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Dell shareholders have given the green light to Mickey D to take the company he founded nearly three decades ago private – again.

Approval from investors was never really in doubt after activist investor Carl Icahn, who seems more interested in Apple, revealed that he and partner SAM had given up the ownership battle, clearing the way for Texan Mike.

And Dell (the company) confirmed this afternoon that the man Michael will cough $13.88 including a $0.13 special cash dividend for the biz. All this values the troubled US goliath at $24.9bn.

The preliminary vote tally revealed that the buyout was passed by the majority of Dell's outstanding shareholders, and this was even the case when Big Mike's stock holding was excluded, the company said.

The founder and CEO will own 75 per cent of the troubled company when the deal closes by the end of October and private equity partner Silver Lake Partners will pretty much gobble the rest.

In a canned statement, Michael Dell said that as a privately owned entity, "we'll serve our customers with a single-minded purpose".

The deal has taken the best part of a year to come to fruition, though Mickey D's effort to take the biz private again only came to light in January, and that was before Icahn and other activist shareholders got involved.

The CEO and founder made numerous appeals to shareholders to cash in their shares, saying the transformation it needs to undertake from box shifter to enterprise IT player needed to happen behind closed doors.

The man Dell got his wish and now the even bigger task of remoulding Dell in the as-a-service era awaits him. ®

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