Their $6.25 billion pledge puts $250 into the accounts of 25 million American kids aged 10 and under, and the couple said earlier this month that the full amount would be deposited within days. Michael Dell and his wife, Susan Dell, are now the single largest private backers of Trump Accounts, the new US government investment accounts for children.
It is the biggest gift the Dells have ever made, more than double what their foundation gave away in its first 26 years. Most of their giving before this stayed in Texas, where Michael Dell started his company from a University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) dorm room in 1984. In April, the couple became the first donors to cross $1 billion in lifetime giving to the university, with a $750 million commitment for a new medical campus. The Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, set up in 1999, runs over 800 projects a year across the US, Africa, India and Israel, but its biggest bets have been in Central Texas. Dell Children’s Medical Center opened in Austin in 2007, and in 2013 the couple put $50 million into founding Dell Medical School at UT Austin. After Hurricane Harvey, they committed over $43 million to rebuilding across 41 counties. The April money funds the UT Dell Campus for Advanced Research, centred on a UT Dell Medical Center due in 2030 and designed around AI and advanced computing from the start. UT Austin has used it to set two targets: raise $10 billion in 10 years and break into the country’s top 10 medical centres within a decade.
Susan Dell, who chairs the foundation, drives much of this. Her father was a surgical oncologist, and health has been her cause since childhood. As a girl, she would stop strangers at the grocery store to tell them not to smoke. MD Anderson Cancer Center will run cancer care inside it, and the gift also covers supercomputing, scholarships and student housing. It ranks among the largest gifts any American university has received.