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| T. Boone Pickens passed away in Texas. |
The "Oracle of Oil" has passed away.
T. Boone Pickens, a hedge fund founder, philanthropist and oil baron who rewrote the book on corporate raiders passed away at the age of 91.
He passed away of natural causes.
Pickens had been suffering from declining health including a serious fall and a debilitating stroke.
In late 2017, he had put his Mesa Vista Ranch in the Texas panhandle up for sales. He also closed his hedge fund company BP Capital, to outside investors.
CNBC notes that Pickens started a career with Phillips Petroleum. He would later find ways to invest in wind power and natural gas.
He was a big time donor. He was the big shadowy type of billionaire who helped George W. Bush and Dick Cheney succeed in their two disastrous terms. He had lots of ties to Republican leaders, political agitators and folks in the news.
He put up funds to help the Oklahoma Stae University. That was Cowboy Nation and he was a major backer in their football stadium and athletics programs.
Thomas Boone Pickens Jr. was born May 22, 1928, in Holdenville, Oklahoma. His father was a "landman," who sold oil and mineral rights. During World War II, his mother was in charge of rationing in her region as head of the local Office of Price Administration.
As a 12-year-old paperboy, Pickens started out with 28 customers, but by acquiring adjacent routes one at a time he quadrupled his business.
"That was my first introduction to expanding quickly by acquisition — a talent I would perfect in my later years," he recalled on his website.
His family moved to Amarillo, Texas, where he attended high school. After graduating in 1951 from Oklahoma A&M (now Oklahoma State) with a degree in geology, Pickens started working at Phillips Petroleum.
He left three years later to drill wildcat wells, first founding Petroleum Exploration with $2,500 in cash and $100,000 in borrowed money for projects in the Texas Panhandle, and later establishing Altair Oil & Gas for exploration in western Canada. The companies became Mesa Petroleum, which Pickens took public in 1964 and became one of the largest independent oil and gas companies in the United States.
During Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign, Pickens helped finance the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” campaign that questioned John Kerry’s Vietnam War record and helped undermine the Democrat’s presidential bid.
He backed Republican Rudy Giuliani in 2008 and Donald Trump in 2016.
“Yes, I’m for Donald Trump,” Pickens declared in May 2016. “I’m tired of having politicians as president of the U.S. Let’s try something different.”
He supported Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris climate accord and his attempts to restrict visitors from predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States.
“I’d cut off the Muslims from coming into the United States until we can vet these people,” he said. “Cut them off until we can figure out who they are.”
Aside from Republican politics, Pickens was a benefactor of numerous organizations, including the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas and the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston ($50 million each in 2007). His $165 million donation to his OSU’s athletic department helped fund the stadium renovation. The school named the complex Boone Pickens Stadium to thank him for what it said was the largest single donation ever to any university athletic department.
On Valentine’s Day 2014, the 85-year-old Pickens married Toni Brinker, widow of Dallas restaurateur Norman Brinker, in a small ceremony in the Mesa Vista family chapel. His four previous marriages ended in divorce. She survives him, as do three daughters and two sons from previous marriages.
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