Pickens, T(homas) Boone, Jr (1928– )

US oil company executive and financier. Having established his own drilling enterprise, Mesa Petroleum Co., he became a feared corporate raider, practising what his critics called ‘greenmail’ – buying large blocks of a corporation's stock, threatening to take over that company, then selling them back for enormous profits. Even his failures, such as his aborted bids in the 1980s to seize Gulf and Unocal, earned him vast sums. By the time he left Mesa in 1996, the company had become one of the largest and most well-known independent exploration companies in the USA. In 1997 he founded the energy hedge fund BP Capital management. He has since bought water rights in Texas and in 2007 announced plans to build the world's largest wind farm. His net wealth is estimated at about $3 billion.

Pickens was born in Holdenville, Oklahoma. The son of an oil company lawyer who claimed a distant kinship to frontiersman Daniel Boone, he worked as a well-site geologist before establishing Mesa Petroleum Co. in 1964.