Word: mesa
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Pickens, the chairman of Mesa Petroleum (1984 sales: $413 million), an oil and gas producer with 650 employees, has gone eyeball to eyeball with the biggest, strongest and sometimes least loved of all U.S. firms, oil companies, and forced them to blink. Indeed, just the fear of Pickens has sent energy giants scrambling to merge with one another. Says Joseph Fogg III of the investment banking firm Morgan Stanley: "You would have to go back to the past century, to people like Jay Gould and Jim Fisk, to find someone who has had an equivalent impact on a major American...
Pickens has made more than $800 million for Mesa and its partners in the past three years by all but rearranging the map of a key sector of corporate America. The consequences of his actions have been stunning. They have resulted in the end of Gulf Oil, Cities Service and others as independent companies. Pickens last year forced Gulf (1984 sales: $28.4 billion), the fifth largest U.S. oil company, to sell out to No. 4 Chevron ($29.2 billion) for $13.2 billion in the biggest merger in business history. The Pickens group's profit on that deal: $760 million. Earlier...
...hardly needs gambling winnings. Much of Pickens' wealth comes from his ownership of stock in Mesa, which invests heavily in the companies Pickens bids for and thus profits handsomely from his deals. His ownership of some 1.5 million Mesa shares and options for 4.8 million others is worth more than $100 million at current market prices. His annual salary of $475,000 is modest by present corporate standards. But in 1980 Mesa gave $7.86 million in salary and stock options to Pickens, making him the best-paid executive in the U.S. that year. His golden parachute in case Mesa...
Though Pickens is busy running Mesa, making speeches and hatching future deals, he may also have political ambitions. He found time to attend last summer's Republican National Convention as a delegate and to chair a fund- raising drive for President Reagan. Gerald Ford recently visited with him in Amarillo. One of Beatrice's children now works in the Reagan White House personnel office, and helped organize the youth vote in the last campaign. There has been talk that Pickens might run for Governor of Texas next year. He does not discourage such chatter...
...name is T. (for Thomas) Boone Pickens Jr. The danger executives see is that he may be out to buy their company, and when Pickens attacks, his prey rarely escapes unscathed. Indeed, a remarkable run of successes has made T. Boone Pickens, 56, president of Amarillo-based Mesa Petroleum, probably the most feared corporate raider on the business scene today...