After graduating from France's Ecole Polytechnique, he did not follow 80% of his classmates into a government job.

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He was a conscientious, if not particularly likeable, army officer, and a graduate of Polytechnique, the highly competitive French engineering school.

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His family moved to Lebanon when he was a toddler, and he later studied engineering at Ecole Polytechnique and Ecole des Mines de Paris in France, where he is a citizen.

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Of the top jobs in both the public and the private sector, almost all are held by graduates of the Ecole Nationale d'Administration or the Ecole Polytechnique, a collective total of fewer than 400 a year who will spend the rest of their lives giving each other jobs.

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