With a career spanning more than 60 years, Stevens has held a variety of roles in the oil sector, from truck driver to driller to engineer. He is now on the brink of becoming America's richest oil tycoon.
Diamondback Energy Inc. has reached an agreement to acquire Stevens Endeavor Energy Resources Inc. for $26 billion in cash and stock. The acquisition moves Stevens from No. 130 to No. 64 on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, solidifying his position as the nation's richest oil driller with a net worth of $25.9 billion based on the current Diamondback stock price. .
A fortune of this size would put Stevens' net worth higher than Continental Resources' Harold Hamm's $15.4 billion net worth and Hilcorp Energy's Jeff Hildebrand's $17 billion net worth. . Charles and Julia Koch, owners of the conglomerate Koch Industries, are wealthy, but oil is only one part of their diverse wealth. Sales of Endeavor are expected to be completed in the fourth quarter.
The agreement ends years of speculation about a potential buyer for Endeavor, one of the few remaining large private producers in the shale-rich Permian region. Born into a family of peanut and melon farmers, Autry Stevens, 85, founded the company in 1979 in Midland, Texas. Prior to this business, he worked for Humble Oil, now part of Exxon Mobil Corporation, and served as an oil and gas appraiser for the Army Corps of Engineers and Midland Bank.
Initially, Stephens' fledgling business primarily provided ad hoc engineering assistance. Over time, it has diversified to include trucking, well services, and rustabout construction. Consistent throughout was Stevens' strategy of acquiring drilling rights in Texas and holding onto them rather than selling them. Shortly after leaving the bank, Stevens acquired his first Permian rights, and despite declining production in the 1980s and 1990s as big oil companies sought more lucrative opportunities overseas, he I stuck with this approach.
Mr. Stevens' preference for using cash rather than debt to acquire drilling rights proved crucial during the 2008 financial crisis. This period was marked by a significant drop in oil demand, leading to the bankruptcy of several U.S. operators. As a result of the crisis, Stevens had to cease operations on nearly all of its rigs. But his strategy paid off soon after, when oil prices soared to more than $100 a barrel.
A game-changer for the U.S. oil industry were advances in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, technologies that greatly improved the prospects of the field. Stevens found itself well-positioned to take advantage of these innovations. Over time, he accumulated drilling rights for a staggering 344,000 acres, about 400 times the size of Central Park, located in the heart of the Permian Basin.
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