Dell shares jumped 32.1% shortly after trading opened on Friday, a move that added $35.8 billion to Michael Dell’s fortune and pushed his net worth to $245.9 billion. The surge was big enough to put him ahead of Mark Zuckerberg on Forbes’ Real-Time Billionaires list, even after the stock had already been climbing on expectations that demand for its AI servers would keep accelerating.
The company’s latest results gave the market the reason it had been waiting for. On Thursday, Dell reported first-quarter earnings of $4.86 per share on revenue of $43.8 billion, far above FactSet estimates of $2.96 per share on $35.7 billion in sales. Dell also said AI server revenue jumped 757% from a year earlier to $16.1 billion and lifted its full-year AI revenue forecast to $60 billion from $50 billion in February, a target that implies 144% growth from the prior year.
That was the kind of quarter investors had been trying to price in, and many still came up short. Morgan Stanley analysts said Friday they were “eating our humble pie” after they “got this one wrong,” while one hardware analyst called the results “an absolute blowout like I have never seen before.” The scale of the reaction was striking even by Dell’s standards: the 32.1% gain topped its previous record intraday jump of 31.6%, set in March 2024, and came as the company booked about $24.4 billion in AI orders through its latest quarter.
The business is still leaning hard into the AI buildout, and that is what makes Friday’s move matter beyond one day of trading. Jeff Clarke said the company’s “AI opportunity shows no signs of slowing,” and Dell’s new $60 billion revenue target now has to be backed up in the quarters ahead. The Pentagon’s separate five-year, $9.7 billion contract announced Wednesday adds another large revenue stream to watch, but the real test is whether Dell can keep turning the AI rush into orders, shipments and cash at the pace investors just rewarded.
For Michael Dell, the market just reassessed how much that growth machine is worth. For everyone else holding the stock, Friday was a reminder that Dell’s AI story is no longer a promise on the edge of the market; it is the market-moving event itself.
