“The first EDSer to see a snake kills it,” Perot told BusinessWeek in 1986. “At GM, first thing you do is organize a committee on snakes. Then you bring in a consultant who knows a lot about snakes. Third thing you do is talk about it for a year.”
GM called off the relationship by paying Perot $700 million for his stock and his resignation from the board. EDS was spun off by GM in 1996, then acquired by Hewlett-Packard Co. in 2008 for $13.2 billion.
Strict Discipline
Perot ran EDS with military-type discipline and sometimes pursued a one-man U.S. foreign policy.
In 1969, he tried to deliver two planeloads of Christmas dinners and gifts to American prisoners of war in Vietnam, only to be turned away by North Vietnam. He later said that President Richard Nixon had asked him “to embarrass the North Vietnamese into changing the treatment” of POWs, and said he considered the effort a success.
In 1979, a mission arranged by Perot and led by a retired U.S. Army special-forces officer, Arthur Simons, rescued two EDS employees imprisoned in Tehran. The daring private raid became the basis for novelist Ken Follett’s “On Wings of Eagles” (1983).
School Standards
Appointed in 1984 by Texas Governor Mark White to lead a committee on public-school reform, Perot led the push that resulted in statewide student testing, the start of pre-kindergarten programs and the state’s no-pass, no-play rule, which limited sports and other extracurricular activities by students who fail courses.
In 1988, Perot returned to information technology by founding Plano, Texas-based Perot Systems, which became immersed in the growing field of digitizing medical records. Dell was the world’s second-largest personal-computer maker, with hopes to expand into computer services, when it bought Perot Systems in 2009, a deal that earned members of the Perot family almost $400 million, according to company filings.
With the former Margot Birmingham, whom he married in 1956, Perot had five children -- Ross Jr., Nancy, Suzanne, Carolyn and Katherine.