Almost from the start, Steven Rosenblum, an M&A partner at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, knew that advising Dell Inc. founder Michael Dell on his buyout of the struggling computer company would be a tough assignment. Not only would he have to help his client work with Silver Lake Partners
to buy the nearly 84 percent stake in the company he did not already own, he’d have to face down serious threats from activist investors and a rival bidder, The Blackstone Group. And perhaps trickiest of all, he’d have to help Dell, the company’s chairman and CEO, fulfill his obligation to investors to opt for the strategy that provided them with the most value, even if that meant voting his shares in favor of someone else’s offer—and, by extension, voting himself out of the company.
