What I remember most about T Boone Pickens was his commenting on water and who would own the rights. It seemed that the next big investment after Oil for him was investing in water. I watched him on television explaining how that was the future. Face it without water there is no life. Did he mean to hold the world hostage? The one to control the water supply controls our lives. LA in the twenties, the movie "Chinatown" was about who controlled water to LA. Today they are still fighting about who controls the water in all of California. Living in New York City, I am always in awe of how much water we 8 million people are able to enjoy at a very low cost. I know where it comes from and how it is filtered, purified and it seems ever abundant but if that ever changes, I hate to think of the alternatives. T Boone Pickens was a thinker into future opportunities to make money his bottom line and was right about the importance of water but I don't trust those who might exploit the one thing that every person needs for life. One can go for days without food but one definitely needs water. Just as the earth is called the blue planet for its' many oceans our bodies also are just like the earth mostly made up of water, needing constant replenishing to survive. We can go without food but water no. I never trusted opportunists where their bottom line was the dollar. Koch anyone? (For more google T Boone Pickens water investments.)
3
Wow, did he shake us up at Gulf Oil Exploration and Development. For what seemed like endless months we came to work and nervously watched as our upper management bumbled and fumbled trying to piece together some kind of strategy to fight this strange businessman.
I was early 30s, newly married sans children and mortgage, when I was cut loose. I parted with a severance check several time larger than a pre Pickens severance due to our stock option plan, and a skyrocketed share value.
So...for me it was an OK thing, wife and I were able to move on. But it sure wasn't that way for all. "Mother Gulf" was going, and after four agonizing rounds of layoffs, few were left to join Chevron.
Remembering mostly bitterness, confusion, loss of career, colleges and friends from this man.
4
"If you want a good show, don't rush the monkey." T. Boone Pickens
1
Yes,the operative expression is 'cast himself'. He is the backdrop for a lot of the energy mess we are experiencing today.
2
Another example of a runaway capitalist that in death invites examination and delivers us once more irrefutable evidence that while these money-grubbing monsters amass great fortunes, the price society pays is the loss of everything sacred, just so that a handful of men can walk the Earth like giants.
10
What is legal in America is what should embarrass and shame Americans.
Corrupt crony capitalist corporate plutocrat oligarch welfare is legal in America by those with the means to buy legislative, executive and judicial complicity and conspiracy.
Being an inhumane callous cruel cynical hypocritical gilded age robber baron malefactor of great wealth is not something to be proud of.
As shown in 'The Godfather' film saga there is no meaningful difference between Wall Street and Main Street when it comes to an organized crime gangster ethos.
Dr. King noted that capitalism, militarism and racism made America first in money, arms and oppression.
See Matthew 25:31-46
6
He did more bad things than good things in his life but was not a complete monster. Later in life he sought to undo many of his sins with little success. While not fully able to repent for things like the Kerry swift boat smear, he was able to do some positive strides for climate. In the end, as all millionaires and billionaires know, you can't take the money, you can only leave it to others to do things with. Lets hope good will use his!
1
Mr. Pickens helped finance a smear campaign in 2004 against Senator John Kerry. That campaign was instrumental in returning George W. Bush, installed into office by the Supreme Court, and whose lies about the rationale behind the 2003 Iraq invasion were revealing themselves, to the White House.
Really, that's all I need to remember about Mr. Pickens.
8
I'll remember T. Boone as the man who sent a 727 airplane to help evacuate pet dogs and cats from a hurricane site. A good man.
3
One interesting sidelight: Remember Ivan Boesky? Remember Michael Milken? They tried to greenmail Boone Pickens. Big mistake. Big, big mistake. Pickens flew to Washington and started rattling cages in Congress and the Department of Justice. Result was that Boesky and Milken got prosecuted and imprisoned.
1
He exerted great influence at times and did much damage to many companies, 1000's of lives, and the environment. And his malicious meddling in politics was despicable.
After first reading and commenting on this article about 8 hours ago, I checked back to see what others had to say. At the end of the day, only 69 comments were posted about this unpleasant tycoon. Perhaps this indicates that it's hard for people to be concerned that someone who failed so miserably at being a decent human being has passed from the scene.
4
And it goes on today with obscene CEO salaries nothing but theft from us shareholders.
“If you are a stockholder, the chances are that one way or another, most corporations are misappropriating your money,” he wrote in his 1987 autobiography, “Boone.” “It is legal under the system; everyday this respectable crime is perpetrated in corporate corridors across the country.”
4
Bottom line:
1980's corporate raider who hurt American families and thereby made his fortune.
What a waste of time reading about this confidence man.
4
I don't forgive the deceased for viciously sliming a Vietnam veteran, John Kerry, who later had his reputation completely upheld by an official Navy investigation of the phony allegations that the deceased had the nerve to gin up.
I don't forget.
It was disgusting.
Unpatriotic.
Imagine spending millions to spread lies about good man, a war veteran.
Did the deceased ever serve in the military?
No.
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@Paul King
I was going to write something similar but you said it perfectly.
This was an embarrassing episode for the country. More embarrassing that Kerry playing catch with the football.
2
@Paul King
A senator who voted to invade Iraq after limiting the deabte about it as he had dinner plans???? Kerry also voted for the Patriot Act and was a party pawn for his career. We are all flawed- yin and yang- Boone as well.
2
Obit didnt mention Pickens quip that “It’s cheaper to drill for oil on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange”
7
Pickens is a classic example that money doesn't buy happiness. He was married five times and the marriages all failed. Embarrassingly, he had named a North Sea oil field for wife #2 (the Beatrice Field) but then moved on to #3, 4, and 5. The offspring have been in all sorts of messes - alcohol and drugs (including at least one OD), bankruptcies, financial fraud - and are quite bitter about their relationship with Pickens. Pickens didn't produce anything, but like most of the raiders of the 1980s, he just shuffled financial paper around. He couldn't even hold on to his own company. And the man who is famous for predicting "peak oil" dies on the day after it is announced that the United States is now the world's leading oil producer. In short, he piled up a lot of green pieces of paper but failed in virtually everything else.
136
That was great. Well done.
21
Another grand eulogy to a person who made lots of money at the expense of our environment and more importantly ,at the expense of the working people and their families..His philanthropy does not excuse his greed and narcissism.
135
Note to Wilber Ross, Donald Trump, Charles Koch, and their like: hoarding money at the expense of others is not a ticket to immortality.
52
Q. Why do the rich always claim to be doing something for the unrich?
A. To con the unrich into voting against their own best interests.
23
Did he make the world a better place?
8
Like the Bob Dylan lyric... goodbye is too good a word, so I bid fare thee well
9
I have now read multiple versions of Mr. Pickens' obituary, and it is stunning that none of them mention his controversial time on the board of regents at (then) West Texas State University, and his attacks on academe the Amarillo Globe-News. It's stunning because his actions and statements then were national news as well. I know because I was editor of the West Texas State U. student newspaper and later a reporter at the Globe-News.
15
This reminds me of my years in Dallas, and the almost universally negative run-ins I had with oil industry wealth while working in the service industry. This is a small klatsch of tightly-knit plutocrats, and their entitled nastiness knows no bounds.
24
And yet the people time and again fail to pick up their torches and pitchforks and drag them by their feet from their ivory towers.
Like Trump, we may find them vile and criminal, but just shaking our collective heads and sighing, “tsk tsk” isn’t the solution.
We need to revive mankind’s oldest vehicle for retribution, the masses’ vengeance.
5
T Boone Pickens was an American Icon. My fondest memory was of a mutual friend, John Norris telling me that we were the only two people he knew who claimed to have our best ideas in the shower. Quite obviously T. Boone had better ideas than I did. Bless him!
1
Takes quite the ego to make a tribute to the recently departed, and make it about yourself.
20
@James Boucher Does your memory also recall he despicable statement he made during his exploration of a run for president? It caused him to drop out. What an expressed idea THAT was!!!
1
A strange bird. RIP.
1
I only remember him for funding the “Swiftboat” smear campaign against John Kerry during the 2004 presidential election.
87
@Chris Which of course deserved to be publicized.
5
"Environmentalist"? Hardly. Pickens tried to sway the Sierra Club to support fracking in NY State in an area containing NYC watersheds. Pickens held a heady week-end with the club pres and district leaders of the club, which included a private airplane ride over areas of NY.
My district manager, when I was chair of the NYC watershed committee, pressured me not to pass any resolutions against fracking in NYC's watershed. We passed one anyway. Years later, he (the district leader) called me to say I was right.
Ironically, it was a few movie stars and other luminaries that managed to do most of the heavy lifting in preventing fracking in NYS.
92
@carolz Thank you for making it possible to not have fracking in NY state. I too am glad it's not happening here.
32
@carolz Thanks goodness NY doesn't have to get their power from that nasty natural gas and gets to enjoy electricity from that truly great source, coal!
T. Boone Pickens was a complex man who could sell icecream in the middle of Armageddon. In the 90s, he ran a large wind farm located somewhere in the pan-handle and wanted to run power lines all the way to Dallas to promote green power. Superficially, that sounded wonderful. But the reality was dark, driven by ulterior motives, and dubious. Pickens knew full well that fossil fuel burning would upset the ecological balance so much that in couple of decades, the most precious commodity in the SW would be fresh clean water. So he basically bought all the underground water resources in the pan-handle. But then, there was no way he could run pipelines to Dallas to carry water, because the disaster hadn't struck yet - you cannot get an approval on a premonition. So he basically installed a bunch of windmills over the aquifers and got eminent domain approval to grab land for power transmission to metropolitan areas. The plan was to run water pipelines underneath those power lines when water scarcity eventually hit the South West. This man can catch Koi carp off of muddy waters.
36
Let us not forget that Pickens sponsored lies about John Kerry's war record, lies that may have cost Kerry the presidency and sent us into the four more years of Dubya's administration that destroyed our economy for all but the ultra-wealthy. Is such a person praiseworthy? Is sponsoring lies equivalent to paying for murder, even if it's only character assassination? In my opinion, we will be a better, stronger country without the likes of Boone T. Pickens paying to advance his personal interests.
117
@A Thinker John Kerry and John McCain were real men. Real men make cowards like Trump and Pickens. They live daily with the knowledge that they could never ever escape the nightmare of their cowardice.
2
This would be the same guy that funded the so call swift boat veterans for truth ad campaign that was discredited. By helping create a false narrative to defeat a political opponent t-bone thereby added the term "swift boating" to the American lexicon as a description for untrue political campaigns. While he will soon be forgotten as a person, his actions will live in infamy in the form this phrase. If he wanted to be remembered as a person, he should have pushed to have the practice of lying about an opponent renamed "T-booning".
69
Switching all gasoline powered cars and trucks to natural gas was a good idea. It made more sense than reinventing the wheel like the visionaries for visionary’s sake want to.
5
I suspect he'll have a hundred thousand or so questions to answer at the Pearly Gates.
52
Is the world better off for T. Boone Pickens' having been here?
9
@Next Conservatism
No.
13
Guys like him are a dime a dozen in Texas:
They just don’t make as much money at the expense of others.
59
Did he take all of his money with him??
49
@Grove
I don't think so. The air rights and water rights he bought up all over the place either.
6
“. During the 2004 presidential campaign that led to George W. Bush’s re-election, Mr. Pickens helped finance attacks on the Vietnam War record of Senator John Kerry, Mr. Bush’s opponent.”
68
Boone Pickens was NOT a “Texas oil-and-gas entrepreneur”. He was an Oklahoma oil-and-gas entrepreneur!
19
@JMG
He may have been born in Oklahoma, but like a lot of oil and gas men (truly, there are no "oil and gas women") he got to Texas as soon as he could. And Oklahoma is the better for it as Texas could have done without him. After all, we already had the Hunts and the Kochs. We didn't need TBP.
1
we wouldn't be in this political mess we are in today were it not for the false swift boat related attacks Bone made on John Kerry. I for one will never be sad over his passing. His bad severely outd weighed and good that he may have at time achieved.
138
@mark streuli Kerry didn't lose because of the Swift Boat attacks. He lost because he was a wimp who didn't have the guts to vote against the Iraq War or support same-size marriage.
Howard Dean did both of those things, but he, you know, shouted. So the DNC replaced a true progressive with a Republican Lite. Sound familiar?
13
@Shannon:
OK, so you don't like John Kerry and wouldn't have voted for him.
Does that make it a right that a billionaire was able to fund the commercials and ads that smeared that man and lied about his history in the military?
15
@Shannon
John Kerry has more courage, moral fortitude and accomplishment in the nail of his smallest toe than most of critics and the "Swiftboat" slanderers have in their entire bodies. Kerry volunteered to serve his country during an unpopular war, and became an activist to end that war based on his experiences from actually being in it. When he was wounded, he could have come home and chosen to sit on a yacht and become a drunk; instead, he devoted his life to public service. He served as a US Senator and as Secretary of State. Yeah, what a wimp. What have you done that's so great?
1
"Maverick" is not cliche for old T. Boone.
RIP
3
So, Pickens made big oil companies “quake.” And now he’s dead. There’s a lesson in there somewhere.
31
The qualities that produce a wheeler-dealer often are incompatible with being able to succeed in maintaining personal relationships. That fifth marriage in 2014 didn’t endure, either: they divorced three years later. And the strife amongst his children is worthy of a soap opera.
49
The man that swift-boated John Kerry on his service in Vietnam, now is being lauded as a man who made great stories? I don’t think so...
He did his part on bringing this country to the political mess we’re in...
220
I'll bet the thousands of people who lost jobs, homes, educational opportunities and stable family lives because of Pickens's ruthlessness and insatiable greed can "remember that far back" all too clearly. It is they who bore the ultimate cost of his so-called "philanthropy."
113
Don't think that he was totally benevolent in encouraging the construction of wind farms. Because the output of wind turbines is inherently intermittent, most utilities used natural gas powered generators to "firm up" the wind resources. While there are other solutions available now, Pickens was pushing for wind power in Texas primarily to create new demand for his natural gas wells.
37
I heard about him when the renewable energy excitement was just starting to build. I read and enjoyed his book "The First Billion is the Hardest". Read that one for the title but genuinely an interesting and entertaining read about how he went completely bankrupt BEFORE he bounced back and became a billionaire.
Mostly an interesting read about how assets are great, but experience is better. And also, if a former centa-millionaire offers you a job when you fail your certification (and so does he) TAKE THE JOB.
5
"During the 2004 presidential campaign that led to George W. Bush’s re-election, Mr. Pickens helped finance attacks on the Vietnam War record of Senator John Kerry, Mr. Bush’s opponent." This character assassination was, after the election, proven false, and yet because of T. Boone Pickens shenanigans, we ended up with a collapsed economy under Bush.
124
@Person
GW Bush assumed the office of the presidency in January 2001.
The first inklings of the Great Recession were detected around December 2007 and kept deteriorating until attaining full-crash mode around September-October 2008.
But hey, if it makes you feel better, blame Bill Clinton.
16
@Person That's a good one! And I suppose the capitalistic cooking of Enron's books, selling of packaged derivatives, and short term value of risk loaded hedge funds are the work of the Girl Scouts. Seems like Republicans never take credit for any of their wars, tax policies, or obscene greed...Sorry folks, keep on moving...nothing to see here.
24
I always have had a soft spot in my heart for that old reprobate. Rest in Peace, Boone. They don't make them like you anymore.
10
Overlooked was his genius for buying beat up cattle ranches cheaply and converting them into classy wild quail hunting properties to sell to his city dwelling status seeking friends.
He was an outstanding sportsman and bird hunter.
6
Back in the late 1980s Columbia University did a Socratic roundtable called “Ethics in America” that included many powerful people. One episode called “Anatomy of a Hostile Takeover” featured Mr. Pickens and others (even a young Giuliani) discussing the ethics of being being a corporate raider. It is a fascinating look at a time and a philosophy that has had far reaching consequences.
https://www.learner.org/resources/series81.html
13
I recall reading his autobiography, "Boone" many years ago and thought it was an extremely interesting read.
I thought his name was perfect for a Texas oil man.
What I really loved about the guy was his spunk and ambition to never be down for the count for long. He was always reinventing himself and some company, making as much if not more than what he had previously lost. He was never one for failure, except in his personal life.
I am always amazed at how someone could be married/divorced 5 times and yet be rather quite successful in the business world. I guess his priorities were always business first, romance and marriage second.
He had a wonderful and sharp wit. Even in that picture of him in his Dallas office in 2009, there's a bit of a smirk hiding behind that whisper of a smile. He was always up to something. He was an original.
Sincere condolences to his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
11
Such a thoughtful and gracious comment. I’ll bet he would have liked it as an obituary. Shine on.
1
@Marge Keller
"I am always amazed at how someone could be married/divorced 5 times and yet be rather quite successful in the business world."
Really? I think it has all to do with prenuptial agreements.
4
@Eric Fleischer
Thanks for your gracious comment!
Very much appreciated.
1
As an Oklahoma State Fan, he's done more for our school financially than anyone else. I'm extremely grateful for his donations both to the academics and athletics of the school. T. Boone will be a part of the Cowboy family forever.
9
@Nathan
No doubt, most of his contributions were to the football team.
11
Had the opportunity (and pleasure) to work with Mr. Pickens on a deal years ago. One of the nicest, down-to-earth men I’ve ever met and worked with. Homespun, folksy and engaging, his easy-going, ego-less style belied a shrewd and sophisticated man. He wasn’t always right (a big “peak-oil” devotee), but he was humble enough to admit when he was wrong, without ever eating humble pie. I will miss him and his type of personality as you don’t find entrepreneurs like him anywhere anymore.
13
My father worked for Gulf Oil in 1983 as Capt on one of their oil tankers. When Mr. Pickens tried to take over, most of the employees on board the Gulf Oil fleet and many corporate staff were laid off during what eventually became the Chevron takeover. My father had two kids in college and a third about to start college the following year. Athough I appreciate Mr. Pickens' business acumen, and I am very sorry for his family's loss, many jobs were lost at Gulf and people's lives changed. The demise of Gulf underscored corporate greed at its basic level, both in the boardroom, and among corporate raiders such as Mr. Pickens.
78
He lived a colorful life. Did good and probably some bad.
He had conviction. He lived a full life, more than most of us.
He stood out.
4
Guys like Pickens make great stories. But fits line him are basically corporate raiders making money on some one else’s misfortunes. Works for them not for the nation.
122
The man has a great sense of humour! His father was " a lawyer who speculated on oil leases". Sounds like this apple didn't fall far from the tree.
30
T. Boone was a legend in his own time. Mesa always paid $1 per share dividends. And extremely philanthropic. My prayers and thoughts are with his family.
16
I think actually he felt he was a legend in his own mind. The business about the big donation that came back to him within an hour speaks volumes. The taxpayers probably took it on the chin for a charitable deduction at the time.
31
"That’s a long time ago. When you’re old, you can’t remember that far back.” I like that. Sometimes a short memory isn't the worst thing. If it means that someone still has the capacity to change even when most of their sunrises have already set, then I think it's a mindset to be admired.
64
@J.H,
Agree it’s a great mindset,but a Silver Star recipient got smeared,Maybe I am old school but the timber who knock a John McCain or a Kerry definitely have two strikes on them.
Thank You,
J Fitz
62
And it is very convenient to say "I'm old, I can't recall", a la Reagan.
43
@J.H,
Well, he was also evading responsibility for his shameful behavior ... see, for instance:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_Boat_challenge
23