Ross Perot

Ross Perot was an American businessman, philanthropist, and politician whose three-decade career produced multiple defining American business-and-political roles — particularly his 1962 founding of Electronic Data Systems (EDS) and his 1992 third-party Reform Party presidential campaign. He was born Henry Ross Perot on June 27, 1930, in Texarkana, Texas, into an American working-class family. His father Gabriel Ross Perot was a Texas-area cotton broker, and his mother Lulu May Ray was a homemaker.

His education at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland (B.S., 1953) launched his early-career path. His 1953–1957 U.S. Navy service produced his early-career American military public profile. His 1957–1962 IBM career as a computer-systems salesman in Dallas, Texas launched his early-career American computer-business public profile.

His June 27, 1962 founding of Electronic Data Systems (EDS) — at age 32, on his 32nd birthday, in Dallas, Texas — launched his 1960s and 1970s American computer-business public profile. The EDS commercial growth across 1962–1984 — across multiple American federal-and-state government computer-services contracts — produced his American computer-business commercial peak. The 1984 sale of EDS to General Motors for $2.55 billion (in cash and stock) produced his later international business-public-profile.

His 1979 EDS Iranian-hostage-rescue operation — across which he organized and financed the rescue of two EDS American employees who had been held by the Iranian Revolutionary government in Tehran — produced his late-1970s American business-leader public profile. The 1979 hostage-rescue operation was subsequently chronicled by Ken Follett in the 1983 nonfiction book On Wings of Eagles.

His 1992 third-party presidential campaign — across which he financed his own Reform Party-affiliated presidential campaign with approximately $65 million of his own personal wealth — produced approximately 19% of total American 1992 presidential votes (the highest third-party-candidate vote-percentage in American presidential-election history since Theodore Roosevelt's 1912 Bull Moose Party campaign). The 1992 candidacy shaped late-20th-century American third-party-presidential-campaign public profile. His subsequent 1996 second Reform Party presidential campaign produced approximately 8% of total American 1996 presidential votes. He died on July 9, 2019, at age 89, in Dallas, Texas, of leukemia complications.

His name Ross derives from the Old Scottish-Gaelic place-name meaning "promontory" or "peninsula." Ross has been a popular American boys' name across the late 19th and 20th centuries.