Dallas oil, wind and water billionaire T. Boone Pickens, it seems, is everywhere.
There he is in Forbes magazine, allowing a reporter to accompany him as he receives a brain scan. Result: Boone just turned 80, but “his brain age is more like 55.”
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There he is in Business Week, saying water is the new oil.
There he is in D CEO magazine, talking about building a $10 billion wind farm in West Texas.
There he is in Calgary, supporting medical research and predicting $200-a-barrel oil, soon.
Then there’s the tiff with the Vietnam veterans who want to collect on the $1 million challenge he issued, backing the truthfulness of the Swift Boat campaign he funded against John Kerry.
The vets say they have proof the information was wrong. Pickens says no, they don’t have proof. He won’t pay. One veteran who served with Kerry has started calling Pickens “T. Boone Chicken.”
And all of that was just in June.
Pickens, no doubt, likes the attention. And he likes being T. Boone Pickens.
Just check out his Web site, Boonepickens.com. There you can learn about his businesses, his upbringing, his philanthropy, and order copies of his new book, “The First Billion is the Hardest,” due out later this year.
“Of all the taxes I’ve paid, 90% of them were after I was 70,” Pickens told Forbes, which estimates his personal wealth at $3 billion.
A previous book by Pickens was titled: “Boone Pickens: the Luckiest Guy in the World.”
Pickens, of course, made his reputation building Mesa Petroleum into one of the largest independent oil companies. He then helped define the term “corporate raider” as he challenged Big Oil and others to be more responsive to shareholders.
His approach to business has always been straightforward. Here’s what he told Business Week about the economics of water:
“There are people who will buy the water when they need it. And the people who have the water want to sell it. That’s the blood, guts, and feathers of the thing.”
Over the decades, Pickens has built a lot of connections.
His attorney, Bill Brewer, also represents former Cowboys quarterback Roger Staubach, tech entrepreneurs Sam and Charles Wyly, and Al Hill III, an heir to oil legend H.L. Hunt. Hill is suing other family members over family trusts.
Long-time Pickens’ associate Andrew Littlefair once worked in the Reagan White House. Littlefair now runs the Pickens-founded Clean Energy Fuels Corp. and the T. Boone Pickens Foundation.
Pickens is making a big mark in philanthropy. He has given a total of about $400 million to Oklahoma State University, much of it for the athletics program. And he made gifts of $50 million apiece to the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas and the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.
“I firmly believe one of the reasons I was put on this Earth was to make money, and be generous with it,” Pickens says on his Web site. “And that’s what I’ve continually tried to do.”
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