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Published: Friday 27th October, 2023
Michael Dell, founder and CEO of Dell Technologies, gifted Dell shares worth $350 million this week, his first time donating Dell shares since 2006 and his most valuable gift of Dell shares ever. Dell, worth an estimated $66.7 billion, is currently the world’s 17th-richest person by Forbes’ estimates.
According to Securities and Exchange Commission filings from Wednesday and Thursday, Dell gifted 5,150,000 shares in five installments between October 13 and October 19. Approximately 40% of the shares went to Dell’s private family foundation, the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation; the remaining 60% was funneled into donor-advised funds established by
Michael and Susan Dell, the filings say. (Donor-advised funds are a sort of charitable account; donations to such funds accrue a tax deduction up front, but the funds can stay in the account for an unlimited amount of time.)
Since its founding in 1999, the Dell Foundation has disbursed at least $2.4 billion, mostly to health– and education–related causes in the United States, India and South Africa. That was enough to rank him and his wife at No. 16 among the nation’s top givers in a January list, although Forbes’ estimate of their lifetime giving amounts to just 3% of Dell’s net worth. Last year the Dell Foundation announced $15 million in grants to groups in Ukraine helping families with medical needs and resettling refugees following Russia’s invasion of the country. The foundation also grants college scholarships to low-income students in the U.S. and South Africa. In India, the Dell Foundation funds credit and savings organizations for low-income families living in urban areas.
The Dell Foundation had around $2 billion in assets as of its latest tax filing. It’s not clear what Dell will do with the $210 million that went into his donor-advised funds.
Dell’s stock
gift comes a little more than a week before a potential $20 billion payday for him. On October 30, Dell’s cloud computing spinoff VMware is set to sell to semiconductor giant Broadcom for $61 billion in cash and stock. (After more than a year of regulatory hurdles, the deal received regulatory approval in August.) On top of the acquisition, it’s also been a generally good year for Dell, as shares of Dell Technologies are up approximately 80% since last year—largely thanks to an insatiable demand for servers from AI companies and potential inclusion in the S&P 500.
Currently, roughly $50 billion of Dell’s net worth comes from his approximately 50% stake in Dell (his gift was just over 1% of his Dell shareholding) and 40% stake in VMware. The rest is held primarily in his private investment firm, DFO Management. Even though this is Dell’s first time gifting Dell stock since 2006, he has been contributing various non-Dell shares to his foundation (the likes of Amazon, Palantir and others) regularly over the years, likely diversified out of Dell stock he had sold.
Although this week’s gift is Dell’s largest share donation by dollar value, Dell gave two installments of 10 million shares each to his family foundation in 2003.
