Some people just have better stories than the rest of us. They’re in the middle of things — big things that we all pay attention to — all of the time. They win, mostly, but not all the time. They make us choose sides. They seem to be in control, to an extent most of us can only imagine. They appear, even while they are alive, to be historical figures.

Ross Perot was one of those.

He’d have been a big deal if he had never done anything outside of business. That narrative started with a star salesman at IBM who quit and founded Electronic Data Systems, the enterprise that made him a vast fortune — a big part of it through the sale of EDS to General Motors. Perot didn’t exactly succeed at GM — he later said it was like trying to train an elephant to tap dance — but he came out of that episode painted as an able executive thwarted by an impossibly bureaucratic corporation. He started Perot Systems after that, a company later sold to Dell for $3.9 billion; without the earlier successes, that would have been the basis of a significant Texas fortune.

Credit by - The Texas tribune

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