The Financial Times runs an interview with T. Boone Pickens: “Visiting T. Boone Pickens’s office suite in Dallas is like walking into a museum. The lobby is crammed with memorabilia: a whole wall of Mr Pickens’s face on magazine covers, a picture of him with Ronald and Nancy Reagan, a spectacular aerial photograph of the Oklahoma State University football stadium, rebuilt thanks to his donation of about $200m.”  

“The room is dominated by a striking painting by Texas artist G. Harvey called ‘Boomtown Drifters’, showing horsemen riding past a line of primitive oil derricks in the early years of the 20th century. The message is unmistakable: the Old West and the modern oil industry are closer than you might think.”  

“It feels like a memorial for Mr Pickens’s career as one of the great mavericks of American business, first as an oilman from the 1950s to the 1970s, then as a corporate raider in the 1980s, and most recently as a prophet of ‘energy independence’ for North America.”