He admitted to miscalculating. “It’s my toughest run in 10 years,” Pickens said, according to the Wall Street Journal. “We missed the turn in the market. There’s nothing fun about it.”
Crude Crash
Six years later, crude prices crashed again, creating the oil industry’s worst financial crisis in a generation. Pickens responded by ultimately selling out all of his oil holdings, choosing instead to wait for a better time to jump back in, he said in a Bloomberg TV interview in February 2016. Later that year, federal filings showed that his BP Capital Fund Advisers LLC took new stakes in a handful of the pipeline owners that ship crude to market.
Along with his investments in oil, Pickens built business plans on water, wind and natural gas. His plan for a $10 billion, 4,000-megawatt wind farm fell victim to the financial collapse of 2008 and the declining natural-gas prices that accompanied it.
On the New York Stock Exchange, his legacy continues. NYSE Pickens Oil Response ETF, a spinoff of the wildcatter’s shuttered BP Capital, began trading in early 2018 under the ticker “BOON.” The equity index fund includes energy explorers and producers, oil-services companies, refiners and renewables companies that are closely correlated to the Brent crude oil price.
After his marriage ended in divorce Pickens married Beatrice Carr Stuart in 1972. That marriage ended in divorce, as did his third marriage, to Nelda Cain, and his fourth, to Madeleine Paulson, the widow of Allen Paulson, founder of Gulfstream Aerospace.
Pickens’ fifth marriage was to Toni Brinker, widow of Norman Brinker, who turned Chili’s Grill and Bar restaurants into a national chain.
He had five children: Pam, Michael, Tom, Liz and Deborah.
--With assistance from David Wethe and Joe Carroll.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.