T. Boone Pickens: OSU's Big, Big Man on Campus
This article is for subscribers only.
T. Boone Pickens, the Texas oilman turned hedge fund investor, says he had a simple motivation for giving more than $500 million to his alma mater, Oklahoma State University: He got sick of watching the school's football team, the Cowboys, lose. "I quit coming to homecoming games because we got beat," says Pickens. "I don't like that feeling."
Pickens, who started his own oil company, earned a reputation as a hard-nosed corporate raider in the 1980s. These days the 82-year-old billionaire devotes himself to promoting his "Pickens Plan" to wean the U.S. off foreign oil by boosting output of natural gas, wind power, and solar energy.