T. Boone Pickens (born 1928) started the Mesa Petroleum Company with a $2,500 investment and built it into the largest independent oil and gas company in America. Then he shook corporate America with a series of hostile takeover attempts that earned him a reputation as a corporate raider. Pickens' ideas about corporate restructuring, and the tactics he used for achieving them, were controversial during the 1980s, but have become standard procedure in executive suites today.

Fortune magazine called him the "most hated man in America" during the 1980s, but Pickens was a folk hero to many stockholders, who welcomed his criticism of large corporate executives whom he said were more concerned with their own salaries and perquisites than with shareholders.

Thomas Boone Pickens Jr. was born on May 22, 1928, in Holdenville, Oklahoma, the only child of Thomas Boone and Grace Pickens. Pickens' father was an oil company lawyer who claimed a...