T. Boone Pickens, oil tycoon

T. Boone Pickens Jr. -- who in 1983 as president of Mesa Petroleum mounted an unsuccessful corporate takeover of Gulf Oil -- no longer runs his own independent oil company. But the self-made tycoon from Oklahoma still is very much on top of the day-to-day madness of the global energy business, where prices are spiking, world oil production is said to have peaked and Americans live in daily terror of unfriendly despots in the Middle East and South America.

These days Pickens, 77, is running BP Capital, a successful hedge fund that invests primarily in oil and gas futures, alternative energy and energy-related companies. I talked to Pickens -- who says he went after Gulf Oil not to move it out of Pittsburgh but because he thought it was being so badly managed -- by telephone on Thursday from his offices in Dallas

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