Michael Barone discusses a fascinating new book about today’s wildcatters. It’s called Fracking: The Outrageous Inside Story of the New Billionaire Wildcatters. Among them:
It tells the story of Harold Hamm, a sharecropper’s son who rose from picking cotton to a $12 billion fortune by prying oil out of the Bakken shale of North Dakota.
And it tells the story of Charif Souki, Lebanese immigrant and proprietor of the Los Angeles restaurant where Nicole Simpson ate and Ronald Goldman served their last meals, who charmed others into financing a liquid natural gas export terminal in Louisiana.
Thank goodness there are still people willing to take huge financial and personal risks — and sometimes lose — in order to improve our lives.
