The Luckiest Guy in the World

T. Boone Pickens tells his own story here — small-town Oklahoma kid turns $2,500 into Mesa Petroleum, the country's largest independent oil company, then spends the 1980s targeting corporate giants like Gulf Oil and Phillips Petroleum on behalf of shareholders who weren't getting their due. It's a first-person account of an era in American finance that shaped how corporations think about accountability, and Pickens is candid about the heat and the costs that came with it. The weakness is that it's largely hagiographic — self-criticism is thin. And outside business and finance readers, the corporate-raider drama is a niche interest. But as a primary-source window into 1980s shareholder activism, it earns its place.