, Columnist
A Fond Farewell to T. Boone Pickens
He was larger than life, outrageous and wise. And he invented the '80s.
The corporate raider.
Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
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I used to tell people that I was in the room when the 1980s – the bull-market-greed-is-good ‘80s – began. It was June 1982, and the room was a luxe Waldorf Towers suite leased by Lazard Freres. An investment banker at the firm had loaned the suite to a Texas oilman named T. Boone Pickens Jr., the founder and chief executive of Mesa Petroleum, based in Amarillo, Texas.
Boone, who had a big reputation in Texas, and virtually no reputation outside it, was making an audacious play: He was trying to take over Cities Service, a company ten times Mesa’s size. And I was sitting right next to him, watching him try.