T. Boone Pickens Farewell Letter

https://boonepickens.com/?p=2343

by cgoodmac • 7 years ago

179 70 7 years ago

boonepickens.com

jedberg• 7 years ago

If you are reading this, I have passed on from this world — not as big a deal for you as it was for me.

Clever. :)

bshimmin• 7 years ago

I loved this tweet from him a year or so ago: https://twitter.com/boonepickens/status/953398294172102658

protomyth• 7 years ago

He had some real winners on Twitter, his exchange with Drake was pretty funny https://www.businessinsider.com/oil-tycoon-t-boone-pickens-o...

RickJWagner• 7 years ago

"It’s your shot now."

That statement and others show me the Pickens was trying to help others, to encourage them. I especially like the list of guidelines at the bottom of the page.

simonebrunozzi• 7 years ago

I had no idea who this guy was. Quick excerpt:

Thomas Boone Pickens Jr. was an American business magnate and financier. Pickens chaired the hedge fund BP Capital Management. He was a well-known takeover operator and corporate raider during the 1980s. As of November 2016, Pickens had a net worth of $500 million.

So, it seems, a "financial" predator, possibly of the worst kind. Not a lot of sympathy for these kind of people.

Edit: to be clear, "late" philanthropists are a nice thing, but as Ricardo Semler [0] once said, "If you need to give away money, you took too much in the first place".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardo_Semler

seibelj• 7 years ago

I am very happy that specialists exist who can take struggling businesses and fix their management and processes. Your 401k agrees with me.

jacquesm2• 7 years ago

There are good corporate raiders and bad ones, T. Boone Pickens ends up near the far end of bad.

His main shtick was to propose a buy-out or merger, wait for the stock to rise on the news, dump it and then never follow through. That doesn't take care of 'struggling businesses', nor does it 'fix their management processes'. Your 401k might still agree but for wholly different reasons than you think.

Earlier in his career I'd say he was a lot better.

tootie• 7 years ago

He was the main sponsor of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth that spread a bunch of lies about John Kerry's Vietnam service during the 2016 presidential campaign.

imgabe4• 7 years ago

"If you need to give away money, you took too much in the first place".

This is a strange sentiment to find on a board that is at least partially targeted at aspiring company founders.

For example the money Bill Gates is giving away is mostly in the form of shares of Microsoft. Those didn't exist before he started the company (with others of course). He signed some paperwork, then later 500 million shares (or however many) came into existence and he had them. Who did he take them from?

Later on other people decided they also wanted shares of Microsoft and assigned them a monetary value. Did Bill Gates somehow force them to want the shares he had? To the extent that he "took" money it was in exchange for shares of a company that other people found valuable.

random023987• 7 years ago

This is a strange sentiment to find on a board that is at least a partially targeted at aspiring company founders.

It's not inconsistent. Most founders are trying to create companies that provide economic value; one can believe that the creation of economic value is a good thing, while also believing that more of the economic surplus created should directly go to the common good.

dbingham3• 7 years ago

He took them from the employees of Microsoft who's work helped make those shares valuable.

Edit: Apparently this statement needs further clarification. What do those shares represent? A share of the profits. And what are the profits? Literally the difference between the company's revenues and expenses. It's literally the difference between the value created by workers and the salary the company paid them in return for that value.

So _of course_ Bill Gates took that wealth from the company's workers. That's what profit is!

----------

Now to expand on the broader idea, in a Democratic Socialist economy where the stock corporation is replaced by the worker cooperative, he would not have had the right to claim 500 million shares. Those shares would have been distributed to the employees of Microsoft based on some metric of contribution to the company. Or would never have existed in the first place, and each worker would have had a vote in how the company was run and the profits distributed.

In either method, Bill Gates would have gotten some still significant portion of the value the company created, but no where near the amount he walked away with in our current economy. The rest of that value would have been distributed to the company's workers in one way or another - profit distributions, shares, dividends, what have you.

In the minds of many - myself included - that is a much more equitable system. Bill Gates took the money from the people who helped create it in the first place. And he took a share that far out paced his contribution to the creation of that value.

He was able to do that because our economic system is set up around authoritarian companies, where the founders and CEOs have near dictatorial power (or oligarchical power with the board). And dictatorships are rarely equitable.

brain5ide• 7 years ago

Ahem. Microsoft screwed quite a few companies/people in their day. Share value is almost direct consequence of that screwing. I'm not strictly against it, but I'd just like that awareness of it to still be on the table when considering things.

dannypgh• 7 years ago

This is a strange sentiment to find on a board that is at least a partially targeted at aspiring company founders.

It's not a universally held belief that a company founder must try to make as much money for themselves as possible.

Entrepreneurs, like everyone else, have values, and some of the values are in conflict with some of their actions. I have a hard time imagining anyone (excluding sociopaths) who legitimately believe their actions don't create any conflict with their values. Discussing the conflict between "I want to start a company" and "I believe there's a maximum amount of wealth that one can morally or ethically acquire" seems super relevant to the audience here.

He signed some paperwork, then later 500 million shares (or however many) came into existence and he had them. Who did he take them from?

I don't think it's worth getting hung up on whether anyone "took" wealth versus created it, because I'm not sure those are mutually exclusive. I would argue MS "took" money from people via unfair bundling practices, many of which were anticompetitive and landed the company in hot water. If you want to be simplistic, MS under BG took money from everyone who was forced to buy a windows license despite not wanting or needing one, at the very least.

_match4• 7 years ago

He was also known for massive investments into wind farms, divesting his petroleum portfolio, and rallying fellow conservatives to take climate change seriously.

You admit you’ve never heard of him, then read Wikipedia, and feel sufficiently armed with the knowledge required to self-righteously proclaim judgement on the life of another human being.

stephen2• 7 years ago

The comments on this thread are terrible.

I don't know enough about him to pass moral judgement, but it seems like many others think that they do (after a quick scan of Wikipedia, meh, that's good enough).

It just seems crass to be flippantly judgmental when the guy just died, and in response to his last elegant / humble / insightful "post" to the world.

I'm also confused at the implicit viewpoints that, IMO, are at odds with the HN/YC ethos of "individual hussle/initiative/hack your way to huge growth/etc". I.e. if Pickens wasn't from another generation and another industry, I think he'd fit in very well with the HN/YC types (disclaimer/ha, I'm making an assumption that I just chastised others for doing).

Anyway, makes me wonder if the "real HN" crowd has moved on elsewhere.

Clubber• 7 years ago

Our culture seems to have just gotten angry all the time and at everybody. Probably not healthy. Definitely a waste of emotional energy.

adrr• 7 years ago

Because he was terrible person who tried to con people out their water under guise of clean energy. He's best forgotten.

kragen• 7 years ago

Hacking is the playful application of ingenuity, or achieving things the experts in the field thought were impossible. Pickens, whatever his merits, didn't do that and didn't value it. Hacking is not tricking people and ripping them off.

_match4• 7 years ago

Agreed. Currently reading the biography of Disney, and it’s so depressing to hear he was the punching bag of every writer, journalist, critic, and university professor throughout the 60s.

Was Disney the conformist racist simpleminded backwater troglodyte they claimed, or were they?

It’s hard to not be bothered by the pettiness of the “cold and timid souls who neither know victory or defeat”. But I once felt hacker news had fewer of those voices.

spking2• 7 years ago

Are you reading the Gabler or Thomas biography on Disney?

Aloha• 7 years ago

Having read several bio's of Disney, I'd say he wasn't.

The worst factual criticism that can be pointed at Disney was he was overly sentimental for a past that never was. He painted American history in such a way to present a "smooth façade of sentimentality and stubborn optimism".

He was very much a man of his time, he wasn't known to use racial epithets - but was racially insensitive like most men of his era - he had several jews in his inner circle, and none of his employees (even the ones who didn't like him) would say he was anti-Semitic - but he allied himself with anti-communist groups that had a strong anti-Semitic bend to them.

I would argue on whole, he left the world a better place than he found it however, the technical improvements he and his company introduced to the world of animation left a huge and lasting impact felt the world over.

martythemaniak2• 7 years ago

I think there's been a huge change in HN's tone over the last 1-2 years or thereabouts towards "takedowns" and lots of negative rhetoric against people, companies, technologies etc. I used to think it was mostly just specific things, like anti-Musk sentiment because a lot of people find him grating, but I now think its mostly just a reflection of the general anti-tech that's very much in vogue.

I also think it's a one-way street, because it's very asymmetrical. It's super quick, easy and satisfying to burn someone because they appear to be a hypocrite, but quite hard to make the counter-case, because reality is often messy and grey (such as this guy, who was both an oil man and a wind energy man). So fewer and fewer people will bother to do all that work to reply to negativity, which will naturally lead to more voice/upvotes on one side, which makes it even more onerous to reply etc.

codeddesign• 7 years ago

I agree with this sentiment. Being on here for 6 years now, the overwhelming perspective is love to hate along with the mob rules. Go against the mob and you will be downvoted to oblivion. Ridiculing someone that cannot depend themselves is just a new low in moral character amongst HN users.

supercanuck• 7 years ago

I don't think it is anti-tech, so much as anti big money. Tech isn't as sexy when you realize how it is funded. Tech use to be about people working in their garages and striking rich on hard work, perseverance.

hn_throwaway_992• 7 years ago

I think there's been a huge change in HN's tone over the last 1-2 years

Replace "HN" with "the world" and I'd agree with you. I think your average person is so exhausted by the shrieking of the the online naysayers that they just reduce their involvement. For example, I saw an article recently about Andrew Yang's very intelligent, classy response to those racist comments from that prospective SNL comedian, and then he was pilloried for "pandering to the white vote". While lots of folks came to Yang's defense, it was just sad that they had to.

I often think that the Internet has fundamentally altered the "freedom of speech" calculus in that it allows people to say outrageous things for attention, but largely ignore the negative consequences (i.e. social opprobrium) of those statements. I have no idea what the solution is, but I don't think it will get better any time soon.

_Codemonkeyism• 7 years ago

Those people here are not anti-Musk but anti-Musk-holydom.

80386• 7 years ago

It's more than "anti-tech sentiment" - in many cases, it's darkly hinting that democidal totalitarianism would be a good idea. (Or at least that the extreme left deserves a fortieth or fiftieth chance to implement all its ideas, and maybe they won't produce democidal totalitarian regimes this time.) And it's everywhere now, not just on HN.

75dvtwin• 7 years ago

I do not think the change in tone/civility and is due to the 'comments' only.

The change is also due to the topics and topics sources constantly pushed into the discussion (often by very high-karma participants).

HN has basically become

NYT/BBC/WallStreetJournal/Vox/Slate/BuzzFeed discussion forum (for anything relating to environment/economy/politics).

Seems that more reasonable technical (although, narrower in scientific scope) discussion is happening on lobste.rs

In there, there is also publicly viewable moderation log, that helps to understand/evaluate how moderation decisions are made.

To me the change started happening in about 2014 where public deplatforming/takedowns became normalized in Software tech sector.

However, I also agree that this type of change at HN, accelerated in more recent years.

briandear• 7 years ago

there's been a huge change in HN's tone over the last 1-2 years or thereabouts towards "takedowns" and lots of negative rhetoric against people, companies, technologies etc.

I've been around HN for almost 10 years now and what has happened on HN is noteworthy. In the "old" days, Hacker News was literally called Startup News and startups and the whole optimism around them was celebrated. Even though there were some famous examples of kind of chopping down an idea -- it wasn't done in some kind of anti-capitalist, political way, but in a typical "nerdy" kind of way. Here's probably the most famous example:

I have a few qualms with this [Dropbox] app: 1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software. 2. It doesn't actually replace a USB drive. Most people I know e-mail files to themselves or host them somewhere online to be able to perform presentations, but they still carry a USB drive in case there are connectivity problems. This does not solve the connectivity issue. 3. It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this? [1].

Now, if we did a Show HN for Dropbox today, the negative comments would be something similar to this:

"Why would you want to store files on a cloud on that generates a huge carbon footprint and support some VC-backed "n-ist"* company that doesn't support government-owned health care and only exists to make profits for shareholders? And besides, there's $preferred_Javascript_framework that can do it without having to conform to the anti-competition walled garden or have any need to use S3 and support Amazon's unfair labor practices."

The "old" way wasn't questioning the act of making money from an invention (capitalism,) while the "new" way has gotten all kinds of pseudo-woke. It seems like "new" HN has become severely anti-capitalist and more interested in shitting on the very system that created (and continues to create) some of the most important, useful technology the world has ever seen. There's a lot of nonsense, for sure (i.e. Juicero,) but then again there was a lot of nonsense in the 1800s [2] and other periods of great technological accomplishment. It's normal to have a bunch of noise with the signal.

We literally can order almost anything from anywhere and have it brought to your door. There are cars that drive themselves. There are aircraft that fly themselves. There are affordable watches that you can use to make phone calls and actually do an ECG. That's amazing. But rather than critiquing the tech in typical nerd-debate fashion (like old Hacker News,) instead there is a distinct group that would spend time attacking Apple's tax strategies or Amazon's carbon footprint. That's significant because it marks a change from the days where companies like Apple were seen as "creating the future" instead now, they are seen as "obligated to pay for a country's social programs because they're so big." That's just nuts. Rather that promoting tech companies of all sorts and sizes and promoting the creation of the future, instead a lot of words are written demanding that those companies pay more to governments. That those companies should somehow be penalized or punished for being successful (from building things people want and find very useful.)

I'm going to get downvoted into oblivion (because circa 2019 Hacker News,) but I feel like the problem here is that as Hacker News went more international, many of the afflictions endemic to Europe have become a bigger influence here on Hacker News. The indefinite pessimism of Europe [3][4] has infected this community specifically and much of Silicon Valley in general. Essentially the indefinite pessimists have pushed out the optimists. Perhaps there's some hope though and the pendulum will swing back to the Definite Optimism of the 1950s and 1960s -- guys like Elon Musk, the late Steve Jobs and a few others seem to have been trying pretty hard to bring back the excitement and optimism of building the future. However, for every Musk, there are dozens of "leaders" who care to preach Doomsday predictions and FUD rather than moving full speed towards building something really cool and useful. Airplanes are a canary here. Flying from Singapore to London used to be considered amazing. Now instead of celebrating human mobility at a scale never before possible (and taking advantage of the opportunities that brings for peace, understanding, and commerce,) instead people lament the carbon footprint and shareholder value of the airline.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_oil [3] https://zakslayback.com/pessimism-optimism-definite-indefini... [4] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/03/european-count...

* where "n" is race, sex, gender, class, etc.

js2• 7 years ago

The comments on this thread are terrible.

Those comments are all now dead or nearly so and I wouldn't have even seen them if your comment weren't calling attention to them. Please don't do that. Just downvote or flag them and trust others to do the same. Otherwise we end up having another discussion about HN instead of about the submission.

Anyway, makes me wonder if the "real HN" crowd has moved on elsewhere.

Please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Just go look at any HN submission of any remotely controversial figure and you'll find terrible comments. It isn't new.

stephen2• 7 years ago

Fair! Thanks for the reminder.

You're right; I was very early into this thread, when those comments were still at the top.

And also the mobile app I use doesn't have a down vote button, so my "I want to react" urge had to go through a new comment instead of the voting itself. I'll flip over to chrome and down vote there next time.

mbostleman• 7 years ago

I think the fact that your foundation of historical context requires a need to consult Wikipedia to know who/what T. Boone Pickens was is a good predictor of that negative knee-jerk response given popular culture today as so much of it relies on minimal historical context.

codesushi42• 7 years ago

Don't come here for the political commentary. Do it for the technical commentary. At least when it is not completely incorrect bullshit.

But the latter has always been an issue here. And there's still enough insight to keep me coming back.

throwaway5752• 7 years ago

"Learn to analyze well. Assess the risks and the prospective rewards, and keep it simple."

"Stay fit. You don’t want to get old and feel bad. You’ll also get a lot more accomplished and feel better about yourself if you stay fit. I didn’t make it to 91 by neglecting my health."

It's a good final letter and has good advice. Complicated guy, complicated legacy, but good advice.

everybodyknows• 7 years ago

The quote from "Indispensable Man” reminds me of this from Charles de Gaulle:

"Indispensable men? The graveyards are full of them."

oh_sigh• 7 years ago

I wish there was a block user feature on hn. Frankly, with about half the commenters in this thread, I think I would be better off if I didn't run across their inane comments on any subject any more.

specialist• 7 years ago

100%. Back in the day our offline mail readers (for BBSs, CompuServe, BIX) had "twit filters" (black lists). An essential feature missing from most online forums today.

prepend3• 7 years ago

I used to have grease monkey scripts for reddit years ago before mobile, but it just was too clunky. I want a way to quickly apply dom actions on my mobile browser that should do the trick.

I used to worry about creating an echo chamber by black listing people but now I’m just so tired, I’d rather have an echo chamber than a frequent “what the fuck is this garbage, oh it’s another comment by prepend”

dmitryminkovsky2• 7 years ago

Don’t look to government to solve problems — the strength of this country is in its people.

I’ve been reading One-Storied America[0], a book from 1935 by two Soviet humorists visiting the United States. The book echos this perspective on every page.

[0] you can find a good 1937 translation online under the title Little Golden America by Charles Malamuth.

eatbitseveryday• 7 years ago

Thanks for giving me another interesting book to add to my list :)

dmitryminkovsky2• 7 years ago

Glad to hear. I’m two thirds of the way through and it’s so interesting.

michalu• 7 years ago

Stay fit. You don’t want to get old and feel bad. You’ll also get a lot more accomplished and feel better about yourself if you stay fit. I didn’t make it to 91 by neglecting my health.

This. Many people don't realize that staying fit isn't a quest to live longer but to live physically better in the later ages.

I cringe when someone tells me stuff like "yeah but that dude smoked and never exercised and lived until 80s while the fit guy got cancer and it didn't help him" ... yes but you forgot to mention that living life in his body became a miserable experience since 45 vs. someone else who may have died in 60s of cancer but in fact spent something like 50 fulfilling years feeling great.

Staying fit may not save you from cancer or car accident, but but the life is so much better when you live in a fit body.

DubiousPusher2• 7 years ago

I find it mesmerizing that people on this thread have a problem with the criticism of a highly influential person upon their death. I mean were people bound to say only positive things when Augusto Pinochet and Robert Mugabe dusted off?

Obviously I don't think T Boone shares the legacy of violent dictators but my point is that those clutching their pearls here trying to categorically separate themselves from those who speak ill of the dead are not separate at all. They either don't believe what Pickens did was all that bad or they don't believe he did bad things. On their spectrum of "posthumous criticism" Pickens lies on the positive side of their personal threshold.

creaghpatr• 7 years ago

The man in the arena will always command a respect the gravedancing haters will never know.

DubiousPusher2• 7 years ago

I'd hate to live in the authoritarian minded society that applied this maxim universally.

T. Boone Pickens Farewell Letter

Related Stories