Giant Texaco offers $9.9 billion to Getty Oil's feuding owners
It started as a bitter struggle between Gordon Getty, amateur composer and opera singer, and the defiant managers running Getty Oil, the cornerstone of the empire built by the late Jean Paul Getty. As the battle developed, both sides resorted to intrigue and duplicity worthy of the Medicis. But late last week, giant Texaco unexpectedly entered the picture and seemed likely to emerge the winner by offering to buy up Getty Oil for about $9.9 billion. The deal, subject to stockholder approval and a green light from Justice Department antitrust lawyers, could be the largest takeover in U.S. history (previous record holder: Du Font's acquisition of Conoco in 1981 for $7.2 billion).
Texaco, third-largest oil company in the U.S. (1982 revenues: $48 billion), snatched 14th-ranked Getty ($12.3 billion) from the embrace of a much smaller suitor, Pennzoil ($2.3 billion). Only three days earlier, before Texaco jumped into the bidding, Pennzoil Chairman J. Hugh Liedtke and Gordon Getty had sealed a $5.2 billion deal to buy up Getty Oil's stock jointly for $112.50 a share and make the company a private firm. But then came Texaco with an irresistible offer of $125 a share. The Texaco price will bring Getty heirs almost $4 billion; a month ago, their shares had a market value of about $2.3 billion.
Getty Oil is the biggest piece of the family fortune left by Jean Paul Getty, who died in 1976. Gordon Getty, 50, youngest of three surviving sons, inherited 13% of the family oil business but, until the past year or so, scarcely seemed interested in it. Designated by Forbes magazine last fall as the richest American (net worth: $2.2 billion), Getty spent much of his time as a patron of the arts. He wrote songs based on Emily Dickinson poems and occasionally performed as a baritone with the Marin Opera Company near San Francisco, playing roles like Cascart in Zaza. Getty, of course, did not have to worry about where his next five-course meal was coming from; his Getty Oil dividends alone paid him $28 million annually.
After the May 1982 death of C. Lansing Hayes Jr., a longtime family adviser, Getty suddenly found himself sole trustee of the Sarah C. Getty Trust, named for his grandmother, a fund that controls 40% of the oil company. When he began looking at the firm more closely, he concluded that its performance was poor and its stock undervalued. The company's market price at the start of 1983 was just $48.50 a share. Getty questioned the company's diversification ventures, including those into insurance and cable television.
The firm in 1979 had acquired an interest in the money-losing Entertainment and Sports Programming Network (ESPN) and in 1980 had purchased the Kansas-based ERC insurance group.
When the heir urged Getty Oil Chairman Sidney Petersen, 53, and the company's directors to reconsider corporate strategy, he ran into resentment and resistance. "I was surprised at the antics of management," says Los Angeles Oil Analyst Craig Schwerdt. "It didn't seem possible for them to buck the wishes of Gordon Getty and get away with it."