Michael S. Dell

Dell was born in 1965 in Houston, to a Jewish family. His parents were Lorraine Charlotte (née Langfan), a stockbroker, and Alexander Dell, an orthodontist. Michael Dell attended Herod Elementary School in Houston. He would go on to attend Memorial High School. In a bid to enter business early, he applied to take a high school equivalency exam at age eight. In his early teens, he invested his earnings from part-time jobs in stocks and precious metals.

Dell married Susan Lieberman on October 28, 1989, in Austin, Texas; the couple reside there with their four children 

Dell purchased his first calculator at age seven and encountered an early teletype terminal in junior high. At age 15, after playing with computers at Radio Shack, he got his first computer, an Apple II, which he promptly disassembled to see how it worked. Dell attended Memorial High School in Houston, selling subscriptions to the Houston Post in the summer. Dell's parents wanted him to be a doctor and in order to please them, he took up pre-med at the University of Texas in 1983. Dell continued learning to target specific populations for newspaper subscriptions rather than just making cold calls, and earned $18,000 that summer. He hired several employees, and after earning a gross profit of nearly $200,000 in his first year of business, Dell dropped out of the University of Texas at age 19.