Self-made; Dell
While he was a premed student at the University of Texas at Austin in 1984, Michael Dell started a company called PC Ltd., the predecessor to Dell Inc., with a seed fund of $1,000. Dell soon dropped out of college to build computers full-time and found himself at the helm of one of the fastest-growing companies in the country, with $6 million in sales in its first year of business.
By the time he was 23, the company went public and raised $30 million — $18 million of it going to Dell personally. Four years later, the CEO became the youngest man to ever lead a Fortune 500 company. Aside from a brief hiatus as CEO between 2004 and 2007, Dell has been the chairman and CEO of Dell Inc. since its inception. After a furious battle with Carl Icahn, Dell took his computer company private again in 2013 in a deal valued at nearly $25 billion.
Despite spending millions on fancy toys and impressive real estate, Dell is generous. He’s given more than $1.1 billion through the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, which primarily supports education, social- and human-services, arts and culture, and community-development causes. A year ago, the foundation pledged $25 million to fund the construction of a new teaching hospital, set to open in Austin in 2017.
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