Boone Pickens Selling Stunning 65,000-Acre Texas Ranch for $250 Million

Haha, remember yesterday when we were talking about the difference between $27 million and $42 million? Boone Pickens came out swinging on Wednesday with what real money looks like. Pickens put his 65,000-acre Texas ranch up for sale for $250 million, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Over nearly five decades, T. Boone Pickens turned a ranch in the Texas Panhandle into a retreat with its own airport, art gallery, chapel and an 11,000-square-foot kennel for hunting dogs. Now 89, the energy tycoon is putting his Mesa Vista ranch on the market for $250 million. [WSJ]

A dog kennel that is almost 9x bigger than my home! The WSJ report notes that Pickens purchased 12 different properties and melded them into this monstrous ranch worth a quarter of a billion dollars.

The road turns to cobblestone, and trees including Mr. Pickens’s favorite sycamores surround the more than 25,000-square-foot stone lodge which has a two-story library, the art gallery and a 30-seat media room. It is a short walk to the 6,000-square foot “Family House” with five bedrooms and five baths. The 2,300-square-foot “Gate House” has three bedrooms and three baths.

To the west sits the stone “Lake House.” In the master suite of the more than 11,000-square-foot home hangs an oil painting of Murdock, Mr. Pickens’s late papillon. The house overlooks much of the 24 miles of creeks, lakes, waterfalls, dams and aqueducts that he built to turn the land into a habitat for dove, turkey, pheasant, mule deer and especially bobwhite quail. [WSJ]

It sounds like he’s selling a small country, not a ranch. Maybe Gundy could have afforded to rent the dog kennel if he’d taken the Tennessee money.

Pickens also released a statement about why now and why he’s making this public.

“Selling the ranch is the prudent thing for an 89-year-old man to do. It’s time to get my life and my affairs in order,” Pickens said in a statement. “There are many reasons why the time is right to sell the ranch now, not the least of them ensuring that what I truly believe is one of the most magnificent properties in the world winds up with an individual or entity that shares my conservation beliefs.”

As for who’s going to buy it? Real estate broker Sam Middleton is in charge of the sale, and he mentioned names like Jeff Bezos. There’s a catch, though.

“A property like this is going to attract a lot of folks who just want the opportunity to tour the ranch, spend the night and be entertained,” Middleton told the Dallas Morning News noting that the property is probably worth between $300 million and $500 million.

“We’re happy to do that if somebody’s qualified to buy. But we don’t want these lookers who cannot afford it. We’re going to have to do deep due diligence on qualifying these buyers.”

Translation: If you have a mullet, you can’t come.

The photographs of the place are absolutely spectacular.

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The real dagger for me came at the end of the WSJ article, though. Pickens wants to have his childhood home transported to Stillwater, which is also where he wants his final resting place to be. I was amazed at this fact.

The ranch currently contains Mr. Pickens’s 1,170-square-foot childhood home which was moved from Oklahoma in 2008. Mr. Pickens’s grandfather built the home for his parents in 1923, according to a framed letter written by Mr. Pickens that hangs in the house. Mr. Pickens’s father’s humidor stands in the living room, and in the closet is the secret compartment in the floorboards where he kept the money from his paper route.

Mr. Pickens is in talks with Oklahoma State University, his alma mater, to have the home moved to the Stillwater campus where Mr. Pickens also hopes to be buried, said Mr. Rosser. [WSJ]

Man, what a life.