The Texan, who started the PC maker in his dorm room 29 years ago and remains Chairman and CEO, believes pulling out of the public markets will help Dell shift from a struggling personal computer business into a business software giant. (Forbes reporter Clare O'Connor just got an exclusive look inside her world.)Īfter months locked in battle with activist investor Carl Icahn, PC entrepreneur Michael Dell won shareholder approval of his final $24.9 billion offer to take his eponymous company private in what will be the biggest leveraged buy-out in recent years. Since last year, she received more than $350 million in Wal-Mart dividends after taxes. 1992), Alice graduated from Trinity College in San Antonio, Tex., and now spends most of her time on the Rocking W Ranch in Milsap, outside of Fort Worth. She and her siblings have also donated about $2 billion to the Walton Family Foundation over the last five years. As the biggest philanthropist of the Walton family, Alice gave more than $2 million in 2012 to support charter school initiatives. Some pieces she donated from her personal collection (which is valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars). Not bad for the small-town Bentonville, Ark., museum, which includes works spanning five centuries from icons like Andy Warhol, Norman Rockwell and Georgia O'Keeffe. Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton's Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art - which she founded in 2011 - has eclipsed 1 million visitors in under two years of operation. If you have some suspects we should look into drop me a line at (Come on Houston, let's beat Dallas next year.) My Forbes colleagues and I are always on the hunt for new billionaires to celebrate, in Texas and all over. As if we needed any confirmation that Texas is far more than just an oil and gas state, only half of these richest Texans owe their fortunes to Texas Tea.

Robert lopshire