More than one oil-industry veteran snickered that Hicks, Muse, whose main expertise lay in industrial companies, was about to learn an expensive lesson about wildcatting.

FORBES: One Tamed Wildcat

Before wildcatting in Iraq, Calibre was a tiny energy company controlled by veteran oilman Prentis Tomlinson, with a handful of oil and gas prospects in Texas.

FORBES: Magazine Article

More than one oil industry veteran snickered that Hicks, Muse, whose main expertise lay in industrial companies, was about to learn an expensive lesson about wildcatting.

FORBES: One Tamed Wildcat

But record-setting Toledo turned out to be a costly dry hole, illustrating the fact that even in these days of space-age 3-D seismic studies, wildcatting is still a risky business.

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Instead of cutting his teeth in the oilfields like Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson or wildcatting billionaire Harold Hamm, Watson studied agricultural economics and started his oil career as a financial analyst, not a roughneck.

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