T, Boone Pickens - # 217

Obituary: T. Boone Pickens, 1928-2019

He was number 217 on the list.

The death last week of 91-year-old T. Boone Pickens, the southwest oilman, corporate raider, hedge funder, and philanthropist, reminds us that business tycoons in America used to be more interesting characters than they are now.

The late 20th century was full of them: 1950s whiz-kid technocrats, conglomerate kings of the 1960s, and corporate raiders and junk bond warriors of the 1980s — that's where Pickens comes in — were very different people from the current crop of dot-com moguls and programmers who camp at the heights of American capitalism. Earnest, reclusive, tight-lipped, and dressed for weekends, equally devoted to amassing more billions while saving the world, the princes of Silicon Valley would scarcely be recognized in public without their phalanx of bodyguards and press agents.

That could hardly be said of Pickens. The handsome, not-especially-tall Texan was affable, approachable, and possessed that rarest of celebrity features: a self-deprecating sense of humor. Married and divorced five times, the recent decline in his health, he explained, was accelerated by a "Texas-sized fall."

He seemed to enjoy making money for the sake of making money, and he didn't appear overly concerned about his legacy. His philanthropies were equally institutional and political. Having helped to finance the Swift Vote Veterans for Truth campaign against Sen. John Kerry’s presidential candidacy in 2004, he offered to work with Kerry six years later in support of alternative energy sources. "That's a long time ago," he told the New York Times. "When you're old, you can't remember that far back."

Like many architects of wealth, Pickens seems to have been propelled by boredom as much as restlessness. The son of a lawyer for Phillips Petroleum, he earned a degree in geology at Oklahoma State and went to work in search of resources for his father's old employer. It didn’t take the young Pickens too long to grasp that it was more profitable to search for oil on his own than as a corporate employee. With a $2,500 stake, he founded his own oil and natural gas wildcatting firm in 1956, which was quickly successful and went public eight years later as the Mesa Petroleum Company.

By the 1970s and early ’80s, thwarted in his efforts to broaden his business by purchasing larger energy companies, he settled on a novel, and distinctly unfriendly, tactic. Persuaded that the big oil concerns were poorly run by self-protective management and complacent boards, he deployed the resources of Mesa to purchase large blocs of stock to gain control of, or at least earn a voice in, corporate governance. This, in turn, prompted his takeover targets, including Gulf Oil, Unocal, Cities Service, and Phillips, to buy back his shares at premium prices to fend off Pickens’ takeover bids.

This strategy of "greenmail" failed in the sense that he never acquired any of his targets, although Gulf was forced to defend itself by merging with Chevron Corporation. But Pickens made billions in the process and became something of a folk hero with his populist notion that corporate boardrooms were dedicated largely to preserving their power at the expense of investors and consumers.

Whether he intended to or not, Pickens revolutionized corporate behavior to this day, forcing boards and executives alike to treat "shareholder value" as their prime responsibility. As with many reforms, of course, Pickens' sword was double-edged: Companies tend to concentrate on short-term goals pleasing to shareholders at the expense of long-range planning and investment. But corporate culture has benefited as well. Managers and boards take their duties seriously, owners of stock are seriously enriched, and the country's economy keeps growing.

For his part, after shaking up corporate America, Pickens himself was shaken by irony. Having overextended his own company in expanding its natural gas production, he lost control of Mesa in 1996 but then recouped his fortunes by founding a profitable hedge fund and devoting his old age to a suitably brash campaign (the "Pickens Plan") for American energy self-sufficiency. Wall Street's verdict on that one remains unclear.

Pickens had been battling a series of strokes and head injuries as a result of a fall he took in 2017, according to his spokesman, Jay Rosser.

Pickens' penchant for philanthropy and love for Oklahoma State football dovetailed in 2006 when he donated $165 million to the athletic program, the largest single gift in NCAA history.

"The greatest Cowboy of them all has taken his last ride," athletic director Mike Holder said in a statement. "It will never be the same again. We could never thank him enough for all that he did for our university. He gave us everything he had -- and all that he asked in return was that we play by the rules and dream big. He was living proof that anything is possible if you're wearing orange. 'Great ride Cowboy, great ride!'"

Pickens graduated from Oklahoma State in 1951 with a degree in geology when the university still went by Oklahoma A&M.