T. Boone Pickens, "Oracle of Oil & # 39; and raid company, dies at age 91

T. Boone Pickens, the wildcat "Oracle of Oil", the founder of hedge fund and philanthropist who rewrote the game book for looters of the company, has passed away. He was 91 years old.

He died Wednesday, confirmed a spokesman for CNBC.

Pickens was suffering from a series of strokes and a severe fall in 2017. At the end of 2017, he sold his huge 100-square-kilometer Mesa Vista ranch to Texas Panhandle for $ 250 million. A few months later, he closed his energy hedge fund, BP Capital, to outside investors.

Early in his career at Phillips Petroleum, Pickens then pursued clean energy projects in the fields of wind power and natural gas.

He was also a great Republican political donor, supporting George W. Bush in the Texas Governor and Texas Presidential Races. Dick Cheney and Nancy Reagan were among the guests on his ranch.

He has also donated more than $ 1 billion over the years, including hundreds of millions to his university, Oklahoma State University, who named his renovated stadium in his honor.

Thomas Boone Pickens Jr. was born on May 22, 1928 in Holdenville, Oklahoma. His father was a "man of the land" who sold oil and mineral rights. During the Second World War, his mother was responsible for rationing in his area as head of the local bureau of the awards administration.

As a 12-year-old newspaper delivery man, Pickens started with 28 clients, but by acquiring adjacent routes, he quadrupled his business.

"It was the first time I discovered a rapid expansion by acquisition – a talent that I would perfect later," he said on his website.

His family moved to Amarillo, Texas, where he attended high school. After graduating in Oklahoma A & M (now Oklahoma State) geology in 1951, Pickens began working at Phillips Petroleum.

He left three years later to drill wild cat pits, for the first time Petroleum Exploration, with $ 2,500 in cash and $ 100,000 in loans for projects in the Texas Panhandle, then founding Altair Oil & Gas for the first time. Exploration in western Canada. These companies became Mesa Petroleum, which Pickens published in 1964 and became one of the largest independent oil and gas companies in the United States.

Pickens was one of the thousands of people circulating in the oil states, using public telephone booths, screwing up, examining transactions, selling them, bringing together a drilled crew and well, and luckily exploiting oil or gas. gas, dreaming Daniel Yergin wrote in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book "The Price: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power".

"Pickens went farther than most people, he was smart and clever, with the ability to analyze and solve a problem, step by step."

Five years after the creation of Mesa, Pickens chose Hugoton Production for a hostile takeover, believing that the value of Hugoton's vast gas reserves in Kansas was below its low. Although Mesa is significantly smaller than Hugoton, Pickens has garnered shareholder support by promising better returns and better management.

In the early 1980s, Pickens pushed his corporate raiding skills to a higher level, investing in pieces of undervalued oil companies, trying to take hold of them and making significant profits even though the redemption failed. As described on his website:

After accumulating over 5% of the Cities Service stock over the years, Pickens spearheaded Mesa's attempt in 1982 to acquire the much larger oil company. Cities Service counter-attacked trying to acquire Mesa. A fierce war ensues, Occidental Petroleum finally winning the service of cities for 4 billion dollars. Pickens made another $ 30 million profit on his shares.

Later, Pickens made similar attempts but failed with Phillips Petroleum, Unocal and Gulf Oil. Gulf, one of the oil sector giants of the "Seven Sisters", has defended itself by turning to Chevron as a "white knight". Chevron ended up gobbling up Gulf for $ 13.2 billion, but Pickens reported $ 404 million to Mesa shareholders for their stake in Gulf.

Some have accused Pickens of being a "Chancellor", in which an investor bought large amounts from a company, and then initiated a takeover to raise the price before bailing out. . But Pickens rejected this label. "I have never exchanged mail," he said in an interview published on his website.

But it could not be denied that Pickens' takeover tactics made it a bundle. They also landed on the cover of Time magazine. He was there in 1985, sitting behind a pile of poker chips – blue chips – and holding a hand of cards decorated with oil derricks.

"He was Gordon Gekko before" Wall Street "and his influence was profound," wrote David Gelles of the New York Times in a January 2018 profile, referring to the villain of the 1987 film Oliver Stone.

As a corporate raider, Pickens was one of the leaders in the nascent movement of "shareholder rights". He founded the United Shareholders Association in 1986 with the aim of putting pressure on business leaders "to make businesses the owners, who are the shareholders".

"I've always thought that maintaining the status quo inevitably led to failure," wrote Pickens in a September 2017 column for Forbes. "At the time, the idea that the shareholders were owners of the companies and the management were employees was foreign to that of the big oil companies that would operate rather like empires." I had the firm intention to make things happen.I was a disrupter before the disrupters were calm. "

In 1996, at the age of 68, Pickens sold Mesa but, instead of retiring, he started a new venture, BP Capital Management, a hedge fund focused on the energy sector. (BP represents his name, not British Petroleum.)

"For most people, that would have been the end – for me, it was half-time," he wrote in the Forbes column.

The hedge fund managed billions of dollars for investors until Pickens closed in January 2018 due to declining health.

A year after launching the hedge fund, he created Pickens Fuel Corp. in 1997 to promote natural gas as a substitute for gasoline. In 2007, he spent $ 100 million of his budget to launch the Pickens Plan, a campaign to declare US energy independence.

That same year, the oil company announced plans to build the largest wind farm in the world – 4,000 megawatts – in the Texas Panhandle, but subsequent low natural gas prices helped derail the plans. It has sought to ensure that Congress offers incentives to convert diesel trucks into compressed natural gas.

"I'm all American," said Pickens. "All energy in America beats the import."

During Bush's re-election campaign in 2004, Pickens helped fund the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign, which questioned John Kerry's record during the Vietnam War and helped undermine Democrat in the presidency.

He supported Republican Rudy Giuliani in 2008 and Donald Trump in 2016.

"Yes, I'm for Donald Trump," Pickens said in May 2016. "I'm tired of politicians in the US presidency – let's try something different."

He backed Trump's withdrawal from the Paris climate deal and his attempts to prevent Muslims from entering the United States.

"I forbid Muslims to enter the United States until we can control these people," he said. "Cut them up so that we can know who they are."

In addition to Republican politics, Pickens was a benefactor of many organizations, including the Southwestern Medical Center at the University of Texas at Dallas and the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston ($ 50 million each in 2007). His gift of $ 165 million to the sports department of his OSU helped finance the renovation of the stadium. The school named the Boone Pickens Stadium complex to thank it for what it said was the biggest donation ever made to a university sports department.

On the occasion of Valentine's Day 2014, Mr. Pickens, 85, married Toni Brinker, widow of Dallas restaurateur Norman Brinker, during a small ceremony in the Mesa Vista family chapel . His four previous marriages ended in a divorce. She survives him, as do three daughters and two sons of old marriages.

A few days after Pickens suffered a "fall from Texas" in July 2017, he wrote an article on LinkedIn titled "Accepting (or Embracing) Mortality."

"Now, do not think for a minute that I'm morbid," he wrote. "The truth is, when you're in the oil business as if I've been all my life, you're drilling your fair share of dry holes, but you never lose your optimism." There's a story I'm telling about the geologist who fell down. "When he got past the fifth floor, he said," Up to here, everything is fine. "That's the way to approach life Be the eternal optimist who can not wait to see what the next decade will bring. "