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. 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.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 Dells’ $250 deposits go to kids who miss the federal $1,000 seed
Trump Accounts were created under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and opened on July 4. The Treasury seeds $1,000 into the accounts of children born between 2025 and 2028. The Dells’ money covers older children who don’t qualify, provided they live in ZIP codes where the median family income is $150,000 or less. Families can add up to $5,000 a year, and the money unlocks when the child turns 18.By October 7, more than 10 million children had received the Dell deposit, worth $2.6 billion.
That was the same as the total philanthropic money the White House said had gone into the accounts at that point.Michael Dell has also backed a new rule letting donors put individual company shares into the accounts, after SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell pledged over 2 million shares to children aged 11 to 17. Critics say this ties a child’s savings to one company. Dell said in an interview that he found it hard to see one share of SpaceX as a bad thing.The ties have drawn scrutiny. President Donald Trump has repeatedly urged Americans to buy Dell computers, and in May the company’s federal unit won a $9.7 billion Pentagon contract that some government oversight experts questioned. The White House says Trump’s praise is about the donation alone.
Texas has been at the centre of Dell philanthropy for over two decades
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.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.
UT Austin’s will carry the Dell name
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. 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. 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.Even the Trump Accounts gift began as a Texas plan. Michael Dell has said the couple first thought about keeping it to their home state before deciding to take it nationwide.