In 2013, as Michael Dell fought Carl Icahn to take his company private, we asked a simple question in the New York Times: how do you keep the revolution forever young? It’s the same question Thomas Jefferson wrestled with when he argued no generation should be bound by the last one’s answers. Dell just gave his own answer again last week.
Four years ago, while others were playing with chatbots, treating AI as parlor games or sounding cataclysmic alarms over LLMs’ threats to society, Dell saw AI’s emerging utility as a new pillar of the economy and prepared his company accordingly, culminating in perhaps the 12th strategic reinvention of his enterprise strategy since he launched his business in 1984 as a 19-year-old in his college dorm room.
