Time on his side: Michael Dell the real business icon as Icahn the activist recedes from view

“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. 

That saga was documented extensively in Dell’s book, Play Nice But Win: A CEO’s Journal From Founder to Leader. Much of the book mapped out the longer-term arc of reinvention, transforming the business from a PC manufacturer into a diversified technology leader, including the massive acquisition of EMC. The attack from Icahn, however, provided some of the book’s most compelling short-term drama. Dell detailed Icahn’s aggressive media campaigns and lawsuits, labeled the board a “dictatorship” and was yet amazed in a face-to-face meeting with Icahn, that he had no actual operational plan for the company.

There is no need to relitigate the blow-by-blow of that titanic fight, but with the passage of time, it has become clear that it was not only a seminal episode in business history; it marked the beginning of the end for old-fashioned activist investors and corporate raiders like Icahn, who had struck fear into the hearts of CEOs everywhere until Dell revealed the emperor had no clothes. 

The divergent paths of the two since that epic struggle could not be more striking. Michael Dell has orchestrated one of the most staggering corporate triumphs of our time, creating value that soared from $24 billion to over $100 billion in broad impact, driving technological breakthroughs for his shareholders and the nation. Meanwhile, Icahn appears to be circling the drain.

To understand the sheer magnitude of Dell’s victory, one must look at the sophisticated capital........

© Fortune