Michael Dell, the reclusive founder of Dell, the world's third-largest PC maker, is controversially trying to privatise his company, and will take on a US$16 billion debt to do so.
Dell is not the first entrepreneur to decide he is no longer happy running a listed corporation and being accountable to shareholders and regulators who, it seems, are stifling his ability to do what he wants with the company he founded in 1984 at the age of 19.
Maybe Dell - America's 22nd richest person last year with a personal fortune of US$14.6 billion - is glancing over his shoulder at Apple, where David Einhorn of Greenlight Capital is locked in battle to use its US$137.1 billion cash pile more effectively. Einhorn wants shareholders to be rewarded with preferential shares to boost the share price. Apple management thinks the money could be better used elsewhere.
This classic example of company bosses aggravated by shareholders telling them how to run their business begs the question of why they ever took their companies public.
The answers they generally give are, how can I put it, rarely entirely honest. We see IPO documents talking about going to the market for new capital, but when it comes to what the new capital is actually meant for, things start to become obscure.
There are good reasons for this as Justin Fox and Jay Lorsch showed in an article in the Harvard Business Review last year. In the past decade, listed US companies paid out shareholders at least US$287 billion more than the sums raised from them. In other words they don't need their money.
What about all the chatter about how IPOs provide the ability to give staff members a greater stake in the company? Fair enough, but this can easily be achieved within the context of a private corporation.