Michael Dell successfully fended off activist investor Carl Icahn and, almost exactly one year ago, completed a $24 billion deal to take his company private. So what would he have done had he lost that battle, and gotten bounced from the company that bears his name?

“I probably would have taken a few months off, and started a new company,” Dell told attendees at the Inc. 5000 conference today. Though, sadly, he refused entreaties from his onstage interviewer, Inc.’s Editor at Large Tom Foster, to divulge what kind of new company he would have launched.

Clearly, the entrepreneurial bug bit deep into Dell, who famously started his company--one of the signal American tech success stories from the 1980s, and one of the longest lasting--from his dorm room while still a freshman at the University of Texas. (He was also Inc.'s first Entrepreneur of the Year, in 1989.) A relaxed Dell, clad in an old-school tech exec uniform of a dark sport jacket and a white dress shirt unbuttoned at the collar, pronounced himself thrilled to be helming a private company once more.

“Twenty percent of my time is now freed up,” he said--and that twenty percent of encompassed his “most annoying tasks,” devoted exclusively to the administrative and communications demands associated with heading a publicly traded company.

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