In , he struck out on his own. Mr Pickens wrote multiple books, including "The First Billion is the Hardest" and maintained an active Twitter presence until just days before his death, where he shared articles and sometimes his so-called Boone-isms, such as, "A fool with a plan can beat a genius with no plan.
Image source, Getty Images. Boone Pickens boonepickens September 11, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. View original tweet on Twitter. As a teen, he expanded his newspaper route by acquiring surrounding routes, one by one. This was during the Depression. But his proudest accomplishment was his ability to throw from either hand. Pickens once told The Dallas Morning News that his father gave him the best piece of advice: A fool with a plan can beat a genius with no plan.
That's when he sprung that line on me," he said in After graduation, he worked as a geologist for Phillips Petroleum for three years but got crosswise with the oil company's bureaucracy. Pickens built Mesa into one of America's largest independent natural gas and oil companies.
In , Pickens was pushed out of Mesa in a messy power play after having served nearly four decades at its helm. Boone Pickens at his ranch northeast of Amarillo.
Pickens was a bit of a wildcatter when it came to his personal life, too. All five of his marriages ended in divorce. His most recent, to Toni Chapman Brinker, widow of legendary Dallas restaurateur Norman Brinker, ended in after less than four years.
In recent years, Pickens rekindled his relationship with his third wife, Nelda Pickens. Pickens took politics personally, mostly with a Republican point of view. Pickens' most notorious political foray was as a leader of the Swift Boat attacks — along with fellow Dallas billionaires Sam Wyly and the late Harold Simmons — against Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry in , which was discredited as a smear campaign.
Pickens would later publicly endorse climate-change legislation authored by Kerry, but he never really apologized for his participation in Swift Boat. When BP Capital's stock crashed along with oil and gas commodities in , Pickens shored up his commitment to OSU with cash from his pocket. Sure, everybody is. But in the worst of times, that's when he stood tallest," Holder said.
After his big fall in , Pickens reflected on his life on LinkedIn in what was his own eulogy of sorts. Last year I opened a speech with this: 'The other day, I turned 88 and realized my life was half over. But things have changed for me since the strokes. I clearly am in the fourth quarter, and the clock is ticking and my health is in decline, much as it is with others in my stage of life.
In , he donated it and moved it to his alma mater, Oklahoma State University in Stillwater. The ranch took nearly 10 years to build, including the stone aqueduct shown in the background. Truth is, when you're in the oil business like I've been all my life, you drill your fair share of dry holes, but you never lose your optimism. When he blew past the fifth floor, he thought to himself, 'So far so good.
Be the eternal optimist who is excited to see what the next decade will bring I'm fond of 'Boone-isms. You must be willing to fire. Work hard. Stay late. Work eight hours and sleep eight hours, and make sure they are not the same eight hours. They rode that monster, and got thrown some, but Big Oil was never the same again.
Cities Service counterattacked by trying to acquire Mesa. Gulf, one of the "Seven Sister" oil giants, defended itself by turning to Chevron as its "white knight. Some accused Pickens of being a "greenmailer," in which an investor purchases large amounts of a company, then launches a takeover to run up the price before bailing out.
But Pickens rejected that label. But there was no arguing that Pickens' takeover tactics made him a bundle. They also landed him on the cover of Time magazine. There he was in , sitting behind a pile of poker chips — blue chips — and holding a hand of cards decorated by oil derricks. As a corporate raider, Pickens was a leader of the budding "shareholders rights" movement. He founded the United Shareholders Association in to pressure corporate leaders "to give the companies back to the owners, which are the shareholders.
I was hell-bent on shaking things up. I was a disrupter before disrupters were cool. In , at age 68, Pickens sold Mesa, but rather than retire, he started a new business, BP Capital Management, a hedge fund focusing on the energy industry. BP stands for his name, not British Petroleum. For me, it was halftime," he wrote in the Forbes column. Pickens suffered a series of strokes in and was hospitalized that July after what he called a "Texas-sized fall.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott called Pickens "a passionate man who always stood by his principles on his path to success. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said Pickens "lived a life marked with kindness and generosity. Born in Holdenville, Okla. Boone Pickens Sr.
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