In 1951, a young student earned a geology degree from Oklahoma State University. Fifty-two years later, in 2003, he made the largest donation in the university’s history at the time; two years after that, he made another record donation more than double his first. Who is he, how did he get wealthy, and why did he keep returning to his alma mater?
Thomas Boone Pickens Jr. was born in 1928 in Holdenville, Oklahoma. Although his family moved from there to Amarillo, Texas, while he was a child, he returned to Oklahoma to earn his bachelor’s degree in geology at Oklahoma State University (OSU). After college, he worked at Phillips Petroleum, the same company where his dad was a lawyer.
Not long after, in 1954, he founded his own oil and gas company, Petroleum Exploration Inc., which became Mesa Petroleum. By the early ‘80s, it had grown into one of the largest oil companies in the United States.
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During the ‘80s, Pickens made a name for himself after launching multiple corporate takeover bids against other big oil companies. While some of these weren’t successful, many were, ultimately making him and his company massive profits and solidifying his reputation as a takeover operator.
“I was seen as the financial barbarian with little regard for shareholders, employees or consumers,” he wrote in his 1987 autobiography, Boone.
Because of weak natural gas prices, Mesa faced significant financial trouble and sold to Fort Worth Billionaire Richard Rainwater in 1996. Pickens left Mesa Petroleum. The sale let him start over and, in 1997, build a hedge fund that invested in oil and gas futures. BP Capital Management, then called BP Energy Fund, enabled him to earn billions.
Despite the risk of the oil business, huge gains and huge losses, Pickens never forgot his alma mater. His first known donation to OSU was in 1982, when he gave $1 million toward the construction of the university’s geology building (which was named in his honor).
Later, in 2003, he donated $70 million; about $20 million of it was earmarked for renovating the football stadium, which would also be named in his honor. In 2006, he set a college-athletics record by donating $165 million for the football program.
This amount, which sat in a hedge fund for six months, grew to a reported $267 million, as per The Oklahoman. The donation grew to about $400 million over the next few years; however, by October 2008, the recession shrank it to $125 million. Regardless, it enabled the stadium, called the Boone Pickens Stadium, to receive some major upgrades.
These wouldn’t be the last of his donations to OSU. He continued to donate until 2011. He died in 2019 at age 91 after experiencing declining health.
Boone is remembered as a man of remarkable tenacity and generosity, an Oklahoman who never forgot his roots.
Related: Andrew Carnegie paid nearly $56.2 million to build 2,509 libraries between 1883 and 1929; less than half of the 1,681 built in the United States operate in their original buildings