Entrepreneur & Activist
T. Boone Pickens
Notes from Evan Smith
"He’s one of the best-known, best regarded, most resilient, and most iconic Texans of this or any generation — a man who, like Lance and Willie, is on a first-name basis with fans and friends far and wide. A native of Holdenville, Oklahoma, whose entrée into the world of entrepreneurship came at age 11, when he took on a paper route and quickly expanded the number of papers by six times, he got to this great state in true bumper sticker fashion, as fast as he could, when his family moved to Amarillo in the late 1930s. After briefly enrolling at Texas A&M on a basketball scholarship, he transferred to Oklahoma A&M, now his beloved Oklahoma State University, with a degree in geology in 1951. His first job out of school was with Phillips Petroleum, but after only two years as a wildcatter, he founded the company that would become Mesa Petroleum. A quarter-century later, Mesa was one of the largest independent oil companies in the world, and he moved into his intense deal-making phase when he acquired or sought to acquire undervalued companies, some of which were even for sale, and became the world’s leading advocate for shareholder value. In the years since, he has made a fortune, lost it all, made another, lost another — who can keep count? In any case, he’s a multibillionaire today and, almost certainly, even counting whatever losses he’s sustained in our current economic upheaval, one of the richest men in Texas, in America, and anywhere on earth. He has been a wildly successful, larger-than-life, everything’s-bigger-in-Texas kind of player in natural gas, water, and, lately, wind. He has been an active participant in the political process, a reliable and sometimes controversial contributor to causes and candidates of the Republican stripe. He’s been a peerless, role-model philanthropist, having given away $700 million to fund everything from college sports to cancer research. Three times he’s told his story in memoir form: first in 1988, then in 2001, and then, finally, just this fall, in a remarkable book called The First Billion is the Hardest, Reflections on a Life of Comebacks and America’s Energy Future. As to that last part, he has put forth a bold, ambitious, ideology-agnostic plan, the Pickens Plan, that he believes to reduce and ultimately eliminate our dependency on foreign oil — and he’s spent tens of millions of his own money promoting it."- Evan Smith, Texas Monthly Talks, Broadcast 11.13.08
