T. Boone Pickens Net Worth & Biography

T. Boone Pickens Net Worth & Biography

T. Boone Pickens was an American business tycoon and financier who started the Mesa Petroleum Company with an investment of $2,500 and built it into the biggest independent oil and gas company in the United States. Then he shook corporate America with a number of hostile takeover attempts that made him recognizable as a corporate raider. His ideas about corporate restructuring, and the strategies he used for achieving them, were debatable during the 1980s, but have now become standard procedure in executive suites. This article sheds light on T. Boone Pickens’ biography and success story. Every desirable detail concerning Mr. Pickens, who Fortune magazine described as “the most hated man in America” in the 80s, has been included herein.

Early Life: Childhood, Education

Thomas Boone Pickens Jr. was born in Holdenville, Oklahoma, United States, on May 22, 1928. He was the only child of his parents, Thomas Boone and Grace Pickens.

His father was an oil company lawyer who had a distant kinship to Daniel Boone. On the other hand, his mother managed the Office of Price Administration (OPA) for three counties in Oklahoma during World War II. The Office of Price Administration was responsible for rationing gas and other merchandise that were in short supply during the war.

Pickens’ parents and his grandmother, along with his aunt who lived next door, inculcated in the young boy, old-fashioned values that eventually helped him live his life. They encouraged him to work hard and be productive with his time and money. During his teenage days, Pickens, who was known as “Boone”, spent his spare time with sports, Boy Scout activities, clarinet practice, and a newspaper route.

In 1944, the family relocated to Amarillo, Texas, where Pickens’ father started working in the land acquisitions department of Phillips Petroleum Company.

He attended Amarillo High for his secondary education and upon graduating, he attended Texas A&M University for one year before transferring to Oklahoma A&M at Stillwater, from which he graduated with a degree in geology.

Professional Life: Entrepreneurial Career

After graduating from Oklahoma A&M in 1951, Pickens took a job at Phillips Petroleum in Bartlesville, Oklahoma as an on-site geologist. By 1954, he was frustrated with his work in the fields. He quit his job and maintained a career as an independent oilman for a while. In 1956, with around $2,500 which he had saved, he formed Petroleum Exploration, Inc. (PEI) with two other partners. Under his watchful eye, his company grew quickly and eventually became a leading independent oil company in the world. Meanwhile, he acquired other companies like Diamond Shamrock, Philips Petroleum, Gulf Oil, and Hugoton Production Company, becoming well known, in the process, for his ruthless attempts at acquiring new companies.

In 1989, he moved to Dallas where he set up BP Captial Management eight years later. In 1997, he established another company which he called the Pickens Fuel Corp to encourage and promote the use of natural gas for automobiles. The company was renamed Clean Energy four years later, and in 2007, Pickens started warning the public against high oil prices. In June 2007, he started promoting the largest wind farm in the world, which was capable of producing up to four gigawatts of electricity. One year later, he came up with The Pickens Plan, a bigger proposal that would reinvent the energy resources of the United States by promoting oil alternatives such as solar energy, natural gas, and wind power.

Personal Life: Wife, Children, Philanthropy, Demise

In 1949, Pickens married Lynn O’Brien, his long-term girlfriend whom he had dated since high school. Within a year of their marriage, their first child, a daughter named Deborah, was born. The couple had three more children, Mike, Pam, and Thomas Boone III. They divorced in 1971 and he went on to marry four different times more.

He died on September 11, 2019, at the age of 91.

During his lifetime, Boone was known for his philanthropic gestures. He gave more than a billion dollars to a variety of charities. Around half of the donations went to his alma mater Oklahoma State University. As of this writing, his cash gifts to Oklahoma State top $625 million. The University of Texas also benefited from his generosity. He was also known for his charitable relief efforts to Hurricane Katrina victims, and various other programs that support the well-being of families, children, and animals.

He also signed The Giving Pledge, promising to give away more than half of his fortune to the less privileged.

T. Boone Pickens Net Worth: Salary, Income Sources, Assets

Mr. T. Boone Pickens’s net worth at the time of his passing was more than $900 million. At various times during his life, this business tycoon was certainly worth more than a billion dollars, but with shaky oil prices and his out-sized charitable contributions, he fell out of the billionaire ranks before his passing in 2019. He gave away more than $1 billion while he was alive, and will surely be always remembered for his generous contributions to numerous causes.

In 2018, Pickens sold his Gulfstream 550 Private Jet for an undisclosed sum and listed his 68,000 acre Texas ranch for sale for $250 million. He is survived by his five children.