Billionaire... Magnate... Corporate Raider... Dead

T Boone Pickens passed away yesterday at the sensible age of 91 years old, and I think he had the type of life that is worth some reflection.

For those who never heard of T… Or maybe I should call him Boone… Or perhaps I should call him Pickens. Either way, T Boone Pickens was a billionaire oil magnate and corporate raider. Which is pretty fucking extraordinary, to begin with.

There is a large handful of people reading this blog right now, and I guarantee none of you are billionaires, magnates, nor raiders.

Which isn’t a dig on my precious readers. I, myself, am barely a thousandaire. I am more stagnant than magnate. And the last thing I raided was my fridge.

I searched the history of this site to see if anyone has ever written about T-Boone in the past, and the only result was Big Cat posting a screengrab of a tweet Pickens sent in response to Darren Rovell sometime back in 2013.

T Boone’s net worth began to diminish years prior for a host of reasons, and I assume Rovell thought it would be worth mentioning once Picken’s fortune officially dwindled below a billion dollars, so he tweeted out "Forbes says that Oklahoma State booster T Boone Pickens is no longer a billionaire."

In response to this seemingly random and semi-informative Rovell tweet, T replied thusly…

I am not overly familiar with Rovell or his work, but I feel comfortable delivering a belated "IN YOUR FACE, Darren!" on behalf of the then 85-year-old almost-billionaire.

Anyhoo, that little blog is why I mentioned to Big Cat that I was going to write about Pickens' passing unless he wanted first dibs.  I know Dan blogs even less than I do, but I still know my place in the Barstool universe, so I would've been more than happy to refrain from any Boone blogging if Dan felt an emotional and literary connection to the deceased.

Big Cat quickly informed me he did not give a fuck about Mr. Pickens (and he did so in a tone that implied Dan may have actually been happy Pickens was dead for some reason*), so I am writing this now as a result.

I cut and pasted this out of the LA Times:

An only child who grew up in a small railroad town in Oklahoma, Pickens followed his father into the oil and gas business. After just three years, he formed his own company and built a reputation as a maverick, unafraid to compete against oil-industry giants.

In the 1980s, Pickens switched from drilling for oil to plumbing for riches on Wall Street. He led bids to take over big oil companies including Gulf, Phillips, and Unocal, castigating their executives as looking out only for themselves while ignoring the shareholders.

Even when Pickens and other so-called corporate raiders failed to gain control of their targets, they scored huge payoffs by selling their shares back to the company and dropping their hostile takeover bids.  

In 1984, Mesa Petroleum made a profit of more than $500 million from a hostile bid for Gulf Corp., then the fifth-largest oil company in the United States, when Gulf maneuvered to sell itself instead to Chevron. Before that, Pickens earned $31.5 million by driving Cities Service into the arms of Occidental Petroleum.

Although only 5-foot-8, Pickens was a star guard on his high school basketball team in Amarillo, Texas, and earned a sports scholarship to Texas A&M University. He lost the scholarship when he broke an elbow, and he transferred to Oklahoma A&M, now Oklahoma State.

Pickens made huge donations to his alma mater, Oklahoma State University — the football stadium bears his name, and he gave $100 million for endowed faculty positions.

In 2007, Forbes magazine estimated Pickens’ net worth at $3 billion. He eventually slid below $1 billion and off the magazine’s list of wealthiest Americans. In 2016, the magazine put his worth at $500 million.

I don't have much to add to that little bio except the fact he bitched Drake back in 2012…

I did some business with Pickens when I was a trader.  The bulk of my mediocre career I spent trading Utilities and T Boone's interest outside of oil stocks was renewable energy… A subsector that fell under my pad.  I distinctly remember the instructions attached to his orders were always to "be aggressive", which is a godsend for a trader who is usually weighted down with VWAP benchmarks or capital concerns.

It's probably why I remember him fondly, and why I am not going to mention his personal lowlights in this blog (and there were many).  Every time I executed an order for Mr. Pickens (either directly or indirectly), it was refreshingly "all gas and no brakes", and that was seemingly the way he lived his life.

At one point during a 2002 interview with FORTUNE Magazine, the author asked Pickens if he had plans to make smaller investments as he got older.  To which he replied, "At my age, you don't have time to plant small trees."  I admired that quote back then, and I try to internalize that quote 17 years later, as I slowly approach death.

Rest in peace, Mr. Pickens… Take a report.

-Large

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• I mentioned above that Dan seemed almost happy about Pickens' death, and I meant it.  I found it so unnerving that I actually took the time to give Dan some of the details about his life that I just wrote about above.  I did that just to see if I could humanize the man that Big Cat obviously wanted dead.

After I finished my long-winded description of Pickens' corporate takeover schemes, Dan casually said, "That's great Large, but I wasn't really listening… Is his death worth one or two games?"

That's when I realized that Dan wasn't happy about the timely passing of T Boone at all (I also realized Dan didn't give a fuck about financial chit-chat)… This degenerate only wanted to know if I thought the impact of such a huge donor to OK State's program would provide enough motivation for their football team to cover the spread in his honor for just the next game (Saturday at Tulsa), or perhaps the next TWO games (Tulsa and then vs #12 Texas on 9/21)?

So I defeatedly said, "Probably 2 games, Dan.", and regretfully walked away.

Dan's an asshole.

TAR

-L

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The next edition of ExtraLarge dropping on BarstoolGOLD tomorrow gives you some keen insight into a child's genitals… Enjoy.

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