I am writing from the T. Boone Pickens hospice waiting for my wife’s cousin to die of cancer. It is a pleasant place, new, with pale green paint and subway tile backsplashes. The decorations are amorphic and modern, designed to fade into the background.
The rooms are large enough for families to gather and the doors are big enough that you can push the bed outside and rest under the trees with a view of a fountain.
Hospices are a place for good in the world and I said out loud to the young Uber driver who drove us from Dallas-Ft. Worth Airport “ Hey – T. Boone Pickens donated this place.”
“Who.” He replied.
Who indeed. T. Boone Pickens was born and bred an oil man. His father worked as an oil and mineral landman which meant he leased rights from the landowners. His mother ran the local Office of Price Administration during WWII which rationed gasoline in three counties near Holdenville, Oklahoma.
Boone got his first job at 12 delivering newspapers and he credited learning how to take over companies to that route – which he increased from 28 papers to 156. He went on to graduate from what is now Oklahoma State University with a degree in Geology and went to work for Phillips Petroleum. From there he became a wildcatter and founder of Mesa Petroleum.
Pickens invented the royalty trust corporate structure for Mesa, designed to shield the company and its shareholders from certain taxes. It also gave a big upfront payday which he put to work…
Starting in 1981 Pickens went on to acquire a host of oil companies including Gulf Petroleum. That megadeal landed him on the cover of Time Magazine in 1985 when it was still a big deal and a quality weekly publication.
Pickens was a famous corporate raider in the era of corporate raids. His hedge fund would buy up shares in a company, announce a hostile takeover which forced the company to buy back its own shares thereby jacking up the price. He would then sell the sales at a profit.
For some reason the public at large felt that this was morally wrong, especially as the majority of the takeover attempts didn’t actually “succeed.” Eventually the government changed the rules to include a 50% excise tax which ended the game.
I remember T. Boone Pickens mostly from when he appeared on the financial channels to talk about oil or politics. At one point, around 2007 or so, he started pushing a massive plan to build a green solar and wind turbine infrastructure in the Texas panhandle. After all, it was sunny and windy and the price of land was cheap.
According to Wikipedia:
“ On August 16, 2007, Pickens’ Mesa Power announced that it had filed documents with the state of Texas to add four gigawatts of electricity to the state grid. The filing with the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) projected that the project would be completed in 2011 and would include up to 2,700 turbines on up to 200,000 acres (810 km2) in Roberts and adjacent counties in the Texas Panhandle.”
In 2008 Pickens abandoned the wind part of his “Pickens Plan” as he determined it would cost too much to transmit the energy from the Texas outback to city centers where it was needed. Furthermore, the discovery of cheap natural gas through fracking meant that his compressed natural gas truck fleet idea was more promising.
Nothing much came of the Pickens Plan. He was too early. In 2008 he was worth $3 billion according to Forbes. Over the next decade he gave away most of his wealth until in 2016 he was reported to have a net worth of $500 million. T. Boone passed in 2019.
He gave to almost everyone including OSU, cancer research and the T. Boone Pickens Hospice from which I am writing this. He was also way ahead of the game, Texas now produces more energy from solar and wind than any other state.
Boone Pickens has a complex legacy from an oil man to a corporate raider. Like many billionaires he had the vision to exploit a loophole before they changed the rules a few times to close it. He gave billions to good causes and persuaded many people that a mix of energy sources was the way to go.
Mesa Petroleum eventually merged and mutated into what is now Pioneer Natural Resources a private company based out of Irving, Texas.
All the best,
Christian DeHaemer
Outsider Club
P.S. On Wednesday I am flying out to an oil patch in Colorado. I’ll be touring an oil rig located at a drill site called Shelduck South. The site is run by Prairie Operating Co. (PROP) a small, $115 million dollar oil company looking to hit a big one. I’ll tell you more about it later.
Check out the amazing T. Boone Pickens’ ranch:
https://www.realtor.com/news/celebrity-real-estate/t-boone-pickens-250m-ranch/
This makes me think that data centers will end up in the panhandle, if they aren’t already:
https://www.outsiderclub.com/huge-nuclear-deal/
Regarding the rate cut:
https://www.outsiderclub.com/red-hot-fomo-coming-through/
