“I don’t understand the billionaires in Dallas,” says Morton Meyerson, known as Mort to friends, as he sits at the dining table of a one-story home in North Dallas where he recently moved.
Meyerson may be best known for the symphony hall that bears his name, an I.M. Pei masterwork of art and sound, but his influence on this city runs deep. As one of the main movers behind Electronic Data Systems, Ross Perot’s data-processing company, he helped build the infrastructure of modern business.
“I surround myself with people who are more talented than I am,” Perot said during his bid for president in 1992, which Meyerson ran. Perot wasn’t only talking about Meyerson, but he definitely had him in mind.
Meyerson has been called “Perot’s right-hand man” and “Perot’s lieutenant,” descriptions he rejects, in part because it makes him sound like a yes-man, and Meyerson said no many times. Those also track too closely to the One Great Man theory of history, and Meyerson knows better than most that EDS was a collective, a team.
A more accurate assessment, then, would position Meyerson as a tough-minded business ace whose legacy happens to track alongside Perot’s for about 30 years. Meyerson invented “outsourcing” a decade before it got that name. He presided over Perot Systems and a Wall Street brokerage and General Motors. That resume doesn’t even touch on his philanthropy. In 1984, when Perot paid $10 million for the naming rights to the Dallas symphony hall, he gave the honor to the man who was definitely not his lieutenant, though perhaps he was his friend.
“I love Mort,” says Mark Cuban, who met Meyerson when he was a scrappy upstart with a big idea, Broadcast.com. Meyerson was an early investor. “He was a great mentor. But his greatest feature is his big heart.”
On June 3, Meyerson turns 87, one of the last living lions of Silicon Prairie. Perot died in 2019, and Texas Instruments’ Eugene McDermott and J. Erik Jonsson are long gone. They left widows and children who carry on the family name — Meyerson has nothing but praise for the late Margaret McDermott and the still-living Margot Perot — but the business giants who rose up after those men? Dallas, we have a problem. Our city is the sixth-wealthiest in the country, home to billionaires whose riches are on a scale once unimaginable, and Meyerson doesn’t understand most of them.
“I have tried to unpack this question 100 times, but I don’t really know them, and I don’t socialize with them, so I have no insight,” he told me in late March, when I visited him at his home. “The billionaires in Fort Worth invest in the city,” he says, speaking of Ed Bass and John Goff. “The billionaires of Dallas, they don’t care.”
Meyerson was never a billionaire, though he did reap millions, mostly from well-timed investments. He made his bones before CEOs regularly showed up on Forbes’ richest lists, and one way to interpret his comment about billionaires would be as an expression of regret for what he did not accomplish, wondering if he did enough, wondering what he could have done — the scholarships, the buildings, the doors opened — if he’d had that kind of money.
Meyerson is mostly out of the game now. He spends evenings watching TV. “Billy Bob Thornton’s got it,” he says of a recent favorite, Landman. But he looks onto a landscape he no longer recognizes. Dallas has changed, business has changed, politics, technology, everything. This is the gift and burden of getting older: watching as the world you knew slips away.
For the past decades, Meyerson lived near the Katy Trail in a former Dallas Power and Light building, a stunning property with a railroad track running through the first floor. Recently, he moved to a modest abode with no stairs and art decorating the walls. On the cool Nakashima natural-wood table of his dining area, a vanilla protein shake and a hard-boiled egg remain untouched. Meyerson has lost his appetite. Since 2020, he’s been battling prostate cancer that eventually spread to his bones. Only weeks before our interview in late March, his gall bladder, full of stones, was removed.
Once a strapping teen who dominated in football, Meyerson uses a walker now. He takes a while to get situated in a chair. He’s wearing an orange sweatshirt with a silver puffer vest, unzipped. His sweatshirt reads, “Do good.”
“I am half of who I was,” he says, his hooded eyes looking weary, and he smiles. “But more than some other people.”
The life-changing tragedy
Born in 1938, Meyerson came of age in Fort Worth, the son of an insurance salesman with a reputation for straight-shooting.
“We used to hate Dallas,” his father, Brudus Meyerson, once said in an oral history of the family. It’s not exactly a rare sentiment in Fort Worth. “Dallas was sort of rich and arrogant.”
Brudus grew up in the Orthodox faith, but as an adult, he switched to reform Judaism. “My heartburn went away,” he said of the change.
At 22, Brudus fell in love with a curly-haired pianist and singer named Bernice. She was young, 15, but the two married in 1936, when Bernice was 18. Two years later, the couple had a son. In his crib, baby Mort would wave his hand in time as his mother played music on the piano; his parents thought he might grow up to be a conductor.
If the Meyersons’ age-gap romance didn’t clue you in that mid-century America was another world, consider that at 5, little Mort took the bus downtown to meet his mom. He was an independent spirit, smart but shy. The charmer of the family would be the second-born, Sandy.
“A perfect child,” Mort says of his brother.
Sandy was 3 when his parents noticed a limp. They took him to Scottish Rite hospital, where doctors diagnosed a tumor in his groin, a neurosarcoma.
Sandy died three and a half years later. Mort was 10, and he now understands this as the foundational loss of his life.
“I don’t mean to sound macabre, but had he lived, I don’t think I would have had the career I did,” he says. “He would have been the star in the family, and I would have been the nerd. But I watched him fade, and I watched what it did to my parents. I don’t think I ever recovered.”
Mort was a good student, particularly in math. He wasn’t popular until high school, when he stood out on the football team at Paschal High School and became president of his senior class. At the University of Texas in Austin, he studied economics and philosophy, although he also sang in the a cappella choir. He graduated in 1961 and became an officer in the United States Army. His specialty was automatic data processing; later, that would be known as computing.
His first civilian job was at Bell Helicopter, where he ran manufacturing with such alacrity that after only a few years, he was on track to become vice president of Textron, the Rhode Island-based parent company of Bell. One day, he got a phone call.
“We’d like to interview you,” said a recruiter.
“Who’s ‘we’?” Meyerson asked.
“EDS,” the guy said.
Meyerson was unimpressed. “What’s EDS?”
Enter Ross Perot
The East Texas firebrand born Henry Ross Perot was a top salesman at IBM when he started his own company in the Dallas of the early ’60s. Electronic Data Systems aimed to fill a hole in the market: All these companies had computers, but how to use them?
EDS had 53 employees when Meyerson interviewed there. In the clean-scrubbed mono-culture of mid-century Texas, they all fit a certain mold. White, Presbyterian, many from the Navy, Perot’s branch.
“I don’t fit,” Meyerson told Mitch Hart, co-founder of EDS. “I’m Jewish.”
It was Hart’s turn to be unimpressed. “Can you write code?” he asked.
Hart secured the deal by offering Meyerson the same salary he’d get from Textron, $11,000. A year later, in 1967, Meyerson moved from Fort Worth to Dallas, where he and his wife, Marlene, forked over $18,000 for a nice middle-class home near St. Mark’s, not far from where he lives now.
“Dallas was low-key,” he says. “Texas Instruments was big. Perot was big. That was about it.” He quickly learned his hometown differed from his adopted one. “Dallas looked east for joy, and Fort Worth looked west,” he says. “I thought, I don’t get this, but I was so busy with the business.”
Meyerson became the rainmaker at EDS. Early on, he proposed a business model for the company that would become known as outsourcing, which led to massive growth. Perot made him company president. During his tenure, EDS ballooned from a $200 million consulting business to a $4.7 billion large-scale systems consulting enterprise. In 1971, when Perot bought the ailing Wall Street brokerage duPont Glore Forgan, he named Meyerson CEO.
“Everything I touched at EDS made money,” says Meyerson, though he still seems mystified by Perot’s decision. “Ross noticed that.”
In the mid-’80s, Perot sold his company to General Motors under the condition that Meyerson become chief technology officer. GM was the largest company in the world at the time, with 360,000 employees. Meyerson was a father by this point, with two children and a wife in Dallas.
“I was in an airplane the whole time,” he says.
“My name is Michael Dell”
Meyerson’s Midas touch made him a coveted mentor for up-and-comers. One day in the ’80s, he got a call from a 19-year-old in Austin. “My name is Michael Dell,” the kid said.
Dell was running a small computer company that had potential, but he needed help. Meyerson was beyond busy, but he agreed to coach the precocious Dell on one condition. “You’ll give me $1 million in shares, and whatever I make, I’ll give to charity.”
They had a deal. (Meyerson made good on his promise, eventually donating his profit to help build Dallas’ symphony hall.)
“You can’t talk at people,” he re telling Dell, a guy accustomed to being the smartest in the room. “You have to simultaneously listen, feel and lead.”
Meyerson’s business insight, deep pockets and blithe disinterest in wealth accumulation made him something of a sitting duck for hungry Texas entrepreneurs. One day he got a call from a friend who told him to meet these two guys hoping to put basketball on the internet.
“That’s the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard,” Meyerson responded. But fine, he’d meet them.
“My name’s Chabenisky,” one of the guys said, introducing himself by his Russian family name, which his immigrant grandfather had simplified. He was Mark Cuban.
Cuban and his partner, Todd Wagner, were young and ambitious. Meyerson liked their style. “I’ll give you $500,000 for 10% of the company,” he told them.
It was the most lucrative decision of his life. In 1999, Broadcast.com sold to Yahoo! for $5.7 billion.
“That’s where I made all my money,” Meyerson says, fiddling with the hard-boiled egg he won’t eat. “I made more money with Mark Cuban than I made with anybody else times a thousand.”
The dot-com boom ushered in a new wildcatter era, tycoons minted overnight. This is the explosion that created much of today’s billionaire class, as wealth gushed into an itty-bitty top tier and the 99% stayed the same.
The change worried Meyerson, even as he went along for the ride. It didn’t make sense that you could make more on a brief transaction than decades of hard work.
Meyerson had long been successful. Now he was very rich.
The saga of the Meyerson Symphony Center
The notion of creating a world-class symphony hall in Dallas started percolating in the late ’70s, but most of the ’80s would before the place became real. The architect, I.M. Pei, was first-rate, but the project technically had many architects, including Meyerson.
“He was indefatigable in his of the symphony center, which hit major bumps in the road at almost every step of its incarnation,” says Laurie Shulman, author of The Meyerson Symphony Center: Building a Dream, which tells the saga of the symphony hall’s creation as well as a city redefining itself.
The anecdote about Perot dropping $10 million for naming rights and bestowing that honor onto the unsung hero of his company has been told many times. Lesser known is a story Shulman tells in her book, about the night of the grand opening, when the extended Meyerson clan drove to the symphony hall for the first time. The car was silent and jittery as they neared the new building, and as they stared up at Mort’s name emblazoned across the front, his father Brudus cracked a joke. “I knew I should have named you Junior,” he said.
Brudus Meyerson ed away in 2010, his wife Bernice in 2016. A love of music had long bonded mother and son, ever since he’d waved his chubby little hand to the sound of her piano in his crib. Mort sang in the Dallas Symphony Chorus for a few years, likely one of the only people ever to perform in a hall that bears his name.
Meyerson’s generosity would be legendary, if he had interest in touting it. He’s a man known to pick up checks for strangers. In 2019, long before I came on staff at The Dallas Morning News, I wrote an essay for the Arts & Life section about accidentally dinging an SUV in a crowded parking lot on Lower Greenville, a mistake that cost me $1,300, a small fortune to a freelance journalist struggling to pay rent. A few weeks after the story ran, I received a check in the mail. It was from Morton H. Meyerson, for $1,300.
“Really?” Meyerson says, when I remind him. He has no memory of doing this. Me? I’ll never forget.
Meyerson developed 2M Collective Inc., a family office, and the Morton H. Meyerson Family Foundation to handle philanthropic projects, which include Dream Big, a partnership with the Rainwater Charitable Foundation to provide scholarships to Tarrant County high schoolers, and Hilleman Scholars Program at Montana State University, which s first-generation students through financial aid and mentoring. In 2007, he was elected into The American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and in 2021, he was inducted into the Texas Business Hall of Fame.
“Any mistakes haunt you?” I ask.
“None that keep me up at night,” he says. Anyway, as he says, “You learn from your mistakes.”
“What’s your greatest legacy?” I ask.
“You’re not gonna like this answer,” he says, lacing his fingers on the table like he’s about to make a deal. “Family.”
No trust funds
Mort married his wife, Marlene, in 1964, and they had two children, Marti and David. The couple divorced in the ’90s but remarried before Marlene died of ovarian cancer in 2017. Mort still wears his wedding ring.
“It was nine days before her death,” his daughter Marti, 55, who lives in Manhattan, says of her parents’ second marriage. “She was in hospice, and they brought a rabbi. It was one of the most healing and beautiful experiences our family had together.”
After his wife ed, Meyerson and Marti ed forces to rename a community center in New York the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan, part of the fabled Jewish Community Center network, as a way to honor her.
His children grew up to be good people, Meyerson says, careful not to touch the raw nerves of the son no longer here. David died in 1998, at the age of 31. His life is memorialized on the Katy Trail, even if most ersby don’t notice. The plaque for David’s Way, at Knox Street, reads: “David Nathan Meyerson. Son, brother, friend.”
“I have really good grandchildren,” Mort says, “who don’t live on trust funds.” He’s rather private about his family, even if he’s also proud. Perhaps it’s the one part of his storied past that only belongs to him.
The animating philosophy of his life has been the Jewish concept of tzedakah, giving to make a better world. The word in Hebrew means “justice” or “righteousness” and suggests an obligation to bring about fairness for everyone.
That’s why the billionaires of 21st-century Dallas baffle him.
“I always thought part of the money wasn’t mine,” he says. “I don’t think they think that way.”
He speaks with iration about the founders of Texas Instruments, who helped build out UT Southwestern Medical Center and created the University of Texas at Dallas. “They were thinking, ‘How would this community be better off, and what do we need to do?’” He sees such work not as a moral burden but as a moral opportunity. “There would be a closer integration between the rich and the poor.”
He likes Mark Cuban, who famously bought the Dallas Mavericks, though he famously sold them as well. These days Cuban is trying to disrupt the pharmaceutical industry’s monopoly. “Mark Cuban is the same person who walked in my office,” Meyerson says.
But much of the local billionaire class’ apparent disinterest in shaping Dallas, its present and future, puzzles him. “Fort Worth people are connected to community, and Dallas people are not, and there’s something wrong. I think that needs to be rectified in the future, or we’re gonna have real problems.”
I can’t tell if he’s speaking so bluntly because he’s reached the age where he has nothing to lose, or because he’s only ever been this way. A straight-shooter, just like his pops.
He sees Dallas growing into a 21st-century powerhouse, one of the most important cities in the country, as the North Texas metroplex is on track to sur Chicago as the third-largest in size. How much of this transformation Meyerson will witness is an open question. His body is weak, but his mind is still sharp.
Two months after our interview, near the end of May, Meyerson would go into hospice. Marti and the family are with him these days. He’s been on the phone saying his goodbyes. The word got out, and people have been calling.
Back at the raw-wood dining table in late March, our time isn’t done. Two hours have ed since our conversation began, and I thank Meyerson for his time, gathering my things and standing to go. When he leans his elbows on the table, I sit back down.
“Now I have some questions for you,” he says, and we talk for another hour.
