The life of T. Boone Pickens demonstrates that success in business, even after significant failure, is fundamentally driven by the ability to craft and sell a compelling narrative, making storytelling the ultimate product.
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He turned a $2,500 investment into
America's largest independent oil
company. He forced the biggest corporate
merger in history, a 13.2 billion deal,
and he didn't even buy the company. He
made 800 million for his investors in 3
years by terrifying the most powerful
executives in the world. Time magazine
put him on the cover. Fortune called him
the company hunter. Congress hauled him
in to testify. An entire town held
24-hour prayer virils asking God to stop
him. Then he lost everything. His stock
went from $171 to under $5. His company
drowned in 1.3 billion of debt. He was
pushed out of the empire. He spent 40
years building. By the time it was over,
Tboon Pickins was nearly 70 years old,
divorced, depressed, and down to roughly
$1.2 million in liquid assets. most
people would have disappeared. He didn't
disappear. He came back, built a hedge
fund from a desk and a telephone, and
earned $1.1 billion in a single year.
Then he gave away over a billion
dollars. Here's what most people miss
about Tboon Pickins. His product was
never oil. His product was narrative.
And he was the greatest salesman in the
history of American business. And the
person who tells the best story wins.
I'm Nico Lewig, the founder of
Collateral.com, the financial
storytelling firm. I spent months inside
this story, including three of Pickin's
own books, Forbes investigation spanning
four decades, a Time magazine cover
story, PBS interviews, a Wall Street
Week appearance, and an oral history
interview where Pickkins at 82 years old
reflects on everything he built in
Nearly Lost. Here's the thing most
people don't realize about Tboon
Pickins. Every chapter of his life was a
sales pitch. When he was 28 with no
money and no reputation, he knocked on
doors across the Texas panhandle selling
investors on Wildcat wells. When he took
Mesa public, he flew to Wall Street and
knocked on doors of institutional firms,
learning to speak the language of
portfolio managers. When he realized it
was cheaper to buy oil on the stock
exchange than drill for it in the
ground, he went on a national media
tour, convincing shareholders they were
being robbed by their own executives.
And when he lost everything in his
late60s, he went back to knocking on
doors, asking people to trust him with
their money one more time. Walk into a
room, tell a compelling story, and get
people to believe in you. If you watched
our documentary on Traml Crow, you'll
recognize a pattern here. Crow built the
largest real estate empire in America by
selling people on partnership. Pickkins
built the largest independent oil
company in America by selling people on
vision. Both of them understood that in
the business, the person who controls
the narrative controls the outcome. And
here's the one principle I want you to
take away from this entire story. The
person who tells the best story wins.
You're going to see this play out in
every chapter of his life. And here's
the journey that we're about to take.
Chapter one is The Wound covering 1928
to 1956.
Chapter 2 is Mesa covering 1956 to 1981.
Chapter 3 is The Insight covering 1981
to 1982.
Chapter four is the battle for golf
covering 1982 to 1984. Chapter five is
Boonbusters covering 1984 to 1985.
Chapter 6 is the fall covering 1986 to 1996.
1996.
Chapter 7 [music] is the comeback
covering 1996 to 2007. Chapter 8 is the
Pickins Plan covering 2008 to 2012.
Chapter 9 is the giveaway covering 2003
to 2018. Chapter 10 is the fourth
quarter covering 2017 to 2019. So let's
begin. Chapter 1, the wound. The
timeline here is from 1928 to 1956. And
to understand why Tboon Pickins bet
everything on storytelling, you have to
understand where he came from. Thomas
Boon Pickkins Jr. was born on May 22nd,
1928 in Holdenville, Oklahoma, a cow
town of 6,300 people surrounded by
pastures where cattle grazed alongside
active oil pumps. He was an only child.
His father, Thomas Boon Pickkins,
Senior, was a landman, someone who
secures mineral rights for leases
[music] for oil and gas drilling. His
mother, Grace Pickkins, ran the local
office of price administration during
the war. rationing gasoline for three
counties. But the real power in the
family sat on the porch across the
driveway. His grandmother, Nelly
Mullinsson, she taught him the two
lessons that would define his entire
life. The value of a dollar and the cost
of your character. She'd ask if I had
the money, and I'd reply yes, that I had
50 cents. That my haircut was 25 cents,
the movie 10 cents, and [music] I'd have
a nickel for popcorn. and she'd say, "A
fool and his money are soon parted.
Don't you ever forget that." One day,
while delivering papers, Young Boon
found an empty wallet. He returned it to
the owner, who gave him a dollar as a
reward. He ran home excited and told his
grandmother. Pickins recalled what she
said, saying, "My grandmother said,
"Sunny, take that dollar back. We're not
going to get a reward for being honest."
He had to return the dollar in a pouring
rainstorm. and the lesson stuck. He was
12 when he got his first paper route
with 28 customers. Within months, he had
bought the routes on either side of him,
expanding his territory to 154 homes. He
later called it his first introduction
to expanding [music] quickly by
acquisition. This is the same instinct
Traml Crow had at the exact same age.
Crow was mowing lawns, selling
magazines, and catting. Pickins was
buying paper routes. Both of them were
learning the same lesson. Nobody is
going to hand you anything. You have to
go get it yourself. Now, here's the
wound. His father was a gambler. Time
magazine reported that he was an
ineterate gambler who made and lost a
fortune buying and selling oil leases.
In the late 1930s, the search for oil in
the Seol area ran its course. Instead of
playing it safe with land deals, his
father started investing in wildcat
[music] wells, which had much greater
risk. Pickkins wrote about it saying,
"As it turned out, my father was better
at assessing risk in a game of a
fivecard draw than in looking for oil.
The family went from a yellow Pierce
Arrow to a used Chevy." His father took
a corporate job as a landman at Philips
Petroleum, not because he wanted to, but
because he had to. Pickkins wrote saying
this was the first time in his life that
he had not been self-employed and that
transition to the corporate world was
difficult for him. I don't think he ever
really made the adjustment. He had lived
in the wild too long. This is the wound.
His father was a brilliant storyteller,
a man everybody liked, but he lost his
independent and could never get it back.
Does this sound familiar to you? It
should because Traml Crow's father was a
bookkeeper who gave decades to someone
else's company and then when the company
disappeared, he had nothing to show for
it. Both men were shaped by the same
lessons. You must have ownership and
skin in the game in order to thrive.
After a basketball scholarship to Texas
A&M that ended in a broken elbow,
Pickkins transferred to Oklahoma State
and he graduated with a geology degree
in 1951. He then went to work for
Philips Petroleum, the same firm that
his father worked for. He hated it from
day one. Pickkins later described what
it was like, saying, quote, "Every
morning, a bell rang at 5 minutes before
8, signaling you to your desk, just like
at school. At noon, everyone would be
standing by the door waiting for the
lunch bell. The final bell rang at 5,
and they didn't want anyone staying past
quitting time. And after 3 years, Boon
quit. He cashed in his $1,300 pension,
bought a Ford station wagon that he
slept in while scouting well sites, and
struck out on his own with $2,500 in
borrowed money. Pickin said, quote,
"Except for a few members of my family,
no one gave me a prayer of succeeding.
My single-minded focus gave me an edge.
I was now going to succeed or fall on my
ass." Chapter 2. Mesa. The timeline here
is from 1956 to 1981. And here's where
the storytelling begins. In 1956, at the
age of 28, Pickkins founded Petroleum
Exploration, Inc. with two investors,
John O'Brien and Jean McCart, who gave
him a $100,000 line of credit. They got
half of the company, he got the other
half. He had no money, no letter head,
and he did his own typing. He was a sole
proprietor who looked younger than he
was and people called him the boy
geologist. But he was a good hustler. He
put together drilling funds, raised
money from his investors, and drilled
wells. His first programs were turned
4:1 and then 6:1. By 1964, he had enough
investors and enough track record to
take the company public. He named it
Mesa Petroleum after the flattop but of
the Texas panhandle. His salary that
year was $24,960.
Now, here's what made Pickings different
from every other independent oilman in
America. He didn't just drill wells, he
sold a vision. Just like Traml Crow was
building speculative warehouses before
he had tenants committed, Pickkins was
selling investors on reserves that
hadn't been discovered yet. Both men
were selling the future. Build it and
they will come. Drill it and the oil
will be there. Pickkins took that vision
global. In 1959, he scraped together $35,000
$35,000
to invest in drilling sites in Canada.
Mesa sank the income from those sites
into new wells and in 1979 sold its
Canadian operations to Dome Petroleum
for $600 million. He discovered a major
North Sea strike in 1975 and named it
after his then wife Beatatrice. Mesa put
54 platforms in the Gulf of Mexico.
Forbes wrote in 1979 saying, "Mesa got
wealthy up there when everyone was
looking in a different direction. He
called Pickkins the best financial man
I've met in 25 years in the oil
business. By 1981, Mesa stock hit $171 a
share." There's two reasons why I made
this film. The first is I love telling
financial stories and the second is I
want to tell yours. I'm the founder of
Collateral Partners. We help investment
firms and operating businesses close the
gap between who they actually are and
how they're perceived. We have finance
people who understand your business and
designers who make you look
institutional. And that combination
doesn't exist anywhere else. So, if
you're raising capital, closing clients,
or recruiting talent, and you're tired
of competitors who just present
themselves better, click the link below.
Let's get on a call and audit your
materials versus your leading
competitors, and let's close the gap.
Chapter 3, the insight. The timeline
here is from 1981 to 1982. By the early
1980s, Pickkins would have been working
on an idea that would have changed
everything for Mesa. He figured it was
vastly cheaper to look for oil and gas
reserve on the floor of the New York
Stock Exchange than to explore for them
in the Gulf of Mexico. Think about what
he was saying. If you take the 10
largest oil companies listed on the New
York Stock Exchange, 90% were not
replacing their reserves annually. Their
stocks were selling at an average price
of 45% of the appraised value of their
underlying assets. That means you could
buy $1 of oil in the ground for 45 on
the stock market. So why would you spend
$500 million drilling wells when you
could spend 500 million buying a company
that already had the oil? Pickin said it
plainly. It has become cheaper to look
for oil on the floor of the New York
Stock Exchange than in the ground. But
here's the problem. Nobody had ever done
this before. Not at this scale. To pull
it off, Pickins didn't just need money.
He needed a story. He needed to convince
shareholders that their own executives
were destroying value. He needed to
convince lenders that a tiny company
from Amarillo could take on a
billiondoll corporation. He needed to
convince the media that he wasn't a
pirate, but rather a champion of the
little guy. And that's exactly what he
did. In 1982, Mesa took aim at City's
Service, an Oklahoma firm with sales
nearly 20 times larger than Mesa's.
City's Service didn't just defend
itself. It launched a counterattack, a
Pac-Man defense, where the prey turns
around and tries to swallow the hunter.
For a brief terrifying moment, the tiny
company that started the fight was about
to be swallowed by its own target, but
Pickins survived. City's service ended
up selling itself to accidental
Petroleum, and Mesa walked away with a
$31.5 million profit. Mesa's vice
president explained the story, saying,
"Mesa had insufficient financial muscle
throughout that fight. We had a good
idea, but not enough money to back it
up. City's service was the proof of
concept. It proved that a tiny company
could force a giant to restructure just
by telling a better story to its
stakeholders. Then Pickkins went after
General American Oil and drove them into
the arms of Philips Petroleum. Mesa's
profit was 45 million. He went after
Suprron Energy. The profit there was 30
million. Each time the pattern was the
same. Pickins would announce a stake,
the stock price would soar, and then the
company would scramble to find a way
out, and the shareholders, the people
who actually own the company, would make
a fortune. Fortune magazine called Boon
the company hunter. And in late 1983, he
set his sights on the biggest target of
his career. Chapter 4, the battle for
golf. The timeline here is from 1983
until 1984. G Oil was not just another
company. It was an institution and Boone
had his sight set on something larger.
One of the legendary seven sisters that
dominated the global oil industry for
most of the 20th century. Based in
Pittsburgh, they had revenues of $29
billion a year. Mesa just had revenues
of $413 million. Pickkins waged the
battle with 1.3 billion in credit that
he raised from bankers and partners [music]
[music]
like independent Texas Oilman Sirill
Wagner and Jack Brown. Time magazine
reported what happened, saying his bid
was extremely bold. It was an incredibly
intuitive reading by Boon. G's top
executives would underestimate him. He
said it simply, saying they were not
street fighters. G's chairman, James
Lee, had made his contempt [music] for
Pickkins clear. He accused Pickkins of
hitand-run tactics. G went so far as to
say they didn't even consider Mesa a
real stockholder because they had
borrowed the money to buy the stock. But
that arrogance was the opening that
Pickkins needed. He waged the entire
campaign through storytelling, taking
out newspaper ads, giving interviews,
and pointing [music] out to every
shareholder exactly how much money they
had to gain. Chief executives who
themselves own few shares of their
companies have no more feeling for the
average [music] stockholder than they do
for baboons in Africa. GF refused to
deal with Mesa, so G sold itself to
Chevron for 13.2 billion, the biggest
merger in business history at the time.
G Oil, a pillar of American industry for
83 years, was gone. In Tibboon Pickins,
his investor [music] group had purchased
21.7 million shares at an average about
$44 each. Chevron paid $80 a share. The
profit was approximately $760 million.
He had not taken control of G, but he
had forced it into the largest corporate
merger in history, and he had made
nearly $800 [music]
million doing it. When 50 of the
arbitrageers who had profited from the
deal attended a dinner for [music]
Pickins at the Regency Hotel in
Manhattan, New York Mayor Edward Cook
gave him a crystal apple in honor of the
$50 million the fight had brought to the
city. Midway through the evening, a
chimpanzeee on roller skates appeared
wearing a golf filling station uniform.
It wheeled in, sat next to Pickkins, and
started licking his face. >> [music]
>> [music]
>> Pickkins quipped in reference to G's
chairman. James Lee was never this
friendly. Pickkins was 55 years old. He
was on the cover of Time magazine and he
was just getting started. Chapter 5.
Boonbusters. The timeline here is from
1984 to 1985. After Gulf, the corporate
world declared war on Tboon Pickins. He
was denounced on Capitol Hill, in
boardrooms, and in the press. Retired
City Service executive GC Richardson
spoke for many saying he's only after
the almighty buck. He's nothing but a
pirate. G's Harold Hammer was blunt
about picking shareholder crusade saying
my only objection to Pickins is the aura
he tries to create when he says he's for
the small shareholder. That's just a
load of crap. But Pickkins didn't slow
down. His next target was his former
employer, the company where he sat at
the desk listening to bells ring waiting
for permission to go to lunch. The
company his father used to work for,
Philillips Petroleum. Bartletville,
Oklahoma was a company town with a
population of 36,000 people. Phillips
was its lifeblood, the largest employer,
the largest taxpayer, and the center of
civic life. When Pickkins announced his
bid in December 1984, the town didn't
resist. It rose up in a revolution. They
held 24-hour prayer virils at the local
church, asking God to protect their
company from Tboon Pickins. They
organized a boon busters campaign. The
battle turned into a bruising and
emotional struggle. Eventually, Pickkins
agreed to back off. Phillips guaranteed
him an $89 million profit on his shares.
Then he was after Unical, the 14th
largest oil company in the country.
Unical's chairman, Fred Hartley, was a
different kind of opponent. Hartley
fought back with a controversial defense
tactic, a massive self-tender offer that
excluded pick and shares. The Delaware
Supreme Court upheld it in a landmark
ruling, Unical Court versus Mesa
Petroleum. That case is still taught in
every corporate law class in America.
Pickkins estimated that as a result of
his takeover battles about 750,000
small investors saw the value of their
holdings grow by approximately $12
billion. But the business roundt the
powerful lobbying group of Fortune 500
CEOs raised $10 million specifically to
destroy T. Boon Pickikin's reputation
and it was working. The era of the
hostile takeover was coming to an end,
and the greatest salesman in the history
of American business [music] was about
to discover that even the best story in
the world can't change the price of
natural gas. Chapter 6, the fall. The
timeline here is from 1986 to 1996. The
game had changed. Companies armed
themselves with poison [music] pills,
staggered boards, and golden parachutes.
The stock market crash of 1987 dried up
the market for hostile takeovers [music]
and Pickkins had made a fateful bet. He
believed natural gas prices were about
to soar. He loaded up Mesa with debt to
invest heavily in natural gas property
and he was wrong. Natural gas prices
collapsed and stayed low for years.
Forbes wrote in 1992 saying time and
cash finally seemed to be running out
for Tboon Pickins. The numbers were
devastating. Mesa had $1.3 billion in
debt. Revenue was about $173 million,
barely more than the 144 million annual
interest bill. The stock shriveled from
$171 in 1981 to $70, then to under $5.
Forbes called it a bet the ranch gamble
on natural gas that had been a blowout
for shareholders. This is the cautionary
tale of what happens when a great
salesman starts believing his own story
too much. Pickkins had spent the entire
decade of the 1980s telling the world
that oil and gas were undervalued. He
told the story so convincingly that it
had convinced himself and he bet the
company on it. But no amount of
storytelling could change commodity
prices. Richard Rainwater came in to
rescue the company, but ultimately
Pickins was pushed out. By 1996, Tboon
Pickins, the most famous businessman in
America, the man on the cover of Time
magazine, the scourge of big oil, was
nearly 70 years old. He was divorced. He
was depressed. His net worth had
evaporated. He later admitted he was
down to roughly $1.2 million in liquid
[music] assets. He wrote about the
lowest point, saying, "I was in that
hard, tough spot in the fall of 1996."
For most people, this would be the end
of the story. This is where the Traml
Crow parallel is impossible to ignore.
And if you haven't watched our Traml
Crow video, go back and watch it after
this. Crow nearly lost everything twice.
First in the 1973 oil crisis and then
again in the 1986 SNL meltdown. Both
times, his partner stepped up and
sacrificed their own wealth to save him.
Crow survived because the relationships
he had built over many decades. Pickkins
was about to prove the exact same thing.
The relationships, the reputation, the
trust he had built from over 40 years of
doing deals, those were about to become
the only assets to him that mattered.
Chapter 7, the comeback. The timeline
here is from 1996 to 2007. Boon Pickins
BP Capital leased a modest office and
outfitted it with used furniture and
off-the-shelf computers. Pickkins had
his desk, a cherry taken from Mesa, a
computer, and a telephone. He had five
employees and a dog named Murdoch. He
wrote about it saying, "I like that
feeling. No baggage. I traded the
corporate jet for the company plane." As
the ads of Southwest Airlines would say,
he imagined a headline that captivated
him for years. Quotes, "The old man
makes a comeback." His longtime adviser,
Bobby Stillwell, liked to say, quotes,
"Boon had been in the prime of his life
three times." Now, think about what
happened next. A man in his late60s,
having lost his company, a marriage, and
virtually all of his wealth, went back
to doing exactly what he did as a
28-year-old in Amarillo, knocking on
doors, and asking people to trust him
with their money. He formed BP Capital
Energy Fund in 1997, a commodity trading
fund focused on energy markets. The
pitch was essentially this. I've spent
my entire life in energy. I know these
markets better than anyone alive. I got
knocked down, but the fundamentals, I
understand, have not changed. It took
extraordinary salesmanship to get
investors to back a 70some year old who
had just lost his company. Think about
this. He went from a few billion dollars
to 1.2 $.2 million. Then in the winter
of 2002,
natural gas prices spiked. A $10 million
investment Pickkins made in natural gas
commodities turned into $125 million. By
the end of February 2003, the fund was
up another 300 million, a 330% return in
2 months. Pickkins reflected on the
irony saying, "It's interesting that the
thing that sank us [music] at Mesa,
natural gas, was the thing that made us
a BP capital. Timing is everything. The
media noticed the resurrection of Tboon
Pickins." Read one headline. Two years
ago, the legendary oil man was divorced,
depressed, and discredited. "Age will be
served," read another. Tboon Pickins is
76 years old. By almost any reckoning,
he is the hottest money manager in the
[music] world. By 2006, the BP Capital
Commodity Fund returned 54% after fees.
Pickins earned $1.1 billion that year
alone, making him the fourth highest
earner on Wall Street ahead of George
Soros. At the close of 2007, the BP
Capital Energy Equity Fund was up 1,140%
since inception. Meanwhile, the company
that had pushed him out, which
eventually became Pioneer Natural
Resources, had lost $1.7 billion in its
[music] first 3 years. From 1997 to
2007, Pioneer earned a total profit of
about $900 million. In that same time
period, BP Capital made $8 billion.
Pickins later said, quotes, "When I
started BP Capital, I had a desk, a
telephone. Best of all, unlike Pioneer,
we carried no debt. The greatest
salesman in the history of American
business had done it again. His product
was never oil. His product was
narrative. And narrative, unlike oil,
never runs dry." Chapter 8. The Pickins
Plan. The timeline here is from 2008 to
2012. In July 2008, on his mother's
birthday, Pickkins launched the Pickins
Plan. He spent $62 million of his own
money on a national advertising campaign
to promote American energy independence
through wind and natural gas. He
testified before Congress. He met with
senators, governors, presidential
candidates from both parties. Pickkins
told his wife Meline about the plan and
she responded saying, "I know that
you'll do it and you'll do a good job.
Now, let's go back to sleep and do it
tomorrow." For a brief, remarkable
moment, an 80-year-old Texas oilman had
unified the country around energy
policy. Liberals loved the wind power.
Conservatives loved the natural gas, but
everyone loved the idea of energy
independence. Then the financial crisis
of 2008 hit. Natural gas prices
collapsed again. The credit markets
froze. And Pickickets couldn't get the
transmission lines built to carry the
wind power from the panhandle to the
cities. He had ordered about $1.5
billion of turbines, but later abandoned
the project. Chapter nine, the giveaway.
The timeline year from 2003 to 2018. As
he entered the final chapters of his
life, Pickkins turned his attention to
giving his [music] fortune away. I've
long stated that I enjoy making money
and I enjoy giving it away. I like
making money more, but giving it away is
a very close second. His greatest
beneficiary was his alma mater, Oklahoma
State University. Over his lifetime, he
gave the school more than $652 million.
In 2006 alone, he gave $165 million to
the athletic department. This was the
largest gift to athletics and the
history of American higher education at
the time. He gave $100 million to the
University of Texas system, split
between MD Anderson Cancer Center in UT
Southwestern Medical Center. He
explained why saying, "I firmly believe
one of the reasons I was put on this
earth was to make money and be generous
with it." He signed the giving pledge,
promising to donate the majority of his
wealth to charity. When Bill Gates
called to ask him to commit to giving
away 50%, Pickkins responded, quote, I'm
already on record saying I do 90%. He
said bluntly, I'm not a big fan of
inherited wealth. It generally does more
harm than good. Oklahoma State President
Hargus captured [music] what Pickkins
meant to the university, saying he was
the ultimate cowboy. It is impossible to
calculate his full impact on Oklahoma
State. By the time Pickkins was done, he
had given over a billion dollars.
Chapter 10, the fourth quarter. The
timeline here is from 2017 to 2019. In
2017, at the age of 89, Pickkins
suffered a series of strokes and a
serious fall. He put his beloved 65,000
acre Mesa Vista Ranch on the market. He
closed his hedge fund in 2018. He knew
the end was near and he wrote a final
message. I clearly am in the fourth
quarter. Let me give you the full
timeline of what this man built. 1928
was the year that he was born in
Holdenville, Oklahoma. 1951 was his
geology degree from Oklahoma State. 1954
he quit Philips Petroleum with $2,500.
1956 he founded Petroleum Exploration,
Inc. 1964 was when Mesa Petroleum went
public. 1969 was the Hugoton takeover, a
company 20 times Mesa's size. 1979 he
sold Canadian operations for $600
million. 1982 was the city service
battle. 1984 he forced the Gulf Chevron
merger for $13.2 billion. 1985 he was on
the cover of Time magazine. 1992 Mesa
was drowning in 1.3 billion of debt.
1996 he was pushed out of Mesa with
roughly $1.2 million in liquidity. 1997
he founded BP Capital with a desk and a
telephone. 2003 he made $300 million in
two months on natural gas. 2006 he
earned $1.1 billion in a single year.
2008 he launched the Pickkins plan and
spent $62 million of his own money. 2019
he gave over a billion dollars. Tboon
Pickkins died on September 11th, 2019 at
the age of 91 years old. He'd been
married five times. He had four children
and numerous grandchildren. He left
behind a legacy that reshaped American
capitalism. He had forced the
restructuring of an entire industry. He
had made the term shareholder rights
part of the national vocabulary. He had
proven that a man from Holdenville,
Oklahoma could go toe-to-toe with the
most powerful corporations in the world
[music] and win. And he had proved
something else. Twice in his life,
Pickkins lost nearly everything. [music]
And twice he came back not because he
found more oil, not because the market
turned in his favor, but because people
believed in him. Just like Treml Crow,
who was saved by partners who
voluntarily liquidated their wealth to
rescue him. Pickkins was saved by
investors who backed him when he had
nothing left but his name and his story.
If you haven't watched our documentary
on Treml Crow, go watch it. The
parallels between these two men will
blow your mind. Crow built an empire in
partnership. Pickkins built an empire on
narrative. Both lost everything and both
came back. Both survived because of the
relationships they had built over
decades of treating people right. And if
you were to take away one thing from
this, it is that Tboon's Pickins product
was never oil. His product was always
the same thing. It was a compelling
story told with absolute conviction by a
man who would never stop selling. He
sold investors on Wildcat Wells and the
Texas panhandle when he was just 28. He
sold Wall Street on a tiny oil company
from Amarillo when he was 36. He sold
the entire American public on
shareholder rights when he was 56. He
sold hedge fund investors on one more
bet when he was 70. He sold the nation
on energy independence when he was 80.
The skill was always the same. Walk into
a room, tell a story, make people
believe. That skill was portable, it was
durable, and it was apparently
indestructible. Pickins wrote in his
final message saying, "I've been a lucky
guy, a very lucky guy, and I hope that
you find yourself as lucky as I consider
myself. Don't think about what you're
going to get. Think about what you can
give." And the person who tells the best
story wins. This is about Ton Pickkins
1928 to 2019 and this is the greatest
story ever sold. One more thing, this
film took seven people weeks to create.
Our goal is to produce content like this
every single week. Netflix production on
the greatest stories in finance and
business. And if you want to see more of
this, like the video, subscribe to the
channel, drop a comment, and share it
with someone who needs to hear this
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