Michael Gorton’s long way to Mars

Michael Gorton was living in the Philippines when he watched the Apollo landing. His father was an Air Force sergeant; the family lived off base. The boy saw people walking on the Moon and arrived at a reasonable childhood conclusion: he would be the first person on Mars. A Scout leader told him to make a life plan. Gorton did. The universe, regrettably, had not agreed to his timetable.

He held on to that plan until around 30, when the prospect of reaching Mars while he was young enough began to look remote. Decades later, the ambition still supplies a useful way into his story. The Teladoc co-founder has worked on power systems, built an internet company, helped launch a record label, and written novels. Space keeps turning up, sometimes as a business interest, sometimes as the setting for the next chapter.

A destination before a career

What survives from the childhood episode is the combination of a very distant objective and a practical instruction. Write it down. Work out how to get there. A Moon landing could have remained a television memory. Gorton made it an itinerary. When the original route failed, there were other things to learn and other projects to attempt.

His own account of growing up gives his parents and four siblings a considerable share of the credit. Money was scarce. He went to college and accumulated qualifications while working full time. The subjects were engineering, physics, and law. That is an unusually broad education for someone who already knew which planet he preferred.

The three disciplines ask different questions. Engineering asks whether something will work. Physics asks what permits it to work. Law asks which agreements and rules apply when people try it. Read his later career through those questions and its changes of direction become easier to follow. A technical idea rarely arrives in the world with all three matters settled.

Before the modem, the power grid

In 1981, Gorton joined Dallas Power & Light, later part of Texas Utilities. His work involved power plants, distribution, transformers, and the integration of renewable energy. These were systems with physical consequences. Electricity had to get where it was going; equipment had to do its job. His responsibilities expanded from engineering into management.

He completed law school at night and began taking on regulatory and other management work. The schedule is worth remembering before the résumé becomes a parade of founders’ titles. There was a long stretch of employment, technical responsibility, and study. He left Texas Utilities in 1992. The following year, he founded Internet Global.

His subsequent connection with Principal Solar returned him to energy from a different position. That recurrence gives the career some texture. New companies did not always mean unfamiliar subjects. Sometimes they meant approaching an old subject with a different set of responsibilities, after years spent learning how both the machinery and the institution operated.

First, explain the email address

Internet Global began with a problem that now requires a small act of historical imagination: prospective customers needed to understand the internet. Gorton gave talks covering such basic territory as what an email address was. Before selling access to a new network, somebody had to explain why a person might want to join it.

The business went on to deploy DSL and internet telephone networks. Gorton negotiated its reported $122 million buyout in the first quarter of 2000. That figure describes a company transaction. The more revealing detail may be the earlier lecture circuit: an engineer learning to make an unfamiliar service comprehensible to people who had other things to do.

Around the turn of the millennium, he also became a founding partner of Texas Acceleration Group, formed to help startups. With partners, he helped establish Palo Duro Records to promote country singer Shelley Laine. There are careers in which a record label would require a lengthy explanation. In Gorton’s, it earns its place beside the networks and the power plants.

An expert in finding the experts

The obvious question is how someone moves between such different businesses. Gorton’s answer puts people ahead of omniscience. In describing his work across sectors, he has said that he is often surrounded by specialists rather than serving as the specialist himself. His job is to find them, trust their abilities, and help them work.

“Companies are built from ideas by people.”

Michael Gorton

There is a less ceremonious version of the same outlook. In a conversation about entrepreneurship, he described the willingness to do humble work, including cleaning toilets, as compatible with negotiating a substantial deal later in the day. A founder’s range of duties can be impressive without being remotely glamorous. Somebody still has to notice what needs doing.

His consulting terms bring the philosophy down to particulars. He offers engagements of six to twelve months, with defined tasks. He wants expertise and enthusiasm for the subject, good chemistry with the executive, and ethical alignment. The requirements sound almost domestic: can we get along, agree on the work, and trust each other while doing it?

The family has a summit list

Outside the office, Gorton and his family have pursued the highest point in every U.S. state. A published 2025 biography put the tally at 43. This is a goal with both a satisfying number and an inconvenient amount of geography. Completion requires returning to the list after the obvious destinations have been crossed off.

His outdoor record also includes 18 marathons and a bicycle ride he describes as 4,800 miles. His author profile lists a second-degree black belt in Kenpo. The pattern is visible without turning exercise into a management seminar. These are activities that demand practice, time, and repeated effort, whether or not a business lesson eventually occurs to the participant.

They also keep the portrait from becoming entirely professional. The family climbing project gives the mountains a shared purpose. The novels give imagination somewhere to roam. A career can occupy an enormous amount of a life without providing all of its company, all of its difficulties, or all of its pleasures.

Calamity gets a new spelling

Gorton’s books allow him to revisit experience in several forms. Broken Handoff deals with business ownership transactions and the interests of founders and investors. Historical fiction offers another route into the past. Calamistunity compresses calamity, mistakes, and opportunity into a title that asks the reader to tolerate a little linguistic engineering.

The premise is that setbacks can yield something useful. His reading influences range from science fiction to writers such as Larry McMurtry and Ernest Hemingway. That breadth helps explain why the bibliography resists a single shelf. Business experience supplies subjects; an interest in story determines how many other things he wants to try.

His public account of friendship adds a welcome wrinkle. After a business associate complained that he spent too much time complimenting people, Gorton considered the criticism and defended the habit. He liked drawing attention to accomplished friends. The episode is amusing because the alleged fault is so particular: an excess of praise, treated as something requiring a considered response.

A spaceship with editorial problems

Tachyon Tunnel gave the childhood space ambition an accommodating new form. Fiction permits an author to send characters where launch schedules cannot. Gorton’s interest is in combining speculative travel with adventure, relationships, and consequences. His proposed technology belongs to an imagined universe; his fascination with the questions behind it is plainly personal.

He has described wanting to inspire persistence and imagination. He also insists on keeping the story moving. Asked about pacing, he brought up having to read James Joyce’s Ulysses. His prescription was succinct: “Tell the story, efficiently.” A galactic journey apparently benefits from an editor willing to ask whether everyone needs to take quite so long getting there.

The sequel, The Daklin Empire, appeared in March 2025. Its travelers face the repercussions of altering the past as well as a formidable galactic adversary. The appeal of the setup is the extra difficulty attached to getting what you want. Open a route through space and time, and a new collection of decisions comes through with it.

The plan acquires another chapter

By May 2026, Gorton was announcing Tachyon Tunnel 4. He said the project had begun as one novel written for fun. Readers wanted to know what happened next; the characters and ideas kept developing. The resulting series gave him more room to write about exploration and technological change, alongside the human attachments that make a journey matter.

There is something pleasingly ordinary about that explanation. After the childhood ambition, the degrees, the companies, and the mountain list, another substantial undertaking grew because people asked for the next installment. He had more to say. The person who once wrote down a route to Mars found himself working out where a story should go next.

He has also worked with Phantom Space, returning to the practical business of space through a strategy role. The boy’s plan has acquired colleagues, contracts, fictional spacecraft, and several revisions. The original deadline went. The subject kept his attention. For Gorton, Mars remains a destination with a surprisingly crowded road leading toward it.