Men's Journal

After graduating with a degree in geology he worked for three years at Phillips Petroleum before his restlessness drove him to break out on his own. Then came a spell of sleeping in his car and shaving in gas station restrooms as he went about consulting on oil well sites before eventually drilling wells for his own start-up company, which later became Mesa Petroleum. Pickens had a string of oil strikes, the company grew, and he netted more than $90 million in revenue by age 44. This was all before he began his assault on Wall Street, before he was forced out of his chairmanship of Mesa, and before he lost big betting on — and then made an even bigger fortune betting everything on — natural gas futures.

As an upstart corporate raider in the 1980s, Pickens appeared on the cover of Time magazine, wearing a wry smile and holding a hand of poker cards with oil wells on the back. Inside, the article gave him credit for singlehandedly changing the nature of mergers and acquisitions and ushering in the heyday of hostile takeovers during the Reagan years. Pickens’s MO was to troll for undervalued oil company stocks, then stalk his prey by researching every aspect of the businesses via public documents and annual reports until, as he put it, he “knew them better than they knew themselves.” Through a variety of private brokers, Pickens would then buy up stock until he had enough to make his move. For the kill, he was known to set up a war room in New York’s Helmsley Palace or Waldorf-Astoria hotel. Rather than permit Pickens to take their companies over, CEOs invariably merged with other companies to ward him off, but Pickens and the shareholders made out like bandits nonetheless as their shares rose during the mergers. “He’s nothing but a pirate,” one oil executive complained in 1985. “Pickens doesn’t break any laws doing what he does,” said George Keller, then chairman of Chevron. “But he breaks tradition.”

Pickens first publicly speculated on the value of natural gas way back in 1991, when he invited reporters into his own home to show off what he called his “compressed natural gas station.” Initially he just watched and watched, until about a year ago, when he saw oil prices rising toward $100 a barrel and recognized the timing might be right to embrace an entirely new energy policy, one based on alternative fuels. That’s when Washington disappointed him. Rudy Giuliani famously gave him five minutes and then moved on to talking about 9/11. Last year President Bush gave him an hour but seemed indifferent.

“He let me talk and asked some questions and then he said goodbye.”
What happened after that? I ask him.
“I never heard from him,” Pickens says, then raises an eyebrow. “I guess my story didn’t exactly overwhelm him.”
Disillusioned, Pickens says he went home and groused about it with his wife, who told him that if he wanted something done he should do it himself.

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The walls of BP Capital are adorned with oil paintings of cowboys and Wyoming cattlemen, plus pictures of Pickens with GOP luminaries such as Bob Dole, Dan Quayle, Jack Kemp, and, most prominently, Ronald Reagan, a hero of his. Pickens says he admired the late president’s ability to put others at ease and earn their trust. On his bookshelves is a lot of signed sports memorabilia, including one football signed by former Heisman winners and another inscribed “To Boone” by Roger Staubach. There are also several studio-quality photos of his wife Madeleine, at least two with their purse-size papillon Murdock, who replaced an identical brown-and-white dog, Winston, who was lost in the brutal divorce settlement between Pickens and his second wife Beatrice.

By design the office is tightly knit. Doors are left open and people talk about college football and the market — the former a safe topic as both Texas and Oklahoma State (where on Saturdays fans pack the Boone Pickens Stadium) are among the top eight in the national polls, the latter a source of growing anxiety. Framed articles about Pickens from USA Today, the American Spectator, and Texas Monthly hang on the wall; on the floor are two boxes of orange Pickens Plan T-shirts. Pickens seems to bask in the renewed attention he has been receiving from his energy plan, appearing on everything from the Tonight Show and Larry King to 60 Minutes; you can hardly turn on a television these days without seeing his steely gaze and hearing his Texas drawl in one of the infomercials that his $58 million media blitz bought him.

A lifelong conservative, Pickens was a loyal and effective fundraiser for Reagan in both presidential runs. More recently he infamously bankrolled the Swift Boat advertising campaign that sandbagged John Kerry’s 2004 White House bid. While he has said he would never vote Democrat, Pickens’s latest campaign has drawn support from both sides of the political aisle, and in August he surprised just about everyone by turning up at the Democratic convention in Denver.

Pickens’s seeming move to the center this election year, however, has had more to do with his ability to forecast the tides than anything else. And the strength of his message arises in some part from his appearance of political independence. He is likely the only figure on the national scene whose supporters now include President-elect Barack Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, Orrin Hatch, and the Christian Coalition. His embrace by both sides of the political spectrum suggests that a growing number of Americans are looking for a third way, a vision of the energy future somewhere between “drill, baby, drill” and living off the grid.

Pickens’s best-selling book The First Billion Is the Hardest is as much an autobiography as it is a pitch for his plan, the essence of which is this: America spends $700 billion a year importing 70 percent of its oil (the Commerce Department estimate is closer to $300 billion). Pickens calls this the single greatest transfer of wealth in our lifetime. “It’s not sustainable,” he tells his audiences. “In 10 years we’ll be spending $10 trillion. And you can forget about spending on education, healthcare, or Social Security.”

Pickens wants to convert land throughout the dying towns of the Great Plains into wind farms. He has already begun doing that in the Texas Panhandle, where he plans to build the world’s largest wind-energy farm, with as many as 2,000 turbines. Ultimately, Pickens contends that we could increase the amount of electricity provided by wind in the U.S. from 1 percent to 22 percent, thereby freeing up natural gas for transportation and reducing our oil imports by 30 to 40 percent. His proposal also includes a natural gas station infrastructure and cars that run on clean energy.

Not even Pickens thinks that wind alone is the answer. Most experts believe that other sources of renewable energy — biofuels, solar power, and, yes, more nuclear facilities — will be needed but that wind can play an important role. And if it does, Pickens will do what he’s always done best: make truckloads of money.

The fact that Pickens stands to gain from his plan isn’t the only reason his green conversion has been met with skepticism. Some energy experts can’t get past the fact that this is the same greed-is-good “pirate” who claimed to be fighting for shareholders but always took care of his own interests first. “Listen closely to his ads,” cautions Apollo Gonzalez, a blogger for the National Resources Defense Council. “He doesn’t want to get America off oil, just foreign oil. Don’t let the pretty images of wind turbines fool you. Mr. Pickens is looking out for Mr. Pickens.”

And then there’s the cost: The bill for building all the turbines Pickens calls for could total around $1 trillion; one expert even put the figure as high as $14 trillion.

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