To many, he is a real-life J.R. Ewing, the ruthless but fascinating wheeler- dealer whom viewers of Dallas love to hate--and sometimes secretly admire. To , his victims, mostly entrenched corporate executives, he is a dangerous upstart, a sneaky poker player, a veritable rattlesnake in the woodpile. To his fans, though, he is a modern David, a champion of the little guy who takes on the Goliaths of Big Oil and more often than not gives them a costly whupping. Whichever image he evokes, T. (for Thomas) Boone Pickens, 56, has swept up like a twister out of Amarillo, Texas, to become one of the most famous and controversial businessmen in the U.S. today.
Pickens, the chairman of Mesa Petroleum (1984 sales: $413 million), an oil and gas producer with 650 employees, has gone eyeball to eyeball with the biggest, strongest and sometimes least loved of all U.S. firms, oil companies, and forced them to blink. Indeed, just the fear of Pickens has sent energy giants scrambling to merge with one another. Says Joseph Fogg III of the investment banking firm Morgan Stanley: "You would have to go back to the past century, to people like Jay Gould and Jim Fisk, to find someone who has had an equivalent impact on a major American industry." Those two financiers reshaped U.S. railroads by forcing the consolidation of many different lines. Today Pickens is performing much the same feat in the energy industry.
The maverick Texan was waging war on two major fronts last week. He was acquiring additional stock in California's Unocal (1984 sales: $11.5 billion), the 14th largest U.S. oil company, in which he already owns 16.9 million shares, or 9.6%. Meanwhile, shareholders of Phillips Petroleum, which tangled with Pickens in 1984, met in Bartlesville, Okla., to vote on a plan that would give Pickens and his partners an $89 million profit on an aborted takeover battle. Rejection of the plan would open the way for Rival Raider Carl Icahn to continue his pursuit of the company. But it could increase Pickens' potential gains by pushing up the value of the Phillips shares that he owns. The result of the vote is expected this week. If the plan is defeated, Phillips could be forced to buy back all its stock at a higher price.
Pickens has made more than $800 million for Mesa and its partners in the past three years by all but rearranging the map of a key sector of corporate America. The consequences of his actions have been stunning. They have resulted in the end of Gulf Oil, Cities Service and others as independent companies. Pickens last year forced Gulf (1984 sales: $28.4 billion), the fifth largest U.S. oil company, to sell out to No. 4 Chevron ($29.2 billion) for $13.2 billion in the biggest merger in business history. The Pickens group's profit on that deal: $760 million. Earlier, it earned $31.5 million by driving Cities Service ($8.5 billion before its 1982 merger) into the arms of Occidental Petroleum.
Pickens' pickin's have made him the most prominent of the new corporate raiders, who are active across the U.S. not only in the oil industry but in fields as diverse as entertainment, paper and food. Partly as a result of their burgeoning takeover attempts, mergers are occurring as never before. Some 45, each worth more than $1 billion, have taken place since 1981, compared with only a dozen in the twelve previous years combined.