Perkins was a director at Applied Materials, Compaq, Corning Glass, Genentech, Hewlett-Packard, and Philips Electronics.

[7] In response, Perkins disclosed his reasons publicly, triggering an SEC investigation and significant media interest into HP's leak-finding activities.

[10] HP confirmed that the investigative firm they hired used pretexting to obtain information on the call records of the directors.

The Securities and Exchange Commission and the State of California began inquiries into the methods used by HP to investigate its directors.

[16] Perkins was the subject of a 2007 60 Minutes special titled "Captain of Capitalism", which focused on his memoir and featured a tour of his yacht.

In January 2014, the Wall Street Journal published a letter from Perkins[18] that compared the "progressive war on the American one percent" of wealthiest Americans and the Occupy movement's "demonization of the rich" to the Kristallnacht and anti-semitism in Nazi Germany: Writing from the epicenter of progressive thought, San Francisco, I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on the "one percent", namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the "rich.

"The letter was widely criticized and condemned in The Atlantic,[19] The Independent,[20] among bloggers, Twitter users, and "his own colleagues in Silicon Valley".

"[21] A month after publication of the letter in the Wall Street Journal, Perkins stated in a Commonwealth Club interview (which can be seen on YouTube)[22] when asked at the ending for his 60-minute "Plan to Save the World" he said that he believed elections should be set up such that the number of votes a person can cast would be proportional to the amount of taxes that the person pays.

"[23] Perkins had houses in Belvedere, Marin County, California,[24] and spent about two months a year at Plumpton Place, his Elizabethan mansion in East Sussex, England, which once belonged to Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page.

[25] In 2011 Perkins acquired a Japanese fisheries training vessel, and had it converted into an "adventure" yacht named Dr. No which is used to carry a "Deep Flight" submarine, manufactured by Hawkes Ocean Technologies, of Richmond California.