What if you bought Dell in 1990?
US Tech · Hardware. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play136.5× · S&P 500 same money: $19,429
$1,000 in Dell at the start of 1990 would be worth about $136,500 today — 136.5 times your money, and ahead of the S&P 500 over the same stretch.
What happened: Dell was taken private in 2013.
The story
Michael Dell started selling PCs from his University of Texas dorm room in 1984, and his insight was operational rather than technological: build computers to order, sell directly to customers, and get paid before paying suppliers. In the 1990s, as PCs became a mass market, that made Dell one of the best-performing stocks of the decade, with gains of several hundredfold. It peaked in 2000.
Then PCs became a commodity, rivals copied the model, consumers moved to laptops sold in shops and later to smartphones and tablets. Dell's growth stalled, an accounting investigation led to restatements and an SEC settlement, and Michael Dell returned as chief executive in 2007. By 2013 he concluded the turnaround would be easier away from public markets and, with Silver Lake, took the company private at 13.65 dollars a share despite objections from Carl Icahn. Public shareholders were cashed out. Dell later bought EMC and returned to the market in 2018, but that was a new security.
The lesson: Selling out at a take-private price can mean handing future gains to insiders; Dell's founder bought the company back cheaply when public investors had given up.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1990 | $0.1 | $136,500 | $19,429 | 136.5× |
| 1995 | $0.5 | $27,300 | $14,783 | 27.3× |
| 2000 | $50.00 | $273 | $4,626 | 0.3× |
| 2003 | $27.00 | $506 | $7,727 | 0.5× |
| 2005 | $42.00 | $325 | $5,763 | 0.3× |
| 2007 | $25.00 | $546 | $4,789 | 0.5× |
| 2008 | $24.00 | $569 | $4,626 | 0.6× |
| 2010 | $14.00 | $975 | $6,071 | 1.0× |
| 2012 | $15.00 | $910 | $5,312 | 0.9× |
| 2015 | $13.65 | $1,000 | $3,301 | 1.0× |
| 2018 | $13.65 | $1,000 | $2,519 | 1.0× |
| 2020 | $13.65 | $1,000 | $2,092 | 1.0× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 1990, turning $1,000 into $136,500. The S&P 500 from that same year: $19,429.
On this day
Now try it without hindsight. The wheel decides the year and the asset class, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick, and we simulate to today. Dell is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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