Key points
- Two Dell officers filed Friday to sell $24.4 million
- Dell traded at its highest price ever that morning
- Separate filings show $388.9 million already sold
- Michael Dell's foundation has filed five earlier sale notices
Two Dell Technologies (DELL) officers turned up on our insider tracker on Friday. Peter Trizzino, president of global sales, filed notice to sell 37,735 shares the filing values at $21.1 million. Richard Rothberg, the general counsel, filed for 6,000 shares valued at $3.3 million. Both notices name September 11th as the approximate sale date, and that morning Dell traded at the highest price in its history.
The stock rose more than 10 percent on Friday, to around $560 from Thursday's close of $506.62. RBC Capital Markets had started coverage that morning with an outperform rating and a $640 target. Dell's up more than 340 percent this year.
Neither notice confirms a completed trade. A Form 144 is a statement of intent to sell, and the dollar figure on it is the filer's estimate of market value rather than a limit price or a record of what anyone received. The executed trade gets reported separately, on a Form 4. Both notices cover shares from restricted stock that vested, Trizzino's in March and Rothberg's back in 2022. Rothberg's also reports one earlier sale, 20,000 shares for $8.2 million on June 15th.
What has actually been sold
Set the notices aside and there's a firmer number. Form 4s report $388.9 million of Dell stock sold on three days, September 3rd, 4th and 8th. Those filings carry transaction dates and prices, so they're a record of completed events. A notice records only an intention.
Silver Lake accounts for $372.9 million of it. Five of its funds sold about 720,000 Class C shares, reported as many separate lines instead of single blocks. On September 8th alone the funds reported more than twenty lines, each a weighted average of multiple trades inside a one dollar band, together spanning $515.87 to $537.00.
Two Dell officers make up the rest. Jennifer Saavedra, the chief human resources officer, sold 25,251 shares at $520.00 on September 4th, and she still holds 296,891. Jane Tunnell, the chief marketing officer, sold 5,436 shares the same day at $523.52. Three fields are worth reading on both. The transaction code is S, an open market sale. The box for a Rule 10b5-1 trading plan is unchecked. And neither filing carries a footnote describing the shares as sold to cover tax withholding on vesting. That's the footnote that appears when a company sells a slice of vested stock automatically.
One note on how we're counting. Dell affiliates filed 28 Form 144 notices this month, and those totals resist being added up. Egon Durban runs Silver Lake and sits on Dell's board. He files notices for shares distributed to him from Silver Lake affiliates, and the funds' Form 4s separately name him as a reporting person by deputization, so the same stock can appear twice. For the completed figure we matched every code S row on transaction date, share count, price and ownership type, and every row was unique. That catches repeated rows, though rows aggregated differently could still overlap.
The foundation has filed five earlier notices
The largest notice of the month came eight days before Friday's pair. On September 3rd the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation gave notice that it intends to sell 2,459,804 shares it valued at $1,248,104,549, through Merrill Lynch.
It's done this five times before, always with Dell stock. The earlier notices ran $265.0 million in December 2023, $381,589,985 in March 2024, $381,480,000 that April, $424.7 million in October 2025, and $1,248,117,298 in June 2026. Two of those pairs land oddly close together. June and September are $12,749 apart, about one thousandth of one percent of either figure, and the two 2024 notices sit about $110,000 apart. That repetition suggests notices sized to a dollar amount rather than a share count. The shares came from Michael Dell himself, in gifts he reported on his own Form 4s under transaction code G.
All six of those notices name Dell Technologies, and the foundation's EDGAR record holds no Form 4 against any of them. The filings reviewed here do not confirm whether those proposed sales were completed, or at what prices.
What they are selling into
Dell told investors on September 1st that its AI server backlog had nearly doubled to $95 billion, and raised its full-year revenue outlook by $25 billion in the same release. RBC analyst David Paige wrote Friday that memory supply is what constrains Dell now, more than customer demand does, and that he expects meaningful backlog through fiscal 2027.
Chief operating officer Jeffrey Clarke said on the earnings call that Dell has picked up more than 10 points of traditional server market share in two quarters, and that the work behind it goes wider than the AI boxes everyone talks about. "We are seeing a growing trend of customers that require meaningful CPU compute capacity to support AI and agentic workflows," Clarke said. "These workloads are creating incremental demand for traditional servers."
It's also true that Silver Lake has been a seller since Dell came back to public markets, and that a private foundation exists to turn assets into grants. Both of the largest numbers here have an ordinary explanation sitting right beside them. For the wider question of what insider sales are worth as a signal, we've looked at whether copying insider trades works when you try it systematically, and Dell's full filing history sits on its filings page.
The filings establish the scale of proposed and completed sales during Dell's rally. They do not establish that the sellers expect the rally to end.
