The Texas Enterprise and Innovation Icons of 1973 and 2023
In Texas, enterprise and innovation transfer in two instructions: individuals come right here to show their huge goals into actual issues, and people who find themselves from right here export their good concepts to the remainder of the world. And no, it’s not nearly oil (although, in fact, plenty of it is about oil). Expertise, building, cosmetics, jewellery, medical advances—Texas has a hand in just about any discipline you possibly can consider. And that two-way visitors exhibits no indicators of slowing down.
The Aspiring World Chief
H. Ross Perot
The Dallas billionaire tech entrepreneur’s Texarkana accent was the butt of late-night jokes, however the populist frustrations he tapped into throughout his two presidential campaigns had been no laughing matter.
Mark Cuban
One other Dallas billionaire, minted by the late-nineties dot-com increase, the Mavericks proprietor and Shark Tank star has flirted with political ambitions and launched an organization geared toward reducing prescription drug costs.
The Troublemaker
T. Boone Pickens
The Oklahoman turned Texan shook up Massive Oil by launching unsolicited bids to take over massive corporations and advocating for shareholder rights. His folksy method gained him followers—simply not within the govt suites.
Elon Musk
The South African turned Californian turned Texan disrupts industries seemingly for breakfast: vehicles, power, aerospace. And now that he’s taken over Twitter, he can infuriate tens of millions every day.
The Philanthropist
The Basses
Generations of this household have donated a lot of their oil-derived wealth to nationwide establishments, corresponding to Yale College. Nearer to residence, they helped subsidize the revitalization of downtown Fort Value.
John and Laura Arnold
The Houston energy couple upped the ante on Texas philanthropy by utilizing their billions to combat Massive Pharma worth gouging, champion contraception entry, and push to finish predatory lending in increased training.
The Builder
Trammell Crow
He constructed his Dallas firm into arguably the primary nationwide real-estate improvement agency, reshaping downtown skylines throughout the nation and setting the stage for the gleaming city panorama Texans now inhabit.
Jason Ballard
The CEO of the Austin-based printed-housing firm Icon describes his large building robots as instruments for lifting individuals out of the worldwide housing disaster by making houses faster to construct and extra resilient.
The Life-style Entrepreneur
Mary Kay Ash
The Dallas cosmetics and multilevel-marketing pioneer turned the Tupperware house-party idea into indulgent neighborhood magnificence bashes and raised a military of salespeople in pink Cadillacs.
Chip and Joanna Gaines
The odd-couple residence renovators made Waco a retail vacation spot, then transitioned into full-fledged moguls with a line of residence items, best-selling books, and their very own cable channel.
The Retailer
Robert Sakowitz
This boom-and-bust Texan wager all the pieces throughout Houston’s go-go seventies, increasing his household’s eponymous division retailer chain and taking over piles of debt—solely to crash alongside the oil market within the eighties.
Kendra Scott
The Austin transplant bootstrapped her jewellery enterprise right into a busy e-commerce web site and greater than 100 shops by catering to middle-class clients sometimes sniffed at by the coastal style elite.
The Showboat Lawyer
Richard “Racehorse” Haynes
Starting together with his protection of a River Oaks surgeon accused of poisoning his spouse with an éclair, this Houstonian originated the function of the flamboyant Texas legal protection legal professional.
Thomas J. Henry
In the present day’s best-known Texas legal professionals promote their prowess in profitable multimillion-dollar fits. San Antonio–primarily based Henry used that formulation to construct the self-proclaimed largest personal-injury agency within the state.
The Medical Innovator
Michael DeBakey and Denton Cooley
Their decades-long feud overshadowed the truth that the mixed work of two Houston surgeons resulted on the earth’s first profitable implantation of a completely synthetic coronary heart.
James P. Allison
This MD Anderson iconoclast pioneered a brand new technique of combating most cancers by unleashing the physique’s immune system. He gained the Nobel Prize—and received to play harmonica with Willie Nelson.
This text initially appeared within the February 2023 concern of Texas Month-to-month with the headline “Icons, Then and Now.” Subscribe at the moment.
Picture credit: Perot: Ron Heflin/AP; Cuban: Andrew Eccles/ABC/Getty; Pickens: Mary Altaffer/AP; Musk: Britta Pedersen-Pool/Getty; Basses: Fort Value Star-Telegram/AP; Arnold: Peter Yang; Crow: The Dallas Morning Information/AP; Ballard: Diego Donamaria/Getty; Ash: Graham Bezant/Toronto Star/Getty; Gaines: Brian Ach/Invision/AP; Sakowitz: John Olson/Getty; Scott: Tim Mosenfelder/FilmMagic/Getty; Haynes: WBAP-TV/NBC5/KXAS-TV/College of North Texas Libraries/The Portal to Texas Historical past; Henry: Johnny Nunez/Getty; DeBakey: AP; Cooley: Donald Uhrbrock/Getty; Allison: Christoph Schmidt/AP
