Thomas Boone Pickens Jr. (May 22, 1928 – September 11, 2019) was an American business magnate and financier. Pickens chaired the hedge fund BP Capital Management. He was a well-known takeover operator and corporate raider during the 1980s. Later in life, he was a prominent conservative activist and philanthropist. At the time of Pickens' death in 2019, his net worth stood at $500 million, after he had given away more than $1 billion to various philanthropic causes.
Early life Pickens was born in Holdenville, Oklahoma, the son of Grace Marcaline (née Molonson), and Thomas Boone Sibley Pickens. His father worked as an oil and mineral landman (rights leaser). During World War II, his mother ran the local Office of Price Administration, rationing gasoline and other goods in three counties. Pickens was the first child born via Caesarean section in the history of Holdenville hospital. His great-great-grandfather was politician Ezekiel Pickens, who was Lieutenant Governor of South Carolina. At age 12, Pickens delivered newspapers. He quickly expanded his paper route from 28 papers to 156. Pickens later cited his boyhood job as an early introduction to "expanding quickly by acquisition", a business practice he favored later in life. When the oil boom in Oklahoma ended in the late 1930s, Pickens' family moved to Amarillo, Texas. Pickens attended Texas A&M on a basketball scholarship, but was cut from the team and lost the scholarship and transferred to Oklahoma A&M (now Oklahoma State University), where he majored in geology. He was a member of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity. He graduated from Oklahoma A&M with a degree in geology in 1951. Following his graduation, Pickens was employed by Phillips Petroleum. He worked for Phillips until 1954. In 1956, following his period as a wildcatter, he founded the company that would later become Mesa Petroleum.
Career By 1981, Mesa had grown into one of the largest independent oil companies in the world. Pickens led Mesa's first major acquisition, a takeover of the Hugoton Production Company, which was 30 times the size of Mesa. He then shifted his focus to acquiring other oil and gas companies by making solicited and unsolicited buyout bids and other merger and acquisition activity. Pickens' corporate acquisitions made him well known during the 1980s, an era of extensive takeover activity. His most publicized deals included attempted buyouts of Cities Service, Gulf Oil, Phillips Petroleum and Unocal. During that period Pickens led two Mesa successful acquisitions of Pioneer Petroleum and the mid-continent assets of Tenneco. Time magazine put him on the cover for the March 1985 issue when Mesa took over Gulf Oil. He considered running for president in the 1988 elections. During this period, he was characterized as a corporate raider and greenmailer. This is due to the fact that many of his deals were not completed, although Pickens and the shareholders he represented received substantial profits through the eventual sale of their stock as a result. His later takeover targets included Newmont, a New York-based firm, Diamond Shamrock, and Koito Manufacturing, a Japanese auto-parts manufacturer, making substantial gains in the process. He was also involved in the creation of the United Shareholders Association (USA), which from 1986 to 1993 attempted to influence the governance of several large companies. After nearly two years of periodic hearing and debate, in July 1998 the Securities and Exchange Commission voted 4–1 to approve a one-share, one-vote rule, a primary USA objective. Pickens chaired the Board of Regents of West Texas State University (now West Texas A&M University) in Canyon. He organized a campaign in the mid-1980s against the Amarillo Globe-News newspaper, for what he claimed was inaccurate reporting about his deals and Mesa. Pickens' attempts to have the paper change its editorial policy failed. Shortly thereafter, in 1989, Pickens and Mesa moved to a suburb of Dallas. In 1996, Mesa was in deep financial trouble and was sold to financier Richard Rainwater. Darla Moore, Rainwater's wife, had Pickens removed from the company. Mesa merged with Parker & Parsley Petroleum in 1997 to form Pioneer Natural Resources. In 1997, Pickens founded BP Capital Management (then called BP Energy Fund) – the initials standing for "Boone Pickens" and not related to BP. In 2006, Pickens earned $990 million from his equity in the two funds and $120 million from his share of the 20% fees applied to fund profits. In 2007, Pickens earned $2.7 billion, as BP Capital Equity Fund, grew by 24% after fees, and the then $590 million Capital Commodity fund grew 40%, thanks to, among others, large positions in the stocks of Suncor Energy, ExxonMobil and Occidental Petroleum. Once his health started declining, he closed the company in 2018. In 2009, Pickens' received The Franklin Institute "Bower" Award for Business Leadership for 50 years of visionary leadership in oil and other types of energy production, including domestic renewable energy, and for his philanthropic leadership contributing to education, medical research, and wildlife conservation.
Natural gas In his 2008 book, The First Billion Is the Hardest, Pickens noted a belief in the peak oil theory. He later altered that position, noting technical achievements of the domestic oil and natural gas industries in using horizontal drilling and fracking to unlock shale oil and gas reserves. He called for the construction of more nuclear power plants, the use of natural gas to power the country's transportation systems, and the promotion of alternative energy. Pickens's involvement with the natural gas fueling campaign was long-running. He formed Pickens Fuel Corporation in 1997 and began promoting natural gas as the best vehicular fuel alternative. Reincorporated as Clean Energy Fuels Corporation in 2001, the company now owns and operates natural gas fueling stations from British Columbia to the Mexico–U.S. border.
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
