Morton Meyerson, an understated Texas businessman who helped the mercurial H. Ross Perot build Electronic Data Systems into a world-leading data processing company, and who later advised Mr. Perot during his quixotic 1992 presidential campaign, died on Monday at his home in Dallas. He was 87.
His family said in an announcement that the cause was prostate cancer.
Where Mr. Perot was all extravagant gestures — running for president, trying to fly food and medicine to Vietnam P.O.W.s, staging a commando raid in Iran — Mr. Meyerson was the quiet, stubborn, moneymaking computer programmer in the backroom who helped make his boss a billionaire. In 1967, barely a year after joining Electronic Data Systems, or E.D.S., he helped Mr. Perot secure and execute a critical contract to process Medicaid claims for Texas Blue Cross Blue Shield, transforming the company into a financial powerhouse.
With that contract and an earlier one to process Medicare claims — the Social Security Administration would later say Mr. Perot had overcharged for it — the company’s pretax profit, which had been $26,487 in 1965, rose to $2.4 million in 1968. The original five-person team Mr. Meyerson had led on the project became a 1,500-person team three years later, and the core of Mr. Perot’s business.
By 1979, Mr. Perot had tapped Mr. Meyerson to be the company’s president. In that capacity, The New York Times wrote in 1982, “Mr. Meyerson has broadened the customer base, and profits are up.”
Mr. Perot had started E.D.S. in 1962 with a $1,000 check. In 1984, when General Motors bought the company, it had $1 billion in revenue. When Mr. Meyerson finally left E.D.S., by then under G.M.’s ownership, in 1986, “it was the largest computer services company in the world,” he later wrote.
And Mr. Perot, after years of a sometimes prickly but fruitful relationship with the computer wizard who proved to be a fount of moneymaking ideas, would call Mr. Meyerson “the finest executive in the computer industry.” In his 1996 autobiography, “My Life & the Principles for Success,” Mr. Perot said that Mr. Meyerson had “bombarded us almost daily with creative ideas and changes that he thought would make the company more successful.”
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The post Morton Meyerson, Texas Businessman and Perot Lieutenant, Dies at 87 appeared first on New York Times.
