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  The McClendon line was not a serious stakeholder in the Kerr oil empire, because Aubrey’s grandfather had opted out in the early days. But Aubrey’s father did enjoy the sort of solid-paying sinecure at Kerr-McGee (he spent a lot of time checking up on the company’s filling stations in Oklahoma) that afforded young Aubrey an upper-middle-class private school upbringing beyond want and worry. So while he had borne witness to the bruising cycles of the oil and gas industry on the Oklahoma prairie, he could not have felt the pain of bust as acutely as the child of a roughneck or a tool pusher or a third-tier company geologist, whose family paychecks diminished or disappeared as the price per barrel dropped on the international market. And despite the biggest gusher in history yarn he sometimes spun, the reason Aubrey entered the business in 1981 was less dramatic in some of his tellings. “I never really grew up thinking I wanted to be in the oil and gas business,” he explained in a less excited moment, “but by the time I graduated, that’s where the best jobs were.”

  Whatever the truth of his genesis story, once he picked oil and gas, McClendon started where everybody with no geologic or technical expertise started—as a landman. “Landmen were always the stepchild of the industry,” Aubrey once explained. “Geologists and engineers were the important guys—but it dawned on me pretty early that all their fancy ideas aren’t worth very much if we don’t have a lease. If you’ve got the lease and I don’t, you win.” The position played to his strengths; it required energy, enthusiasm, and a whiff of sincerity. Tom Sawyer would have been a landman. The best of them kept their ear to the street, so they could stay ahead of the next big drilling play, to know where the major producers would be sinking wells (and cash) next, so they could get there first, ahead of their competitors, and buy up the mineral rights while prices were still low. A landman had to persuade farmers and ranchers and townsfolk near a future play to sell him the mineral rights for a little cash up front and the promise of fabulous payouts to come. You had to be able to sell the future, and Aubrey could sell it. Aubrey did sell it.

  In 1989, the not yet thirty-year-old Aubrey and his partner, another ambitious young landman named Tom Ward, made a move toward exploration and production, with an increasing focus on natural gas and new drilling technologies. Within just four years, the two friends turned a $50,000 investment into a public company valued at $25 million. They named the company Chesapeake Energy, which is a little weird for a company from Oklahoma, but Aubrey liked the sound of it, with its faint aroma of mid-Atlantic yachtsmanship. The two men rejected the simpler McClendon & Ward, Aubrey would later say, because in the not-unlikely circumstance that the business ended up in bankruptcy, they didn’t want their names on the top line of the Chapter 11 filing.

  By the time Chesapeake Energy went public in 1993, the industry was sliding into the doldrums. Sluggishness in the rise of oil and natural gas prices offered scant incentive to drill. But Aubrey liked to zig when everybody else zagged. While other independents slowed their roll, Chesapeake Energy bosses floored the accelerator: they borrowed enormous amounts of money, which saddled the company with an unhealthy load of debt, but they used that borrowed money to drill and drill and drill some more. Chesapeake would reward the brave. The company would take oil and gas out of the ground as rapidly as it could, Aubrey told business writers, and turn it into cold hard cash for bold investors.

  This appetite for risk (and a run of reasonably steady commodity prices) enabled the company to double its production three years running and still pay out a nice dividend to its stockholders. “I’d call us the most successful energy company of the last ten years, if not the last twenty,” Aubrey said in 1997. Chesapeake stock soared—right up to the moment prices cratered at the end of the 1990s. Chesapeake had taken on a billion dollars of debt by the dawn of the new century, the big notes due in seven years, and it looked as if all were lost if it didn’t do something fast. The board was pushing to sell the company in a hurry and clear the debt. Aubrey, however, refused to be chastened, or to let fear get the better of him, or to acquiesce in a fire sale. He had by then got the idea that he could trust his own luck, and he was still scouting hard for the main chance when he took a meeting with a major electricity-producing company in San Jose, California. The Calpine bosses told Aubrey about their plan to stand up dozens of new gas-burning power plants to meet the Golden State’s massive energy needs. This alone could increase gas consumption in the United States by 10 percent.

  Demand for natural gas would not only trend up, Aubrey calculated, it would go through the roof; prices would jump. The expensive new Mitchell-led drilling technologies capable of loosing natural gas from previously hard-to-get-to shale formations would finally prove worth the cost. “I went away from that meeting saying, ‘We got a chance,’ ” he said. Another man a billion dollars in the hole might shy from the table. Aubrey shoveled in his chips. Chesapeake Energy issued more stock and went on another borrowing spree, with hundreds of millions of dollars in help from Deutsche Bank, J. P. Morgan, and Lehman Brothers. From his office in Oklahoma City, Aubrey executed a spectacular landgrab in promising shale-producing regions in upstate New York, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas, and right at home in Oklahoma.

  The beauty of the shale play was that it didn’t require real technical expertise to target the best place to sink a well. You just needed to own the mineral rights to as much land as possible. Once a well was bored down into the layers of shale deep below the earth’s surface, the gas was, as a rule, generously distributed. Pretty much anywhere worked. With the increasingly common techniques of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling, it was kind of hard to come up with a dry hole, or “bust a pick” as one of his competitors liked to say. This played to Aubrey’s strengths.

  “When the game changed,” he would say, “and acquisition became the key to capturing the greatest values from the unconventional plays, I felt like I had a natural advantage over most [competitors] because I understood how to put together a very formidable Chesapeake land machine to ‘capture the flag’ in big plays.” In just seven years—from 2000 to 2007—the company locked up drilling and mineral rights on more than ten million acres in the United States, equivalent to owning everything under a landmass the size of Maryland, with Connecticut tossed in, too.

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  By the beginning of 2008, with the price of natural gas coming back up and Aubrey’s incredible success talking people into his ideas and plans, his bet on shale gas was paying off in a big way. Chesapeake had grown from a few hundred employees in 2000 to nearly seventy-six hundred. There were three thousand Chesapeake employees in Oklahoma City alone, all housed in a modern campus Aubrey commissioned and helped to design. His vision of an ideal, sprawling office park was still growing and taking shape and would eventually include more than twenty redbrick Georgian-style buildings, a fitness center offering yoga classes and free massages, upscale cafeterias, and a sixty-three-thousand-square-foot day-care center. “I have been focused on building a campus that is architecturally appealing and functions well on a human scale,” he would explain to a local magazine writer. “I like to think of our company as being organic and fast moving, so we build horizontally….I believe businesses succeed if people work together on a collegial level. I wanted to keep our buildings horizontal in scale to reflect our environment of teamwork versus hierarchy.”

  Fortune magazine named Chesapeake one of the country’s one hundred best companies to work for in 2008, owing mainly to the personal care and largesse of Aubrey McClendon. Aubrey made a special point to get to know new hires at the regional headquarters in his gas-producing fields of tomorrow. He jetted into the dedication of a regional office in White County, Arkansas, in the second week of 2008 with a $100,000 check to fund science and engineering scholarships at nearby Harding University and a pledge to grow the new thirty-five-person field office by three or even four times in the coming months. �
��We want to be the best neighbors they’ve ever had,” Aubrey told a reporter at the gathering of more than five hundred locals. “The people of this area are about to see an economic boom the likes of which they’ve never seen before.”

  Who didn’t want to believe Aubrey? Who didn’t want to be part of his adventure? Who didn’t want to cash his checks? He was the most visible and the most prepossessing face of the country’s remarkable shale gas boom, the revolution in extraction technology that was finally going to set us free—free from our withering and costly addiction to foreign oil; free from the galling cupidity of prices at the gasoline pump; free from our long, polluted romance with dirty coal. Forget Russia and Lukoil; natural gas right here at home was the future. Or at least the near future—a perfect bridge between America’s oil-importing and dirty-coal past and the green-energy panacea of wind and solar that Democratic presidential candidates like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were touting that spring. Natural gas, Aubrey McClendon was telling anyone who would listen, is “ready to rescue our economy, enhance national security and reduce pollution….By converting just 10 percent of our vehicles to Compressed Natural Gas, we can lower our use of foreign oil by nearly fifty billion dollars per year. So let’s ask Washington to put those billions to work as incentives to build and buy CNG vehicles like the rest of the world enjoys, incentives for retailers to sell CNG, for drivers to convert their current cars and trucks to CNG, and to install home refueling units that connect to residential gas lines.”

  We’re all in this together, producers and consumers, was Aubrey’s personal campaign message, and he pushed it straight down the corporate chain of command, all the way to subcontractors working at far-off regional headquarters in Arkansas or Louisiana or Texas or upstate New York or Towanda, Pennsylvania, smack in the middle of the Marcellus Shale boom. Landmen gathering mineral-rights leases on behalf of Chesapeake Energy were showing up on doorsteps all over Pennsylvania to ply landowners with the lure of royalty packages that would likely pay out for thirty years, not to mention the chance to do their small part for national security. “He told us there was natural gas in the shale rock a mile down, and they had a new way to drill for it that was minimally invasive and would cause very little damage to our land,” one dairy farmer told the Rolling Stone writer Jeff Goodell of the Chesapeake landman who secured her signature on a mineral lease. “He said it was a patriotic thing to do, that natural gas would help America gain energy independence.”

  Chesapeake Energy was making a big public show of doing its part, patriot-wise. The company was the Charlie Hustle of the natural gas world, drilling anywhere and everywhere: under a suburban country club’s manicured lawns, a university’s parking lot, an airport’s runways and terminals, and right next to schools and day-care centers. Fortune magazine figured Chesapeake’s drilling activity was double its nearest domestic competitor in the field of natural gas. “We’re doing things that nobody else in the world is doing; drilling wells that other people wouldn’t have,” Aubrey boasted to his team at the Oklahoma City headquarters in March 2008, with a reporter from Fortune looking on to record the remarks for the wider public. “We’ve made discoveries that other people would never have found. When I wake up in the morning I’m ready to go because I get to work for a company that drilled more rock than anybody else on earth.” This last brag was not strictly accurate; Aubrey did top the U.S. charts, but it’s a big oil- and gas-producing planet out there, and Chesapeake wasn’t anywhere close to the top. Still, the Fortune reporter seemed to accept this little exaggeration as just another case of Aubrey being Aubrey. His enthusiasm was off the leash again, running well ahead of his accomplishment. But, hey, who’s to say he wouldn’t catch up!

  Chesapeake had the wind in its sails like never before. Natural gas was generating 20 percent of America’s electricity—nearly twice what it was ten years earlier. More than four thousand miles of new pipeline was under construction in 2008, capable of transmitting almost fifty billon cubic feet of natural gas every day. “[This] could be completely transformative for our country,” Aubrey McClendon exclaimed. “The plumbing is being built right now!”

  Natural gas prices had already climbed from $2 and change per million BTUs (British thermal units) at the beginning of 2000, when Aubrey began putting all his chips on gas, to nearly $8 at the beginning of 2008. In the next six months, the price nearly doubled, nestling in just shy of $14 on July 3, 2008. Chesapeake stock rode the brisk and increasing winds up and up and up, from $38 a share in February 2008 to almost $70 in July. And even when the stock was performing its most dizzying climb, when the valuation began looking cartoonishly high to energy analysts, Aubrey remained bullish. He kept borrowing more and more money, personally, to buy more and more Chesapeake stock. By that summer of 2008, he had amassed more than thirty million shares for himself.

  And, boy, did he look good on paper! Aubrey McClendon had increased his personal wealth nearly 50 percent in a single year, to $3 billion, which had jumped him almost a hundred places, to number 134 on the Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans. (He stood ten spots ahead of David Rockefeller Sr., who had long ago traded in most of his inherited oil company stock for a steadier portfolio of assets heavy in real estate and French impressionist paintings.) Forbes noted that Aubrey McClendon was one of 38 men and women on the list whose fortunes were made in the oil and gas business—a cohort whose combined net worth in 2008 ran to about $162 billion. Which meant Aubrey and these other 37 individuals could have shoved their collective fortunes into very conservative interest-bearing financial instruments and covered the entire annual spending of the state government of Oklahoma to the end of time. Aubrey, meanwhile, insisted wealth was not how he judged success. “I just plug away, hope for the best, and let everybody else keep score,” he told a friendly local reporter. “Billionaire is a word that probably has more meaning to other people than it does to me.”

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  They did love Aubrey in his hometown. He wasn’t the only billionaire in Oklahoma City, but he was its most visible and most rah-rah citizen. He didn’t make his fortune and then relocate to Tulsa or Dallas or Houston. He was OKC through and through. The locals knew him on sight: he looked like Archie Manning’s long-lost younger brother, with the insouciant, unkempt shock of wavy hair, the soft unthreatening drawl, and the slightly doughy features that all belied a flinty, hard-edged need to win. Stories about Aubrey traveled second- and third- and fourth-hand. Somebody saw Aubrey and his wife, Katie, an heiress to the Whirlpool fortune, sneaking champagne into the local movie theater. Somebody saw Aubrey riding around downtown on a motorcycle powered by natural gas. They heard he had ordered ties emblazoned with tiny drilling rigs. And had insisted that the investment bankers visiting from back east sample one of his many restaurants’ famous duck-fat fries. He joked to friends and reporters about him and his Oklahoma redneck buddies pulling a fast one on the entire leadership suite of the City of Seattle. And bragged that when the governor of Connecticut accused Chesapeake Energy of “fleecing” her citizens by manipulating the price of natural gas, he flat out called her a liar. The suits at places like ExxonMobil might be willing to turn the other cheek, but Aubrey was going to defend the honor of his own. “You tell me—and when you tell me, you’re also saying to all our employees—that we did something wrong,” he said to a roomful of his Chesapeake co-workers, “I’m gonna come out swinging and fighting.”

  Then, too, there were the stories about his money and his stuff. Like how Aubrey had accumulated a multimillion-dollar, 100,000-bottle wine collection—not because he was a great connoisseur, but because he fancied himself a great investor. He started to collect, he told a reporter from Forbes, “with the idea that wine was an underowned and underpriced asset class, especially in China and other emerging countries….As for favorites, I really don’t have any. I like some very inexpensive wines and I like some high-end wines. I guess my favorite th
ough would be a small St. Emilion wine called Clos Dubreuil, which in full disclosure, I own about 50% of, and plan to give you a bottle of it if allowed.” (The reporter accepted and rated it “incredible.”)

  There were countless stories in the local papers about Aubrey spreading his wealth. “Asking me what to do with extra cash is like asking a fraternity boy what to do with the beer,” he told a reporter from a trade paper. If he stopped in at Irma’s Burger Shack, just across the street from his offices, and saw the place was empty, he’d hand out $100 tips to everyone on the job that night. The McClendons had given $1 million to shore up the Red Cross in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and pledged more than $10 million to their alma mater, Duke University. But their biggest giving was close to home. In May 2008, Aubrey and Katie announced a $12.5 million gift to the University of Oklahoma to fund student housing, academics, and athletics. Five days later, they heralded an investment of $35 million in a new cancer treatment center specializing in a more targeted, less damaging form of radiation therapy. “I have every reason to believe ProCure will become the gold standard for providing proton therapy to treat cancer in this country,” he gushed.