Boone Pickens
The name Boone Pickens (he dropped the initial "T" after his father's 1988 death) seems like a relic of the 1980s, along with leveraged buyouts and Drexel Burnham Lambert. During that decade of financial excess, the legendary Texas oilman and founder of Mesa Petroleum roiled Big Oil with hostile takeover attempts of much larger firms--Unocal, Phillips Petroleum, and Gulf Oil--often backed by Michael Milken's infamous junk-bond machine.
Though none of those bids were successful, Pickens often profited by driving the companies into other mergers--and their stocks skyward--or by getting paid to go away and make trouble elsewhere. Pickens considered himself a champion of shareholder rights for attacking entrenched corporate managers; others branded him a profiteer. Either way, by the mid-1990s Mesa itself had become a takeover target as a result of some very bad bets it made on natural gas. "We got ourselves into a spot, and we were heavily in debt," says Pickens, who left the company in 1996, 68 years old and wealthy despite its ill fortune. "But I never even considered retirement. I love to work."
And work he has. Since then, Pickens has started an investment firm, BP Capital, which runs two highly successful private energy investment funds, one focusing on commodities, the other on stocks. He also founded a California company that sells compressed natural gas for trucks--"that turned into a big business," he drawls--and an outfit that upgrades ranches from cattle operations to wildlife recreation. On his own 30,000-acre Mesa Vista Ranch in the Texas panhandle, he has created one of the finest quail-hunting habitats in the world.
But his boldest idea yet comes from what Pickens discovered under his ranch--and it wasn't oil. Mesa Water, Pickens's newest venture, plans to tap the Ogallala aquifer to deliver up to 150,000 acre-feet of water per year to parched municipalities downstate--possibly San Antonio or the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex--where populations are bulging. "The entire water deal has the potential to be the biggest deal of my life," crows Pickens. It's certainly generating controversy, with many Panhandle residents furious that a local resource is being sold from underneath them. "If [Mesa Water's] proposal is approved, the result will be the destruction of the Panhandle economy and lifestyle," the Amarillo Globe-News opined in 2002. Probably because of his former role as corporate scourge, Pickens is unfazed. And he proudly compares his current situation with the 1990s, when he perennially struck out. "Now," he says, "we're hitting it out of the park." -Matthew Benjamin
This story appears in the March 15, 2004 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.