WASHINGTON: H Ross Perot, the feisty Texas technology billionaire who rattled US politics with two independent presidential campaigns in the 1990s that struck a chord with disgruntled voters, died on Tuesday at the age of 89, his family said.
“Ross Perot, the ground-breaking businessman and loving husband, brother, father and grandfather, passed away early Tuesday at his home in Dallas, surrounded by his devoted family,” the Perot family said in a statement.
Perot’s fortune was estimated at $4.1 billion by Forbes magazine in April 2019.
Perot was a natural salesman who made a fortune in computer services but he was an unlikely and unconventional politician.
Perot leaped into the 1992 presidential race as an independent and quickly found a lode of Americans turned off by the Republican and Democratic parties. His overarching issue was curbing the government’s deficit spending — an issue he referred to as the “crazy aunt in the basement” who no one wanted to talk about.
Henry Ross Perot was born on June 27, 1930, in Texarkana, Texas, and raised in the height of the Depression.
He graduated in 1953 from the US Naval Academy, where he first learned about computers.
After his naval service, Perot joined IBM as a computer salesman in 1957 and quickly made a reputation for himself. In 1962 he met his yearly sales quota by Jan 19.
Disenchanted that his bosses did not like his ideas, Perot started his own company, Electronic Data Systems Inc in Dallas, a move that would make him a billionaire by age 38 by handling data processing for customers such as the Medicare system, Nasa and other government entities.
Perot and wife Margot married in 1956 and had five children. — Reuters
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