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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
The PC wunderkind is on a selling spree -- $2.5 billion worth of his company stock in less than two years.
Aug 31, 2000 | Michael Dell is rolling in greenbacks. So far this year, he has sold more than $1 billion in stock of Dell Computer, the build-to-order PC firm he founded 17 years ago in his college dorm. Last year, the e-commerce wunderkind cashed in shares worth roughly $1.5 billion. Top executives routinely unload company shares; after all, even absurdly wealthy CEOs need to diversify their multibillion-dollar portfolios -- or perhaps pick up another mansion, yacht or plane. But $2.5 billion in less than two years ... for one guy? That's a mind-boggling sum, even by new-economy economics.
And it's well more than the sums other tech execs with similar mega-holdings are shedding these days. So far this year, Steve Case, for instance, has sold $28.4 million worth of America Online stock; Meg Whitman has traded roughly $98.9 million of her eBay holdings; Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos pocketed about $20 million from a May sale; Yahoo CEO Timothy Koogle cashed in a paltry $11.4 million; Scott McNealy unloaded $22.5 million worth of Sun Microsystems shares; and Bill Gates -- the planet's richest man -- has made out with about $153 million worth of MSFT, according to Securities and Exchange Commission filings.
Other high-profile insider shareholders such as Oracle's Larry Ellison and Yahoo!'s Jerry Yang are far easier to track when it comes to their equity sales: Neither has parted with a single share since January.
Perhaps the only high rider who makes Dell's trades seem like chump change is Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who's dumped about $4.7 billion of MSFT this year alone, and has filed to sell another 12 million shares. But Allen no longer works for the software company, and for years has used the windfall to influence the direction of new technologies through his investment vehicle, Vulcan Ventures, and to simply tickle his own fancy with stuff like the Seattle Seahawks football team, a rock 'n' roll museum and a telescope to search for aliens.
Dell spokesman Jon Weisblatt insists there's nothing unusual -- or telling -- about his boss' billion-dollar profit taking. "He's not trying to divest himself of his holdings," Weisblatt says. "It's just routine for him to sell shares every quarter. It's just routine money management."
