1986: Aaron Giebel, 58, a Midland oilman, couldn't have picked a worse time to try running his millions into a billion. By 1982 the canny Texan, an engineer-geologist and son of a laborer, had turned a $1,700 partnership stake into an oil-and-gas fortune of $100 million. And then, as Giebel freely admits, something snapped: "I stepped out of character," he remembers. "Greed took over, and I leveraged myself assuming that the price of oil would go from $40 to $70 a barrel."
By the time it was all over, Giebel's net worth had plunged to a paper value of $20 million, and his petroleum company had to be reorganized under Chapter 11. Gone now are his four airplanes; so too are $2 million worth of prize cattle, part of his Western art collection and his $2.4 million home, above, that he was forced to sell at half the price.
Far from being poverty-stricken, he still has a Mercedes and his family. But he also harbors a few regrets: "I feel a lot of guilt," he says. "I had to let a lot of real good people go, and I feel like a failure for squandering all those bucks."
In the last year the psychic strain of the oil bust has left its mark on Giebel's colleagues too: A friend and former partner died of a heart attack after going broke, and an acquaintance threatened suicide after losing both his money and his wife.
Giebel himself is prey to sleepless nights—and occasional fantasies about becoming a cab driver—but a characteristically Texas optimism has kept him in business. "Now," he says, "I gotta buckle down and heal up. And I'll be back up there someday if the creek don't rise."
February 15, 1990, while returning to his hometown of Fort Worth aboard a Williams Aviation plane, Aaron Giebel died.
