Michael Dell still personally owns about 40% of the computer company with his name on it, according to Forbes. He owns rather more than that of the vehicle now doing his most interesting buying, which has no share price, no quarterly call and, as of Sunday, a reported $7.7 billion insurance broker in its sights.
The story of how those two things met runs through Tampa, and it takes nearly three decades.
1981
Lowry Baldwin began his insurance career at Aetna Property & Casualty. Two years later he joined Baldwin & Sons; in 1991 he and Chuck Davis merged their firms to found Davis Baldwin Insurance. Nothing about this was glamorous. Commercial property and casualty cover is the plumbing of American business, priced annually, renewed forever, and mostly sold by people you have never heard of.
It compounds beautifully, which is the part the plumbing never advertises.
1998
Michael Dell recruited John C. Phelan and Glenn R. Fuhrman to form MSD Capital, L.P., a firm with exactly one client. Its purpose was to manage the Dell family’s money rather than anyone else’s, an arrangement that removes the single most tiring constraint in finance: the need to explain yourself every ninety days.
Offices followed in New York, Santa Monica and West Palm Beach.
2006
Lowry Baldwin, Elizabeth Krystyn and Laura Sherman founded Baldwin Krystyn Sherman Partners in Tampa. Three names on the door, one city, a client list of Florida businesses and individuals who needed risk transferred somewhere it would be paid.
2011
Baldwin Risk Partners was formed as a holding company, built to scale the platform through further acquisitions. This is the moment a brokerage stops being a firm and starts being a machine for absorbing other firms. Trevor Baldwin, Lowry’s son, had joined the family company in 2009 after a stint at a private equity firm, which is a useful education for a man whose job would shortly become buying agencies for a living.
He is a Florida State graduate in Risk Management & Insurance. In Tampa, that is close to a hereditary qualification.
October 2019
Trevor Baldwin had taken over as chief executive that May. Months later the company listed on Nasdaq and raised $229.6 million, one of the largest IPOs of a Tampa-based firm in years and, the University of South Florida noted in a later profile of him, the first commercial insurance brokerage IPO in at least fifteen years. The listing carried the business past a $1 billion valuation.
The corporate shell had been incorporated in Delaware that July under the name BRP Group, Inc. The name on the ticker would take another five years to catch up with the name on the door.
2021
A capital raise at Acrisure, another American brokerage consolidator, drew in Fidelity, Apollo Funds and Gallatin Point Capital. Also on the list was BDT & MSD Partners, the merchant bank connected to Dell’s family office, which according to the trade publication Leaders Edge remains Acrisure’s largest minority shareholder.
So the Dell side of this story had already read the industry’s homework. Insurance distribution throws off fees in good markets and bad, and consolidators buy small agencies at one multiple and carry them at another. It is arbitrage with a filing cabinet.
Late 2022
MSD Capital was restructured as DFO Management. Gregg Lemkau, formerly co-head of the investment banking division at Goldman Sachs, became chairman of DFO and co-chief executive of BDT & MSD Partners, the merchant bank that Wikipedia records as having $50 billion in assets under management as of 2023. Alisa Mall arrived from Foresite Capital and is now DFO’s chief investment officer.
The portfolio that emerged is not a hedge fund’s. It runs to Four Seasons Resort Maui and Four Seasons Resort Hualalai, the Fairmont Miramar and The Boca Raton on the property side, and equity positions in PVH Corp, which owns Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger, and Dine Brands Global, which owns IHOP and Applebee’s. Elsewhere: West Monroe Partners, East West Manufacturing, Owl Rock Capital Corp and the Ultimate Fighting Championship.
Pancakes, pay-per-view and Hawaii. The through line is cash flow, not taste.
May 2024, then 2 December 2025
BRP Group formally became The Baldwin Insurance Group, Inc. The following July the company reported second-quarter 2025 revenue of $492.9 million, up 30% year on year, with adjusted diluted earnings per share of 48 cents, up 14%.
Then, on 2 December 2025, Baldwin agreed to acquire Cobbs Allen Capital Holdings for $1.4 billion, structured with a $438 million cash component, stock valued at roughly $648.44 million and a performance-based earnout of up to $250 million. A company founded in a Tampa office in 2006 was now writing billion-dollar cheques.
That is the sort of trajectory that gets you a phone call you did not ask for.
9 September 2026
Forbes reported that Michael Dell’s net worth had climbed 2% to $273.2 billion, making him the second-wealthiest person in the world for the first time, overtaking Larry Page. A separate report six days earlier cited a Forbes real-time figure of $250.7 billion and a rank of fifth, which tells you what these numbers are: market-linked snapshots of a man holding roughly 40% of Dell Technologies and, per one account of the Broadcom-VMware transaction, more than 200 million Broadcom shares received when that $69 billion deal closed in November 2023.
The fortune moves by tens of billions between Thursday and Tuesday. The family office does not.
Sunday, 13 September 2026
The Financial Times reported that DFO Management is leading a planned $7.7 billion take-private of The Baldwin Insurance Group, with DFO and Sequence Holdings in advanced talks. The expected price: $32.50 per share, a premium of about 10% to Baldwin’s Friday close of $29.65.
Against that, the public market’s own arithmetic. LSEG data put Baldwin’s value at around $4.14 billion at the time of the report; Bloomberg, covering the same story, cited a market value of $4.2 billion. The gap between those figures and $7.7 billion is debt and structure, the two things take-private buyers understand better than the rest of the tape. Baldwin’s shares had already climbed more than 23% year to date, helped in part, the FT noted, by speculation that the company might be in line for a buyout.
If completed, it would rank among DFO’s largest acquisitions to date. The transaction was expected to be announced as soon as the following Monday.
Reuters said it could not immediately verify the FT’s report. Baldwin Insurance Group, DFO Management and Sequence Holdings did not respond to requests for comment outside business hours.
It was a Sunday.
