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The First Billion Is the Hardest
T. Boone Pickens
Reflections on a Life of Comebacks and America's Energy Future
Crown Business
September 2008
On Sale: September 2, 2008
Featuring: T. Boone Pickens
272 pages
ISBN: 0307395774
EAN: 9780307395771
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Memoir
With a Plan for Reducing U.S. Oil Dependency
It’s
never too late to top your personal best.
Now eighty
years old, T. Boone Pickens is a legendary figure in the
business world. Known as the “Oracle of Oil” because of his
uncanny ability to predict the direction of fuel prices, he
built Mesa Petroleum, one of the largest independent oil
companies in the United States, from a $2,500 investment. In
the 1980s, Pickens became a household name when he executed
a series of unsolicited buyout bids for undervalued oil
companies, in the process reinventing the notion of
shareholders’ rights. Even his failures were successful in
that they forced risk-averse managers to reconsider the way
they did business.
When Pickens left Mesa at age
sixty-eight after a spectacular downward spiral in the
company’s profits, many counted him out. Indeed, what
followed for him was a painful divorce, clinical depression,
a temporary inability to predict the movement of energy
prices, and the loss of 90 percent of his investing capital.
But Pickens was far from out.
From that personal and
professional nadir, Pickens staged one of the most
impressive comebacks in the industry, turning his investment
fund’s remaining $3 million into $8 billion in profit in
just a few years. That made him, at age seventy-seven, the
world’s second-highest-paid hedge fund manager. But he
wasn’t done yet. Today, Pickens is making some of the
world’s most colossal energy bets. If he has his way, most
of America’s cars will eventually run on natural gas, and
vast swaths of the nation’s prairie land will become places
where wind can be harnessed for power generation. Currently
no less bold than he was decades ago when he single-handedly
transformed America’s oil industry, Pickens is staking
billions on the conviction that he knows what’s coming. In
this book, he spells out that future in detail, not only
presenting a comprehensive plan for American energy
independence but also providing a fascinating glimpse into
key resources such as water—yet another area where he is
putting billions on the line.
From a businessman who
is extraordinarily humble yet is considered one of the
world’s most visionary, The First Billion Is the
Hardest is both a riveting account of a life spent
pulling off improbable triumphs and a report back from the
front of the global energy and natural-resource wars—of
vital interest to anyone who has a stake in America’s future.
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