Colorful tycoon got rich in oil before mining Wall St.
OKLAHOMA CITY — T. Boone Pickens, a brash and quotable oil tycoon who grew even wealthier through corporate takeover attempts, died Wednesday in Dallas. He was 91.
Pickens was surrounded by friends and family when he died of natural causes under hospice care at his home, spokesman Jay Rosser said. Pickens suffered a series of strokes in 2017 and was hospitalized that July after what he called a “Texas-sized fall.”
An only child who grew up in a small railroad town in Oklahoma, Pickens followed his father into the oil and gas business. After just three years, he formed his own company and built a reputation as a maverick, unafraid to compete against oilindustry giants.
In the 1980s, Pickens switched from drilling for oil to plumbing for riches on Wall Street. He led bids to take over big oil companies including Gulf, Phillips and Unocal, castigating their executives as looking out only for themselves while ignoring the shareholders.
Even when Pickens and other so-called corporate raiders failed to gain control of their targets, they scored huge payoffs by selling their shares back to the company and dropping their hostile takeover bids.
Later in his career, Pickens championed renewable energy including wind power. He argued that the U.S. needed to reduce its dependence on foreign oil.
“I’ve been an oilman all my life, but this is one emergency we can’t drill our way out of,” he said in 2009.
Pickens couldn’t duplicate his oil riches in renewable energy. In 2009, he scrapped plans for a huge Texas wind farm after running into difficulty getting transmission lines approved, and eventually his renewables business failed.
“It doesn’t mean that wind is dead,” Pickens said at the time. “It just means we got a little bit too quick off the blocks.”
In 2007, Forbes magazine estimated Pickens’ net worth at $3 billion. He eventually slid off the magazine’s list of wealthiest Americans. In 2016, the magazine put his worth at $500 million.
Besides his peripatetic business and political interests, Pickens made huge donations to his alma mater, Oklahoma State University — the football stadium bears his name, and he gave $100 million for endowed faculty positions.
“I firmly believe one of the reasons I was put on this Earth was to make money and be generous with it,” he said on his website.
Pickens was born in 1928 in Holdenville, Oklahoma. His father was a landman, someone who secures mineral-rights leases for oil and gas drilling. His mother ran a government office that handled gasoline-rationing coupons for a three-county area during World War II.
Although only 5-foot-8, Pickens was a star guard on his high school basketball team in Amarillo, Texas, and earned a sports scholarship to Texas A&M University. He lost the scholarship when he broke an elbow, and he transferred to Oklahoma A&M, now Oklahoma State.
After graduating with a degree in geology, he joined Phillips Petroleum Co., where his father, T. Boone Pickens Sr., was working.
After three years, he borrowed some money and found two investors to start his own business, called Petroleum Exploration. That was a predecessor to Mesa Petroleum, an oil and gas company in Amarillo, which Pickens took public in 1964.
Pickens’ star faded in the 1990s. He lost control of Mesa, and his bullishness on natural gas prices turned out to be a costly mistake.
There were difficult times in his personal life. In 2005, one of his sons, Michael, was arrested on securities fraud charges — he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years’ probation and ordered to repay $1.2 million.
After his fall in July 2017, Pickens wrote on Linkedin that he was still mentally strong, but “I clearly am in the fourth quarter.”