T. Boone Pickens on Making His First Billion Dollars: Capital Management Investment Firm (2008)

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Thomas Boone Pickens, Jr. (born May 22, 1928), known as T. Boone Pickens, is an American business magnate and financier. Pickens chairs the hedge fund BP Capital Management. He was a well-known takeover operator and corporate raider during the 1980s. As of September 2014, Pickens has a net worth of $1 billion. Pickens was born in Holdenville, Oklahoma, the son of Grace (née Molonson) and Thomas Boone Pickens. His father worked as an oil and mineral landman (rights leaser). During World War II, his mother ran the local Office of Price Administration, rationing gasoline and other goods in three counties.[2] Pickens was the first child born via Caesarean section in the history of Holdenville hospital.[3] At age 12, Pickens delivered newspapers. He quickly expanded his paper route from 28 papers to 156.[4] Pickens later cited his boyhood job as an early introduction to "expanding quickly by acquisition", a business practice he favored later in life.[4] When the oil boom in Oklahoma ended in the late 1930s, Pickens' family moved to Amarillo, Texas.[4] Pickens never served in the military[4] but instead attended Texas A&M; on a basketball scholarship, but he lost the scholarship[4] and transferred to Oklahoma A&M; (now Oklahoma State University), where he majored in geology. He is a member of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon Fraternity. He graduated from Oklahoma A&M; with a degree in geology in 1951. Following his graduation, Pickens was employed by Phillips Petroleum. He worked for Phillips until 1954.[5] In 1956, following his period as a wildcatter, he founded the company that would later become Mesa Petroleum.[5] By 1981, Mesa had grown into one of the largest independent oil companies in the world. Pickens led Mesa's first major acquisition, a takeover of the Hugoton Production Company, which was 30 times the size of Mesa.[6] He then shifted his focus to acquiring other oil and gas companies by making solicited and unsolicited buyout bids and other merger and acquisition activity. Pickens' corporate acquisitions made him a celebrity during the 1980s, an era of vigorous and extensively reported takeover activity. His most publicized deals included attempted buyouts of Cities Service, Gulf Oil, Phillips Petroleum, and Unocal.[7] It was during this period that Pickens led Mesa's successful acquisitions of Pioneer Petroleum and the mid-continent assets of Tenneco. These as well as other deals placed Pickens at the center of controversy during the 1980s. His celebrity rose so quickly after the Gulf Oil takeover bid that Time magazine[8] put Pickens on the cover for the March 1985 issue. He briefly considered running for president in the 1988 elections.[9] During this period, he was often characterized as a corporate raider and greenmailer. This is due to the fact that many of his deals were not completed, although Pickens and the shareholders he represented received substantial profits through the eventual sale of their stock as a result. His later takeover targets included Newmont Mining, a New York-based firm, Diamond Shamrock, and Koito Mfg., Ltd., a Japanese auto-parts manufacturer, making substantial gains in the process.[10] He was also involved in the creation of the United Shareholders Association (USA), which from 1986–1993 attempted to influence the governance of several large companies. After nearly two years of periodic hearing and debate, in July 1998 the Securities and Exchange Commission voted 4–1 to approve a one-share, one-vote rule, a primary USA objective. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._Boone_Pickens