Word: petroleum
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...maverick Texan was waging war on two major fronts last week. He was acquiring additional stock in California's Unocal (1984 sales: $11.5 billion), the 14th largest U.S. oil company, in which he already owns 16.9 million shares, or 9.6%. Meanwhile, shareholders of Phillips Petroleum, which tangled with Pickens in 1984, met in Bartlesville, Okla., to vote on a plan that would give Pickens and his partners an $89 million profit on an aborted takeover battle. Rejection of the plan would open the way for Rival Raider Carl Icahn to continue his pursuit of the company. But it could increase...
...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, it earned $31.5 million by driving Cities Service ($8.5 billion before its 1982 merger) into the arms of Occidental Petroleum...
Pickens claims that inept management can be found everywhere among the large oil firms. He zestfully points out that petroleum companies made four of the seven acquisitions that FORTUNE magazine rated last year as the worst of the past decade (examples: Mobil's $1.86 billion purchase of Marcor, the owner of Montgomery Ward; Standard Oil of Ohio's $1.77 billion acquisition of Kennecott). Many firms are now unloading some of their unattractive operations. Exxon is trying to sell its office-products business, and Atlantic Richfield recently took a $785 million write-off on its stake in Anaconda...
...sophomore year. While there, he married Lynn O'Brien, his high school sweetheart. She was 17, he 20. "My mother says she never saw anyone grow up so fast," Pickens recalls. After two years on the dean's list, he graduated with a degree in geology and joined Phillips Petroleum, where his father then worked as a lease broker...
After a year of knocking about without financial backing, Pickens secured a $100,000 line of credit, half of which came from his wife's uncle. With it, he formed Petroleum Exploration, his first company. "I've worked with a lot of geologists," remembers Lawton Clark, an independent Denver oilman who joined Pickens in that venture, "but I've never seen anyone as well prepared. He just knew what there was to be known." Pickens describes those hardscrabble early days as a period of "pickin' with the chicken...