“We’ve created the leader in an impressive number of categories,” Mr. Dell said in an interview. “We definitely have tough competitors, but I like to think that some of them may be running around trying to figure out how to respond to this combination.”

Mr. Durban added, “The doubling — no, quintupling — down with investment is in stark contrast to what many other mature technology companies are doing.”

Plans for taking on a target as big as EMC began as far back as October 2014. In addition to the tens of billions of dollars worth of loans and bonds that needed to be arranged, more than $6 billion worth of assets, including major divisions, had to be sold.

Dell and Silver Lake also devised a “tracking stock,” a publicly traded security tied to the performance of the virtualization software maker VMware, which was spun out of EMC into the public markets but is still mostly owned by it. The tracking stock would force Dell to publicly disclose some financial information, something it has not had to do since going private in 2013, but the move proved vital for the financing, since the stock could be used as collateral for some of the debt.

Some of Dell’s own potential banks balked early on, arguing that they simply could not sell enough junk bonds to finance the deal, and other lenders refused to participate if they could not easily resell some of the loans to other investors.

Then Dell, Silver Lake and the bankers came up with an idea, pushed hard by Mr. Durban: Sell more high-rated loans and bonds, a questionable idea for a junk-rated company like Dell.

An internal Silver Lake finance team that included Joerg Adams, Geoff Oltmans and Frank Walters, as well as their counterparts at Dell, Tyler Johnson and Ryan Weninger, pored over the plans and spent hours pitching to prospective investors.