His two jobs converged in the mid-1960s, when the U.S. enacted Medicare and Medicaid and directed waves of new health-care claims to state insurers such as Blue Cross-Blue Shield. Perot won the Texas Medicaid and Medicare processing contracts for EDS -- a deal struck without competitive bidding, an arrangement later investigated by Congress -- then went on to win contracts from 10 other states.
By 1968, EDS had 323 full-time employees, annual net profits of more than $1.5 million “and a growth curve so fantastic as to make investment bankers’ mouths water,” John Brooks wrote in “The Go-Go Years” (1973).
In 1968, Perot took EDS public. His banker at R.W. Pressprich & Co., which underwrote the offering, was Kenneth Langone, who would later achieve fame as co-founder of Home Depot Inc.
Initially priced at $16.50, EDS shares rose to $23 on the first day of over-the-counter trading and to $160 in 1970, at which point Perot’s 9 million shares were worth about $1.45 billion.
“Probably no other man ever made so much money so fast,” Fortune magazine wrote in a 1968 profile.
Financial Setbacks
He lost a chunk of it in one day -- April 22, 1970 -- when EDS shares plunged to $85 and his net worth, on paper, dropped by almost $500 million. He lost more when his bids to save two ailing Wall Street brokerages, F.I. DuPont, Glore Forgan & Co. in 1970 and Walston & Co. in 1972, ended in failure.
Still, when Forbes ranked the 400 richest Americans for the first time in 1982, Perot made the list, with an estimated net worth of $325 million.
The 1984 sale of EDS to GM earned Perot $1 billion and a seat on the board as the Detroit carmaker’s largest shareholder. EDS, as a unit of GM, was to streamline the carmaker’s fragmented computer systems.
It would prove to be a fraught marriage, with Perot ridiculing the company and its then-chairman, Roger Smith.