Michael Dell is trying to get control of Dell, Inc. with as much as $1 billion of his own personal funds. His goal: shift the company’s focus from PC sales to a more enterprise-focused company that can operate without the pressures of being publicly traded.

According to Bloomberg, Dell, who now owns 15.7 percent of the company, may contribute between $500 million to $1 billion to the buyout led by Silver Lake Management with potential support from Microsoft Corp. With the personal investment, Dell’s value in the company would be $3.45 billion.

With the investment, Dell’s contribution would be more than half of the total “$8 billion to $9 billion equity check, with the remainder of the takeover financed by debt and possibly some of the $11 billion of cash Dell reported it had as of Sept. 30. Silver Lake and Microsoft would invest $1 billion to $2 billion each, said the people with knowledge of the talks.”

For its part, Silver Lake has raised about $15 billion. According to sources, Bloomberg reports that the deal would put Dell’s value at about $23 billion to $24 billion, priced at $14 a share.

I like Dell’s cloud strategy. At initial glance it looks like the right mix of services for customers that want to use a more elastic infrastructure.

Box CEO Aaron Levie tweeted recently about what it says when a company like Dell has to go private to innovate. In any case, it’s pretty damn exciting for someone like Michael Dell to make such an aggressive move for control of a company he started in his college dorm room so long ago.

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