- Autry Stevens is on track to become one of the richest people in the world after selling his oil business.
- But the 85-year-old said he hadn't thought about how to spend his new billions.
- The sale would create one of the largest drilling companies poised to take advantage of Texas' oil boom.
The 85-year-old oil tycoon is cashing in, but appeared solemn in an interview about selling his business.
Autry Stevens sold his company, Endeavor Energy Resources, to Diamondback Energy earlier this week. The $26 billion cash and stock deal would make him the richest oil tycoon in the United States, Bloomberg reported.
However, the quiet Stevens seemed reluctant to leave the company he founded in 1979. The Wall Street Journal The main reason he made that decision was his cancer diagnosis.
“It's sad when the people there are gone,” he told Barron's in a recent interview. “It was like a little family.”
Mr. Stevens has long resisted outside efforts to buy Endeavor, one of the last major independent oil companies in West Texas' rich Permian Basin. But things changed when he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, he told Barron's.
He said he decided not to hand over the company to his daughter Lyndal Gress, who serves on the company's board and also has children, saying his son is not part of the family business.
Now, the company is poised to become a formidable force in the domestic energy industry thanks to a deal with Diamondback Energy, which beat out major bidders such as ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips.
Stevens is well known for his unassuming style. The newspaper said he drove an old Toyota Land Cruiser to work and flew Southwest Airlines on a budget. This reflects his humble upbringing on a peanut and watermelon farm in central Texas, according to his University of Texas at Austin alumni profile.
Despite his vast fortune and fame, he appeared on truTV's reality series 'Black Gold', it seems his career trajectory was still focused on his initial ambitions, which “It’s about earning a steady paycheck and a comfortable retirement,” he said. To UT Austin.
Stevens attributes his success to an openness to new ideas and technology, and a cash-first drilling strategy reported by Bloomberg that helped the company survive the 2008 financial crisis while many other U.S. operators went bust.
“The history of the oil industry is full of stories of people making and losing wealth over and over again,” he said at his alma mater.
Asked by the newspaper what he would do with his new billions of dollars, Mr. Stevens said he had not yet thought deeply about it.
With the sale of Endeavor, Mr. Stevens jumped from 130th to 77th place on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. His net worth has increased by $17.5 billion since this time last year, making him second only to Nvidia's Jensen Huang and Meta's Mark Zuckerberg.
