TREVOR REES-JONES

Rees-Jones did not start in oil. He was a bankruptcy lawyer in Dallas, working on oil and gas reorganizations, which taught him the business from the wreckage up.

In 1984 he left law to drill wells as a small independent. It went badly for a long time.

He drilled around 17 dry holes and spent a decade barely covering each month's bills. In 1994 he founded Chief Oil & Gas out of 500 square feet of office space with a part-time assistant.

Then he bet on the Barnett Shale near Fort Worth, using fracking and horizontal drilling to pull gas out of rock people thought was worthless. It worked.

He became one of the pioneers of the American shale boom.

Chief Oil & Gas is the whole story. He built the first version into the second-largest producer in the Barnett Shale, then sold those assets to Devon Energy for $2.2 billion in 2006, plus pipeline assets to Crosstex for $480 million.

He did not retire. He started a new Chief Oil & Gas focused on the Marcellus and Haynesville shale plays, and sold most of that to Tug Hill and Chesapeake Energy for more than $2 billion in 2022.

By one Bloomberg count he has collected over $5 billion selling assets since 2006.

Rees-Jones is a wildcatter, the old Texas word for someone who drills where others will not. His style is to take big, concentrated bets on land and drilling that the majors have written off, then prove them wrong with new technology.

He famously seals deals on a handshake. He is not a diversified portfolio guy.

He goes deep on oil and gas, the business he knows cold, and he is willing to lose for years before a single bet pays off enormously. High risk, high conviction, one industry.

The 2006 Devon sale. Rees-Jones sold Chief Oil & Gas's Barnett Shale assets to Devon Energy for $2.2 billion in cash, with another $480 million for pipeline assets to Crosstex.

The timing was the genius part. Natural gas prices were near a peak, and they collapsed not long after.

Everyone who held their gas assets got crushed. He had already cashed out.

A man who spent ten years failing, then made over $2.6 billion in a single year.

His honest struggle was the decade before the win. After leaving law in 1984, he drilled around 17 dry holes and nearly went broke chasing oil and gas with no payoff.

By his own account he was close to losing everything before the Barnett finally hit. The lesson he tells young people is that perseverance is most of the game, but only because he lived the version where it almost did not work.

Ten years of dry holes is not a strategy anyone would recommend. It just happened to end well for him.

Rees-Jones is married to Jan, and the couple run their foundation together. They are private about their personal life, which is rare for a Texas billionaire of his size.

He is known among associates as a bigger-than-life personality who will close a deal on a handshake. Most of what is public about him is the giving, not the lifestyle.

Rees-Jones graduated from Dartmouth College, then earned a law degree from Southern Methodist University in Dallas. He practiced bankruptcy law focused on oil and gas reorganizations.

That legal work, picking through failed energy companies, is where he learned how the oil business really worked. He used a lawyer's eye for distressed assets to build a fortune in the field he had only watched collapse.

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