“Time will tell.” The vacuous cliché is a common if pointlessly used idiom of journalists and business executives, traced back to the Greek playwright Euripides, who is usually translated as having said, “Time will explain it all.” However, Michael Dell could have confidentially chanted Mick Jagger’s Rolling Stones anthem “Time is On My Side!”
Indeed, it has now been well over a decade ago, in the summer of 2013, when the battle lines were drawn in a boardroom showdown which, in retrospect, pitted true entrepreneurial vision against the quintessential activist hustle. On one side stood Dell, fighting to take his eponymous company private and rebuild it away from the merciless glare of quarterly earnings calls. On the other stood famed activist raider Carl Icahn, who aggressively peddled a proposal amounting to purely destructive financial engineering at the cost of the company — a scheme involving stock buybacks, warrants for future shares, and ruthless plans to carve up Dell’s creation for quick, extractive cash.
