He lives in north Dallas with his third wife, Amy, 50, in a 23,000-square-foot (2,100-square-meter) home on 10 acres in the pricey Preston Hollow neighborhood, where one house was for sale in April for $33 million. Warren’s six-bedroom, 13-bathroom home has a chip-and-putt green, a pole-vault pit, a four-lane bowling alley, and a 200-seat theater where the billionaire’s musician pals play private concerts. A polished 12-foot section of an oak tree gives his 12-year-old son Klyde’s bedroom the feel of a treehouse. “Isn’t that cool?” Warren asks as he shows a visitor around.
Giraffes, javelinas, and a hulking, ill-tempered species of Asian oxen called a gaur roam Warren’s 11,000-acre ranch northwest of Austin. He also has ranches in eastern Texas and southwest Colorado, a house on Lake Tahoe, and an island off the coast of Honduras.
He donated millions of dollars (he declines to say how many) to have a Dallas park named for Klyde. He indulged his passion for music by co-founding a label called Music Road Records.
Five years ago, Energy Transfer was a little-known family of partnerships with about $6 billion in revenue and pipelines that moved nothing but gas almost entirely within Texas. Today, it’s a 71,000-mile oil-and-gas transportation-and-processing web that spans the country and exports worldwide.
“To be where we are today, it’s like a dream,” Warren says. “I swear to God, I almost think we did it without anybody noticing.”
One sunny March afternoon, Warren settles into the cabin of his Dassault Falcon 900 jet, taking pains to note that he, not Energy Transfer, owns this and his other jets. The next day, he’ll hop one of those planes for a meeting in Tegucigalpa with the president of Honduras about a potential project.
Now, he’s in jeans and a white Energy Transfer polo, heading for a quick visit to his Austin recording studio. Joining him are Energy Transfer colleagues Matt Ramsey and Cliff Harris. They love to needle him about his houses and planes and how his hip replacement last year helped his golf game (or not). As the Falcon exits Dallas airspace, they shut up long enough for their friend to tell some of his story.
He grew up middle class in little White Oak, Texas, about 120 miles east of Dallas, population 1,903 when he lived there. His father worked in the oil fields and urged his son to get an education so he wouldn’t have to do the same.
Young Kelcy flunked out of the University of Texas at Arlington after a year of partying and went home to work for his dad’s employer, Sun Pipeline. He attended night classes while toiling on a pipeline under construction nearby. “That was hot, dirty work,” Warren recalls. “I really grew up.”
He returned to UT, earned an engineering degree in 1978, and took a $1,333-a-month job designing pipelines for Lone Star Gas in Dallas. “I thought I was rich,” he says. He moved to Odessa, Texas, to learn the commercial side of the business and then back to Dallas to work for another pipeline outfit, Endevco.