Inside Susan Dell's $10 Billion Giving Operation, and Why She Says It's Just Getting Started

Susan Dell rarely gets the public attention her husband Michael, the founder of Dell Technologies, does, but inside the foundation that bears both their names, she is the one steering most of the money. As co-chair of the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, she has directed the lion's share of the roughly 10 billion dollars the couple has given away over more than two decades, built around a consistent focus on education, health and economic opportunity.

A foundation built for scale

The foundation, established in 1999, now oversees more than 800 projects in a given year, a scale that reflects how much the operation has grown from its early days. Janet Mountain, who heads the foundation, has described Susan Dell's approach in simple terms: people matter to her, and so do solutions, a combination that has pushed the foundation toward funding work that produces measurable outcomes rather than symbolic gestures.

Texas as the anchor

Much of that work has concentrated on Texas, and on the University of Texas at Austin in particular. The Dells gave 50 million dollars in 2013 to help establish the Dell Medical School, a gift that helped seed what has since grown into a broader medical footprint in Austin, including the Dell Children's Medical Center and the Dell Pediatric Research Institute. In April 2026, the couple's lifetime giving to UT Austin crossed 1 billion dollars, a threshold few donors to any single university ever reach. The relationship has continued to expand since, extending into an advanced research campus and an AI-focused medical center on the same campus.

Responding when disaster hits close to home

The foundation's giving has not stayed confined to steady, long-term institution building. When Hurricane Harvey devastated the Texas Gulf Coast, the Dells committed 43 million dollars toward recovery efforts spread across 41 counties, a rapid-response complement to the foundation's longer-horizon education and health work.

A bet on every child born in America

The single largest commitment came in December 2025, when the Dells pledged 6.25 billion dollars toward Trump Accounts, a program that provides 250 dollars to each of roughly 25 million American children under the age of 10. It is by far the biggest line item in the couple's giving history, and Susan Dell has framed the logic behind it as being about more than the dollar figure attached to each account.

Susan Dell has said that when children have a future worth saving for, that builds hope and opportunity, a line that doubles as something close to a mission statement for how she approaches giving.

Asked about the scale of what the foundation has already built, from a medical school to a pediatric research institute to a nationwide savings program for children, Dell has been characteristically forward-looking rather than reflective, saying simply that the foundation is just getting started. For an operation that has already moved 10 billion dollars into education, health and economic opportunity, that is less a promise than a description of how the foundation has operated from the beginning.