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Copyright © 2016 by Tina Davis and Jessica Resnick-Ault. All rights reserved.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.
Published simultaneously in Canada.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Names: Davis, Tina, 1974– | Resnick-Ault, Jessica, 1980–
Title: Hess: the last oil baron / Tina Davis, Jessica Resnick-Ault.
Description: Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., [2016] | Series:
Bloomberg Press | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015031845 | ISBN 978-1-118-92344-3 (cloth);
ISBN 978-1-118-92346-7 (ePDF); ISBN 978-1-118-92345-0 (ePub)
Subjects: LCSH: Hess, Leon, 1914-1999. | Businessmen – United
States – Biography. | Petroleum industry and trade – United States.
Classification: LCC HD9570.H47 D39 2016 | DDC 338.7/6655092 – dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015031845
Are there any questions?”
The narrow conference room on the first floor of Hess Corporation’s 29-story downtown Houston office high-rise was quiet. About 100 people were gathered to see the denouement of a four-month battle between the oil company’s board and management and a hedge fund agitating for change.
Chief Executive Officer John B. Hess, son of company founder Leon Hess, was facing shareholders in public for the first time since the fund run by Wall Street activist Paul Singer had announced it had acquired a sizable stake in the company and was seeking to alter its course, demanding it sweep out old board members, sell assets, and refocus its corporate strategy. John, newly stripped of his role as chairman, had agreed hours before to allow the dissident shareholder to appoint three nominees to the board after four months of acrimony capped by negotiations that stretched into the early morning. There were no questions.
Thirty-eight minutes into a shareholder meeting that had been preceded by an increasingly nasty series of letters, battling websites, and name-calling between the hedge fund and the company, it was over. Faced with the biggest challenge to his family’s leadership since the company was founded in 1933, John Hess had blinked.
That May morning in Houston, shareholders rode the escalator into the Hess conference room. The skyscraper, with more than 800,000 square feet of office space, gleams in the heart of Houston’s booming energy corridor. Shortly after it opened in 2010, as if in homage to its fossil-fuel–loving largest tenant, wind turbine parts fell off the building. The rooftop wind turbines were quietly removed.