Oil company raider was dubbed the most hated man in corporate America

Ashrewd, publicity-savvy Texas oil tycoon once dubbed by Fortune magazine as ‘‘the most hated man in corporate America’’, T Boone Pickens preferred to present himself as a David battling oil Goliaths.

Pickens – a distant relative of frontiersman Daniel Boone – was one of a handful of fearsome, high-stakes corporate raiders who helped define the Reagan-era boardroom scene and who set a raucous tone at shareholder meetings. He targeted companies – mostly oil firms – he considered undervalued, and bought conspicuous chunks of stock in the expectation that management, to keep control of the business, would pay a premium to buy it back.

Critics called this stratagem ‘‘greenmail’’ and condemned it for ignoring the interests of employees, customers and management.

He became a ubiquitous presence in the media, which could not get enough of his folksy takedowns of corporate chiefs as greedy ignoramuses. Entrenched executives, he said, ‘‘who themselves own few shares of their companies, have no more feeling for the average stockholder than they do for baboons in Africa’’. He disputed his reputation as a ‘‘raider,’’ describing himself as an activist who ‘‘changed the value’’ of companies led by hapless executives.

‘‘When we started buying stock in Gulf Oil, it was $33,’’ he once told Playboy. ‘‘It had been $33 for 10 years. When we sold our shares back, it was $80 a share. At $40, the market cap was $6 billion. At $80, it was $13b.’’ (Pickens’ company made a profit of $760m.)

A prosperous wildcatter in his 20s, he spent much of his career as president and board chairman of Mesa Petroleum, which he expanded into a regional behemoth through acquisitions before tasting the potential for even bigger revenue streams by forcing companies to pay him to go away.

From 1983 through 1985, he launched three of the most daring takeover bids in US corporate history, for Gulf Oil, Phillips Petroleum and Unocal. In the process, he became one of the highest-paid executives in the country, with $20m in salary and deferred compensation.

Shareholders, many of them pensioners and retirees, showered him with fan mail. The idea that shareholder rights are best upheld by high stock prices is now widely accepted in discussions of corporate governance.

Thomas Boone Pickens Jr was born in Holdenville, Oklahoma, a town of 3000 surrounded by oil wells. His father was a lawyer for Phillips Petroleum who bet his family’s modest wealth on oil-lease deals but whose efforts never amounted to a big payoff. He was also a gambler who often played poker until dawn.

Pickens’ mother was the fiscal disciplinarian.

‘‘I was very fortunate in my gene mix,’’ he told Time magazine. ‘‘The gambling instincts I inherited from my father were matched by my mother’s gift for analysis.’’

Pickens developed an early taste for deals when he started delivering newspapers, initially to 28 addresses. He expanded his operation by taking over other boys’ routes until he was delivering 155 papers.

He graduated from Oklahoma State University with a degree in petroleum geology, and started work as a well-site geologist for Phillips. Frustrated by the stodgy corporate culture, he quit in 1955 to set out as a wildcatter.

With two partners, he started Amarillo-based Petroleum Exploration. In 1964, he took the company public as Mesa Petroleum and soon realised that, however much money could be had in exploration, even more could potentially be found in acquisition.

He was an early exponent of the peak oil theory, which held that the world would soon run out of oil to pump. The rise of fracking, which made hard-to-reach oil accessible, upended the theory.

He began to advocate for an energy policy that he said would wean the United States

from its dependence on foreign oil – and that would also benefit companies in which Pickens had a financial stake. He called natural gas produced in North America a ‘‘patriotic’’ fuel source and promoted his plan by appearing in television commercials.

Pickens was portrayed in profiles as a workaholic and an impatient, often caustic husband and father. His marriages to Lynn O’Brien, with whom he had four children, Beatrice Carr, Nelda Cain, Madeleine Paulson and Toni Brinker ended in divorce.

Survivors include four children from his first marriage; a stepdaughter he adopted during his second marriage; 11 grandchildren; and many great-grandchildren.

Pickens was a major donor to the Republican Party and especially close to the Bush political dynasty. The Chronicle of Philanthropy reported that he donated $7m to aid Hurricane Katrina victims, and he bequeathed $500m to Oklahoma State University, which named its football stadium after him.

He titled his 2008 memoir The First Billion Is the Hardest, and continued to relish a life devoted to risk. In 2014, a year after he fell off the Forbes list of 400 wealthiest Americans, the then-85-year-old told the magazine: ‘‘I know I can make it all back – if I have enough time.’’

At 85, he fell off the list of 400 richest Americans. ‘‘I know I can make it all back – if I have enough time,’’ he said.