Dell goes private: All you need to know

Personal computer maker Dell is bowing out of the stock market in a $24.4 billion buyout. Dell stockholders will be paid $13.65 per share to leave the company on its own - 25 per cent more than the stock's price of $10.88 before word of the buyout talks trickled out three weeks ago.

Michael Dell, the company's largest shareholder, is throwing in his 14 per cent stake and an undisclosed sliver of his $16 billion fortune to help finance the sale to a group led by the investment firm Silver Lake.

A November 2000 photo of Dell CEO Michael Dell delivering his keynote address at Comdex, in Las Vegas. Software maker Microsoft is backing Dell's buyout deal by lending $2 billion to the buyers. The remaining money to pay for the acquisition is being borrowed through loans arranged by several banks, saddling Dell with an estimated $15 billion in debt.

A January 1995 photo of Dell CEO Michael Dell at a news conference in New York City. The sale is structured as a leveraged buyout, which requires the acquired company to repay the debt taken on to finance the deal.

A June 1997 photo of Dell CEO Michael Dell delivering the keynote address at a PC Expo in New York. The buyout marks a new era for a company created in 1984 by a college kid with a $1,000 investment. The company would go on to revolutionize the PC industry by taking orders for custom-made machines at a reasonable price - first on the phone, then on the Internet.

A February 1999 photo of Dell founder Michael Dell in the dorm room at the University of Texas in Austin, Texas, where he launched his enterprise as a college freshman. Initially valued at $85 million in its 1988 IPO, Dell was the world's largest PC maker with a market value of more than $150 billion at the height of the dot-com boom in 2000.

But Dell began to falter as other PC makers were able to lower their costs. HP and other rivals forged relationships with stores that gave them the advantage of being able to showcase their machines. By 2006, HP had supplanted Dell as the world's largest PC maker.

Once the deal closes, Dell's stock will stop trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market 25 years after the Texas-based company raised $30 million in an initial public offering.

Michael Dell, 47, is betting that his company will be able to evolve into a more diversified seller of technology services, business software and high-end computers without having to pander to the stock market's fixation on whether earnings are growing from one quarter to the next.