T. Boone Pickens, a Texas-Size Businessman, Calls It Quits<br />“In oil, you can make a lot of money and lose a lot of money,” Ms. Jaffe said.<br />“Pickens got farther than most,” Daniel Yergin wrote in “The Prize,” his authoritative history of the oil business.<br />He would take a small stake in a public company, call on it to slash expenses<br />and return money to investors, and often pressure the company to sell itself.<br />Decades past his heyday as a self-made oil mogul and old-school corporate raider, his fortune<br />and his public profile diminished, Mr. Pickens was still hoping to strike it rich, just as he had done some 60 years ago as a young wildcatter in Amarillo.<br />“Today you’re seeing in corporate America a lot of the things<br />that he espoused 30 years ago,” said David Bradshaw, an investment banker at Moelis and Company who is close to Mr. Pickens.<br />“I truly believe I was put on this Earth to make money,<br />but also to be generous with it,” Mr. Pickens, whose current worth is estimated at $500 million, said in his email.<br />“He wasn’t afraid to stand up to some of these guys in the oil patch,” Mr. Icahn said in an interview.<br />As a corporate raider in the 1980s, Mr. Pickens — along with men like Carl C. Icahn<br />and Michael Milken — helped develop a shrewd new playbook for making money.<br />Mr. Pickens proceeded to go on a hot streak, correctly betting on price fluctuations in oil and gas for years and becoming a billionaire.
