On January 26, 1931, in a scrubby clearing in Gregg County, East Texas — a place where the soil was red and poor and the Depression was already grinding small farmers into dust — a drilling rig punched through 3,587 feet of earth and hit oil at a rate that defied what every geologist at every major oil company had sworn was impossible. Three hundred and twenty barrels an hour. Nearly eight thousand barrels a day. The well was called F.K. Lathrop No. 1, and the man who drilled it was a thirty-six-year-old Fort Worth independent named William Alvin Moncrief, who went by Monty, who had no geologist on his payroll, no corporate backing, and no particular reason to be right about what lay beneath that particular stretch of pine and clay — except that he believed oil was there. The majors, with their seismic surveys and their credentialed skepticism, had dismissed the entire region. Monty Moncrief and his two partners, John Farrell and Eddie Showers, drilled anyway.
What Lathrop No. 1 revealed was not a small, isolated reservoir but the northern extension of what would become the largest oilfield inside the boundaries of the United States: 130,000 acres of what oilmen would call the Black Giant, a single continuous formation stretching from Rusk County to Gregg County, holding more than five billion barrels of recoverable crude. Two earlier wildcat wells — Dad Joiner's Daisy Bradford No. 3 in October 1930 and the Lou Della Crim No. 1 drilled on "Mama" Crim's farm that December — had been assumed to be separate, minor strikes. Moncrief's well, drilled twenty-five miles north of Joiner's and fifteen miles north of the Crim, made the geometry unmistakable. The three wells belonged to one enormous formation. The experts had been looking at three dots and seeing three dots; Moncrief saw a line.
The moment Lathrop came in, people at the wellsite went wild. Moncrief's ten-year-old son, W.A. "Tex" Moncrief Jr., was there to witness it — the muddy water first, then the column of crude shooting ninety to a hundred feet into the air, "solid oil," as Tex would recall nearly nine decades later. "People were jumping around and hollering and hugging each other just like they'd won a football game," Tex said. "I decided on the spot that I wanted to become an oilman." He would keep that promise for the next ninety-one years.
But the story of Monty Moncrief — the patriarch, the original wildcatter, the man whose name would be inscribed on hospitals and university buildings and medical centers across Texas, the man whose family would accumulate a billion-dollar fortune and then, decades after his death, tear itself apart fighting over it — begins not at the gusher but in the years before it, when Moncrief was doing something more fundamental than finding oil. He was founding a dynasty.
Part IIThe Playbook
The Moncrief playbook is not a set of business tactics. It is a philosophy of institutional permanence — how to build an enterprise that survives the founder, then survives the founder's son, then survives the fractures that permanence inevitably creates. What follows are the principles that emerge from nearly a century of one family's sustained commitment to a single, uncompromising idea.
Table of Contents
1.Choose your bush and never leave it.
2.Build a family, not a company.
3.Accumulate singles before swinging for home runs.
4.Stay independent at all costs.
5.Erase the "I" from the enterprise.
6.Apprentice the next generation through immersion, not instruction.
7.Die at the desk.
Let relationships compound as long as capital does.
In Their Own Words
We're 100% family owned, unincorporated and independent, and we intend to stay that way.
Passing a legacy on were oilmen.
Optimism is the personal quality that nurtures luck.
No guts, no blue chips, has always been a wildcatter's expression of faith.
What they needed was a company that had a single man running it; no committees, no group decisions, no hierarchy of managers, no professional deal-killers or pessimists.
His unquestioning confidence in the worthiness of his enterprise made him seem impervious to doubts.
He kept his faith in the absolute value of building, of progress, of getting things done.
We're oilmen meant that anything that extended beyond the realm of oil was not a proper Moncrief concern.
I'd rather be lucky than smart because a lot of smart guys go hungry.
In business, there's no 'what if'. There's only 'what happened'.
By the Numbers
The Moncrief Empire
1929Year Monty Moncrief founded his independent oil business
5B+Barrels of oil in the East Texas field Moncrief helped reveal
28Consecutive successful wells drilled in Scurry County
$1B+Peak estimated net worth of son Tex Moncrief
$100M+Total Moncrief family donations to UT Southwestern medical facilities
91Monty Moncrief's age at death — still working on a deal in his office
3Generations of Moncriefs in the oil business, all from the same Fort Worth building
Marland Oil and the Education of a Wildcatter
Before there was a Moncrief Oil, before there was an East Texas gusher, before there was anything resembling a dynasty, there was a young man back from World War I with no money, no land, and no oil leases, but with something arguably more useful: an education in how the industry worked from the inside. Monty Moncrief had gone to work for Marland Oil Company in Fort Worth after returning from the war, and in doing so he apprenticed himself to one of the era's most aggressive operators at a moment when the Texas oil business was still new enough to be figured out by someone paying close attention.
The biographical details of Monty's early years survive mostly in fragments — born in 1895, raised around the culture of enterprise that was already taking root in Fort Worth before anyone knew the Permian Basin existed, his military service in World War I, the return to Texas. What matters is what Marland taught him: how to read leases, how to evaluate risk, how to assess what geologists were telling you against what the land itself seemed to promise. And perhaps most importantly, how to think like an independent. Marland Oil was a company, but the mentality Moncrief absorbed was the wildcatter's mentality — the conviction that the best opportunities lay not in the consensus plays but in the places the consensus had overlooked.
When Moncrief struck out on his own in 1929, partnering up to buy mineral leases in areas that the majors had either ignored or abandoned, he carried that mentality into the field. The timing was catastrophic by any conventional measure — the stock market had just crashed, the Great Depression was settling in — but Moncrief was operating in a different economy. Land was cheap. Leases were cheap. And if you found oil, the oil was worth exactly what oil was always worth: everything.
'We're Oilmen'
The phrase that defined Monty Moncrief's worldview was not a mission statement or a business philosophy. It was an identity. "We're oilmen," he would answer when asked about ranching, about real estate, about anything that might distract from the singular purpose of finding hydrocarbons underground. The statement contained within it an entire theory of competitive advantage: focus so narrowly that you become the best in the world at one thing, and never be tempted by adjacencies.
This was not false modesty. It was a form of discipline that Moncrief elevated to near-religious conviction. "We're one hundred percent family-owned, unincorporated, and independent, and we intend to stay that way," he told anyone who asked about the structure of his business — and some who didn't. In an industry that was rapidly consolidating, where the majors were swallowing independents and the independents were going public to raise capital, Moncrief held to a vision that was deliberately, almost defiantly, anachronistic: a family business, in the oldest sense of the term, where the family was the business and the business was the family, and the desire to found one was inseparably tied to the desire to found the other.
We signed this deal. We figured out what was best. This is a we kind of business. We don't tolerate any of that I stuff around here.
— Monty Moncrief
He never used the first person singular when discussing deals. Always "we." This was not corporate boilerplate about teamwork; it was something deeper, an insistence that individual glory was antithetical to the project of building something that would outlast any one person. In Texas, in the oil business, Sally Helgesen wrote in Wildcatters: A Story of Texans, Oil, and Money, "one sees, as nowhere else, that the ideal of capitalism is the ideal of founding a family and conferring the right of inheritance upon it, passing a legacy on."
The comparison that recurs, across the decades of commentary on the Moncrief family, is to the great banking dynasties — the Morgans especially. Ron Chernow wrote of the Morgan family: "The Morgans always believed in absolute monarchy. While Junius Morgan lived, he ruled the family and the business. Until Junius died his massive shadow dominated his son's life." Substitute "Monty" for "Junius" and you have something close to the structure of authority that governed the Moncrief household and the Moncrief business — which were, of course, the same thing.
The Architecture of a Dynasty
In 1978, Monty Moncrief was eighty-four years old. He was still making the decisions, still the patriarch, still the man whose authority over family and enterprise was absolute and unchallenged. He possessed, in the account of those who knew him, "the directness and the utter simplicity of the old and the truly great." His unquestioning confidence in the worthiness of his enterprise made him seem impervious to doubts — not because he was stupid, but because he had chosen his life's work with such totality that second-guessing it would have been like second-guessing his own existence.
This is a particular kind of character, one that the twentieth century produced in abundance and the twenty-first century increasingly struggles to understand. The old wildcatters — Monty Moncrief, Sid Richardson, H.L. Hunt, Clint Murchison, Dad Joiner — "had neither the time nor the inclination to question their own purposes, or to agonize about what the future consequences of their efforts might be," as Helgesen wrote. "They just went out and did whatever was there to be done." Everywhere they looked, they saw opportunity without limits. The land itself was empty, and so these men built cities upon it and founded dynasties.
This was Fort Worth in the middle of the twentieth century: a city whose social and economic architecture was being constructed by a handful of men who had pulled unimaginable wealth from the earth. Hunt and Murchison had moved to Dallas. Richardson and Moncrief stayed in Fort Worth. The city would bear their imprints — Richardson's nephew, Sid Bass, would later fund the city's cultural renaissance; the Moncriefs would put their name on hospitals, cancer centers, university buildings, streets. But the foundation of it all was the same: a man who drilled a hole in the ground in 1931 and hit oil.
What distinguished Monty from the others — from Hunt with his bigamy and his right-wing radio broadcasts, from Murchison with his leveraged empire of hotels and insurance companies and the Dallas Cowboys — was the purity of his focus. He did not diversify. He did not play politics at the national level. He did not accumulate the trappings of power for their own sake. He found oil, and then he found more oil, and then he raised sons to find oil after he was gone.
Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, and the Scurry County Miracle
The story of Moncrief's post-war drilling campaign in Scurry County has acquired, over the decades, the quality of parable. In 1949, Monty Moncrief decided to drill in West Texas and — in a gesture that speaks to the peculiar social world of mid-century Texas oil, where wildcatters and Hollywood celebrities occupied overlapping orbits of wealth and risk-appetite — offered his golfing friends Bob Hope and Bing Crosby a chance to invest. They accepted.
The singing and dancing duo became partners in what would prove to be one of the most spectacular drilling runs in the history of the Permian Basin. After one dry hole, Moncrief Oil drilled twenty-eight consecutive successful wells in Scurry County. Twenty-eight. The field they revealed — SACROC, the Scurry Area Canyon Reef Operators Committee — would ultimately produce more than 1.2 billion barrels of oil and become a pioneer in enhanced oil recovery, with CO₂ injection beginning in 1972 that continues to this day.
The dry hole is worth pausing on. There is a saying attributed to various oilmen — it sounds like something Monty would have said, though the specific sourcing is uncertain — about how the trouble with the oil business is that everybody expects to find oil on the surface. "If it was up near the top, it wouldn't be any trick to it. You've got to drill deep for oil." The first well failed. The next twenty-eight didn't. That ratio tells you something about the nature of wildcatting as an enterprise: it is not about avoiding failure but about having the capital, the conviction, and the leases to keep drilling after the failure comes.
Hope and Crosby made money. Moncrief made an empire.
Father and Son, Fifty-Fifty
When Tex Moncrief returned from World War II — he had enlisted in the Naval Reserve after graduating from the University of Texas with a degree in petroleum engineering in 1942, serving in the Pacific — he did not go job-hunting. He went into business with his father. The arrangement was elegant in its simplicity: fifty-fifty partners, father and son, from the day Tex came home until the day Monty died.
Tex had prepared for this his entire life, though "prepared" implies a degree of deliberation that may not capture the reality. The preparation was more like absorption. He had watched the Lathrop gusher at age ten. He had grown up in the Moncrief Building on Commerce Street in downtown Fort Worth, breathing the particular atmosphere of an independent oil operation — the maps, the lease files, the phone calls from landmen, the tension of waiting for a well to come in. He had studied petroleum engineering because that was what a Moncrief studied. He had gone to war because his generation went to war. And then he came back and did what Moncriefs did.
The father-son partnership discovered oil and gas across West Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and New Mexico. The Scurry County campaign was the first great postwar success. Then came the Madden Deep field in Wyoming, where in 1972 Tex acquired a one-third interest in a natural gas formation that would prove enormously profitable — more than three trillion cubic feet of gas. And then, decade after decade, the deals kept coming: leases evaluated, wells drilled, some dry, most not, the family's wealth compounding quietly in a city that was itself growing rich on the same geology.
I learned everything from my daddy.
— W.A. 'Tex' Moncrief Jr.
Tex said this without embarrassment, without the anxiety of influence that might have afflicted a more self-conscious man. His father was his mentor, his partner, his model. When Forbes asked the elder Moncrief — by then in his late eighties — who his mentor was, the answer was immediate: "My father." The recursion is the point. Each generation learned from the one before, and the learning was not abstract or theoretical. It was geological, financial, and temperamental: how to read a formation, how to structure a deal, how to hold your nerve when the bit was grinding through five thousand feet of nothing.
The Arithmetic of Singles and Doubles
When Forbes, in one of those clipped questionnaire profiles that the magazine used to run, asked Tex Moncrief for his advice to young entrepreneurs, his answer was pure distilled wildcatter wisdom: "Accumulate a lot of singles and gradually get into the doubles and triples before you try for the home runs."
The baseball metaphor is revealing. It suggests a man who understands that the oil business — for all its mythology of gushers and overnight fortunes — is fundamentally a game of probability and position. You do not bet the company on a single well. You accumulate positions. You build a portfolio of prospects. You drill the ones that make economic sense at the margins, and if the odds are in your favor across enough wells, the wealth compounds. The home runs — the Lathrops, the Scurry County runs, the Madden Deeps — come not because you swing for them but because you are at the plate often enough, with enough capital behind you, that the distribution of outcomes eventually delivers one.
This is the inverse of the popular image of the wildcatter as reckless gambler. Monty and Tex Moncrief were gamblers, certainly — anyone who drills wildcat wells in unproven formations is gambling — but they were disciplined gamblers, the kind who understood that the house edge works in your favor if you have enough bankroll and enough patience and enough willingness to eat dry holes without flinching.
There was another piece of paternal advice that Tex treasured, one that carried even more weight: "My daddy told me to 'stick to my bush'; i.e. my oil and gas business." Stick to your bush. The metaphor is agricultural, not geological, but the meaning is the same as "We're oilmen." Do not wander. Do not diversify. Do not be seduced by the adjacent opportunity. Find your bush, and harvest it until there is nothing left to harvest, and then find another bush in the same garden.
Dying at the Desk
Monty Moncrief died on May 21, 1986, at the age of ninety-one. He died, according to family lore that has the weight of gospel, right there in his office in the Moncrief Building, working on a deal. The story is told by his son Tex with the kind of reverence that suggests it is not merely a biographical detail but a moral instruction: this is how a Moncrief dies. Not in retirement, not in a hospital, not on a golf course. At the desk.
"As long as your mind's in good shape you can work until you die," Tex told Forbes, two decades after his father's death and well into his own ninth decade. "That's what my dad did. He died right here in the office working on a deal at age ninety-one."
There is something almost Roman about this — the paterfamilias collapsing at his post, the son and grandsons carrying on, the family name maintained on the building, the same building, the same office. The continuity is not accidental. It is the entire point. Monty Moncrief had spent fifty-seven years building an operation whose purpose was not merely to extract wealth from the earth but to create a structure that would perpetuate itself across generations. The business was the family was the legacy. To retire from it would have been to abandon it.
His widow, Elizabeth, survived him by six years, dying in 1992 at the age of ninety-four. Their foundation — the W.A. "Monty" Moncrief Foundation — would become one of the primary vehicles through which the family distributed its wealth to hospitals, universities, and cultural institutions across Texas.
The Barnett Shale and the Ranch That Sat on a Fortune
The ironies of the Moncrief story tend to be geological. Consider the family's 20,000-acre ranch outside Fort Worth. Tex Moncrief had owned it for decades, a working ranch in the tradition of Texas oil families who like to run cattle on land that may or may not have something more valuable underneath it. In the early 2000s, it became clear that the ranch sat squarely in the middle of the Barnett Shale gas field, one of the most prolific natural gas formations in the country, made accessible by the new technology of hydraulic fracturing.
There was enough gas for hundreds of wells. Tex didn't need the money — he was already worth close to a billion dollars — but the discovery was a kind of cosmic punctuation mark on the Moncrief story: even the land they owned for pleasure turned out to be sitting on a fortune. The bush they had stuck to kept producing, even when they weren't looking for it.
Davy Jones at Twenty-Eight Thousand Feet
At 3:30 a.m. on January 10, 2010, Tex Moncrief's phone rang. He was eighty-nine years old. On the line was James Robert Moffett — "Jim Bob" to his friends, cochairman of McMoran Exploration — a man whose biography belongs to the same species of Texas outsized personality that the Moncriefs represent, though from the bayou country of Louisiana rather than the Fort Worth oil patch. "Jim Bob told me, 'Tex, we got it,'" Moncrief recounted. "'It looks like we got something by the tail.'"
That something was Davy Jones, a natural gas field in the waters off Louisiana holding as much as six trillion cubic feet of gas — the energy equivalent of roughly a billion barrels of oil. The well had been drilled to 28,000 feet below sea level at a cost of some $100 million. It was an ultradeep, high-risk prospect of the kind that typically only publicly traded companies with deep balance sheets would touch. But Moncrief owned 9% of Davy Jones personally and had pledged at least $100 million to buy into eleven other prospects that McMoran planned to drill nearby.
The opportunity had come, as these things often do in the oil business, through a long personal friendship. In 2006, McMoran had been a minority partner with ExxonMobil in an offshore prospect called West Blackbeard. Exxon abandoned it. Moffett wanted to try again and eventually asked Moncrief to buy in. The names tell the story — Blackbeard, Davy Jones — and Moncrief leaned into the pirate theme with glee, hanging a Jolly Roger flag and a poster of the tentacle-faced Davy Jones character from Pirates of the Caribbean in the elevator of his office.
It was rare to see an octogenarian individual — not a fund, not a corporation, but a single person — with that kind of skin in the game on an ultradeep offshore well. But this was precisely the Moncrief model: independent, unincorporated, family-owned, willing to take concentrated bets on high-conviction geological opportunities. Forbes reported it as perhaps the biggest find of his career. Tex, characteristically, was understated. "It may go up a little with this discovery," he allowed when asked about his net worth.
"I'm still looking for deals," he said. "Just going to keep looking and hoping, looking and hoping, that's all you can do."
He was eighty-nine. He sounded like his father.
The IRS Raids the Moncrief Building
On September 1, 1994, sixty-four armed agents from the Criminal Investigation Division of the Internal Revenue Service descended on the offices of Moncrief Oil in downtown Fort Worth. They seized more than one million documents. The accusation: the Moncrief family and their operating company, Montex Drilling Co., had bilked the federal government out of between $100 million and $300 million in taxes.
Charles Moncrief — Tex's son, the grandson of Monty — would later write about this moment in his book Wildcatters: The True Story of How Conspiracy, Greed, and the IRS Almost Destroyed a Legendary Texas Oil Family, framing it with the dramatic compression of someone who lived through it: "One day, you're living in peace, and then you're at war. Sixty-four armed agents from the Criminal Investigation Division of the Internal Revenue Service are kicking down your door. The newspaper headlines scream accusations against you and your family. And your hometown is following the lurid spectacle that your life has become."
The investigation lasted two years. In the end, Tex Moncrief pleaded no contest to a single count of criminal tax fraud — the specific charge was that he had "improperly deducted" $900,000 in business expenses from Montex Drilling on his 1990 personal federal tax return. The plea agreement was signed and sent to the United States Department of Justice but, remarkably, was never officially filed. On January 4, 1996, Moncrief and Montex settled with the IRS, paying $23 million.
The gap between the initial accusation — $100 million to $300 million in unpaid taxes — and the actual resolution — $23 million and a single no-contest plea on a $900,000 deduction — tells its own story. The IRS had come with sixty-four agents and a million seized documents and walked away with a fraction of what it claimed. Moncrief, for his part, decried the agency's "aggressive tactics" but did not elaborate. He had other things to do. There was oil to find.
Succession and Its Discontents
Monty Moncrief's greatest achievement was not the East Texas oilfield or the Scurry County wells or even the billion-dollar fortune. It was the creation of a multigenerational institution — a family enterprise that survived the transition from founder to son. But the question that haunted every dynasty in the history of capitalism haunted the Moncriefs too: what happens when the patriarch dies?
Tex had four sons by different marriages — a biographical detail that introduces, as it always does, the architecture of future conflict. There was Richard "Dick" Moncrief. There was Tom Moncrief. There was Charles "Charlie" Moncrief, who became Tex's right-hand man and the presumptive successor, the one who ran Montex day to day, the one who brought his daughter Gloria into the business to learn the trade. And there were others. The family tree branched in ways that created competing claims, competing loyalties, competing visions of what the Moncrief legacy was for.
For as long as Tex was alive — and he was alive for a very long time, dying on December 29, 2021, at the age of 101 — the centripetal force of his authority held the family together, or at least held it in check. He was still, in the manner of Monty before him, the patriarch, the man who made the decisions. But Charlie developed glioblastoma, a virulent form of brain cancer, and died in January 2021. And Tex, by then a centenarian, was failing.
What followed was a succession crisis that would have been familiar to the Medicis, or to the audience of King Lear, or — perhaps most accurately — to the viewers of HBO's Succession. In October 2020, according to court filings in Judge Pat Gallagher's 96th District Court in Fort Worth, Dick Moncrief marched into the Montex headquarters and seized control of the company, firing the chief financial officer and offering jobs to twenty of twenty-two employees. He had received, his half-brother Tom and niece Gloria alleged, a $10 million transfer from the failing Tex obtained through "undue influence and/or fraud." Dick had played no role at Montex "for more than twenty-five years," they claimed. He also owed $20 million on a loan that had been due since 2018 — and had not paid a dime.
Dick, for his part, accused Gloria and Tom of manipulating another incapacitated person — Charlie himself, during his final illness. He alleged that someone had procured "a few chicken scrawls purported to be Charlie's signature" on a document that removed Tex from the board of the family's massive 1966 trust and converted it from a Texas entity to a Delaware limited partnership, without informing Tex as required. The purpose, Dick said, was to shield the trust from an audit. Gloria countered that she was Charlie's "planned successor," having worked alongside her father for ten years, and that the restructuring was a legitimate defensive maneuver.
The lawsuits multiplied. Each side accused the other of extracting signatures from dying or mentally infirm relatives. Ranch and vacation properties in Texas and Colorado became contested terrain. Hundreds of millions of dollars in trust assets were at stake.
No one is pulling punches in a drama that smacks of Shakespeare's King Lear colliding with HBO's Succession in downtown Cowtown.
— Fort Worth Report, February 2022
The most remarkable thing about the conflict was how long it stayed out of the press. The Moncriefs were Fort Worth's most prominent philanthropists, their name on buildings and streets and cancer centers across the city, and yet the "high-stakes clash among Fort Worth's most prominent philanthropists and social luminaries" — as the Fort Worth Report would eventually describe it — "unfolded without a word in the news media" for over a year, even as "local movers and shakers" grew "increasingly agog."
Gloria Moncrief Holmsten — Charlie's daughter, the woman at the center of the succession fight — had roomed at the University of Texas at Austin with Jenna Bush Hager, one of President George W. Bush's twin daughters, who was godmother to one of Gloria's children. She had interned at the Bush White House. She was, in the idiom of Texas society, connected in ways that made it very difficult for journalists to pry the story open. Until it opened anyway.
The Philanthropy of Permanence
The Moncrief name is written across Fort Worth in the particular way that old oil money inscribes itself on a city: not flashily, not with the relentless personal branding of a later era, but with the patient, cumulative weight of decades of giving to institutions that outlast any individual.
The Moncrief Cancer Institute. The UT Southwestern Monty and Tex Moncrief Medical Center at Fort Worth, established in 2015 after a $25 million donation from Tex — the first UT System named campus outside of Dallas. The family's total donations to UT Southwestern medical facilities exceeded $100 million. Texas Christian University. The University of Texas. Educational, health, civic, and cultural organizations across the city and state.
When Tex made the $25 million gift, he mentioned his father prominently: "My Dad would be pleased that the Moncrief Radiation Center that he created in Fort Worth years ago has now evolved into UT Southwestern's plan for a major clinic in Fort Worth." Even in his nineties, the son was still framing his achievements in terms of his father's legacy. The "we" that Monty had insisted upon — "we signed this deal, we figured out what was best" — extended across the grave.
Dr. Daniel K. Podolsky, President of UT Southwestern, said after Tex's death: "There was never an individual more decisive in pursuing his passion. His vision and remarkable generosity — always in honor of his admired father — have enabled UT Southwestern to serve legions of those in need."
The philanthropy was not incidental to the Moncrief project. It was integral to it. In the Texas oil tradition, the accumulation of wealth carried with it an obligation — not enforced by law but by the cultural expectations of the communities these men had helped build — to give it back. Hospitals, universities, churches. The institutions that make a city a city rather than a collection of oil derricks and bank accounts. The Moncriefs gave to these institutions not merely out of generosity but out of the same instinct that drove the founding of the family business: the desire to create something that would endure.
The Last Wildcatter
Fort Worth Mayor Mattie Parker, in her statement after Tex's death, called him "a giant of a man, a true pioneer in business and philanthropy." Bruce Bullock, director of the Maguire Energy Institute at Southern Methodist University, placed Tex in the context of a vanishing breed: "With Tex as well as the other kind of legendary wildcatters, they were pioneers in the sense that they really didn't believe in large corporations. They believed in smaller-leaning, sole proprietorships, if you will, which meant they took an awful lot of risk. There just aren't people around like that anymore."
There just aren't people around like that anymore. The sentence carries the weight of an epitaph not just for Tex Moncrief but for the entire tradition he represented — the independent wildcatter, the family-owned operator, the man who made concentrated bets with his own money on what lay beneath the earth. The industry had consolidated. The majors dominated. The shale revolution had industrialized what had once been an artisanal business. Private equity funds and publicly traded E&P companies had replaced the individual risk-taker.
And yet the Moncrief model — independent, unincorporated, family-owned — had survived for nearly a century, across three generations, through booms and busts and IRS raids and family lawsuits, producing wealth that flowed back into the city that had nurtured it. The model was anachronistic from the moment Monty Moncrief articulated it. That was its strength.
Tex Moncrief's breakfast, every morning, was bacon, egg, toast, and coffee. His favorite way to relax was a cocktail with his wife at 5:30. He read at least two hours a day. He prayed — "Yes, yes, yes." He considered an MBA unnecessary. If he could have been anything else, he said, "I just wouldn't." The greatest thing he ever saw was that gusher in Gregg County in 1931, when he was ten years old and his father was thirty-six and the oil shot a hundred feet into the Texas sky.
The Moncrief Building still stands on Commerce Street in downtown Fort Worth. The family still fights over what's inside it. And somewhere beneath the red clay of East Texas, the Black Giant still holds oil that Monty Moncrief was the first to prove was there — on a January day in 1931, when he drilled where no one believed oil could be found, and was right.
8.
9.Turn your ranch into optionality.
10.Philanthropy is not an exit — it is the business model.
11.Plan the succession or it will plan itself.
Principle 1
Choose your bush and never leave it.
"My daddy told me to 'stick to my bush.'" This was Tex Moncrief's most treasured piece of paternal advice, and it encapsulates the deepest strategic conviction of the Moncrief enterprise: radical focus. In a world that rewards diversification, the Moncriefs refused to diversify. They never went into ranching as a business. They never played real estate. They never launched a hedge fund or bought a sports team. They were oilmen, and anything that extended beyond the realm of oil was not a proper Moncrief concern.
This is not the same as saying they were unsophisticated. It is the opposite. Radical focus is the most sophisticated strategy available to an independent operator, because it transforms all the advantages of scale that corporations possess — diversified revenue streams, risk mitigation through portfolio breadth — into a single liability: the corporation can never know any one thing as deeply as the specialist knows it. The Moncriefs knew oil. They knew formations, they knew leases, they knew the particular geology of West Texas and Louisiana and Wyoming in a way that no committee at ExxonMobil ever could. Their edge was depth of knowledge, and depth of knowledge requires narrowness of scope.
Charlie Munger, whose "surfing model" of staying on the wave of a great business resonates directly with the Moncrief approach, put it this way: "There are huge advantages for the early birds. When a surfer gets up and catches the wave and just stays there, he can go a long, long time." The Moncriefs caught the wave of independent oil production in 1929 and stayed on it for nearly a century.
Tactic: Identify the single domain where you have the deepest knowledge and the highest conviction, and resist every temptation to leave it — especially the temptations that come disguised as "diversification."
Principle 2
Build a family, not a company.
The Moncrief enterprise was never incorporated. It never had a board of directors, outside investors, or institutional shareholders. It was a family operation in the most literal sense: ownership resided within the family, decisions were made within the family, and the purpose of the business was to sustain and perpetuate the family. "We're one hundred percent family-owned, unincorporated, and independent, and we intend to stay that way."
This structure created enormous advantages and enormous risks. The advantages: speed of decision-making, total alignment of incentives, zero agency costs, no quarterly earnings pressure, no activist investors, no need to explain yourself to anyone. When Tex Moncrief wanted to invest $100 million personally in an ultradeep offshore well at age eighty-nine, he did not need to convene a board meeting. He picked up the phone.
The risk is the one that eventually materialized: succession. A family enterprise is only as stable as the family, and families — especially families with multiple marriages, multiple branches, and a billion dollars at stake — are inherently unstable. The Moncrief model worked brilliantly for two generations and fractured in the third.
Tactic: A family-owned structure gives you the greatest freedom to take concentrated risks and think in decades rather than quarters — but only if you solve the succession problem before it solves you.
Principle 3
Accumulate singles before swinging for home runs.
Tex Moncrief's advice to young entrepreneurs — "Accumulate a lot of singles and gradually get into the doubles and triples before you try for the home runs" — is a philosophy of capital allocation disguised as a baseball metaphor. The key word is "accumulate." You do not start by swinging for the fences. You start by building a base of small, reliable wins that generate the capital and the experience to take bigger swings.
The Moncriefs' Scurry County campaign illustrates this perfectly. They drilled one dry hole, then twenty-eight successful wells. Each successful well generated capital for the next. The portfolio of producing wells created the cash flow that funded the riskier exploration plays — the Madden Deep, the Davy Jones — that delivered outsized returns. The singles funded the home runs.
This is the opposite of the venture capital model, where you start with other people's money and swing for the fences from day one. The wildcatter model requires you to earn your right to take big risks by first demonstrating that you can take small risks successfully.
Tactic: Build your bankroll through a series of high-probability, modest-return investments before deploying capital into high-risk, high-return opportunities.
Principle 4
Stay independent at all costs.
The pressure to go public, to sell out, to merge with a larger entity — this pressure is constant in the oil business, and the Moncriefs resisted it for nearly a century. The reasons were partly philosophical ("we're oilmen") and partly strategic. Independence meant they could act on geological conviction without needing to justify it to outsiders. When every major oil company's geologists said there was no oil in East Texas, Monty Moncrief drilled anyway. He could do this because he answered to no one but his partners and his family.
Independence also meant accepting a particular kind of risk. When the IRS raided the Moncrief Building in 1994, there was no corporate legal department to absorb the blow, no public relations firm to manage the narrative. The family took the hit directly. The settlement cost $23 million — real money, even for a billionaire — and the legal and reputational costs extended far beyond that.
But the alternative — submitting to the governance structures that protect corporations from these risks — would have destroyed the very thing that made the Moncriefs exceptional: their ability to act on conviction, quickly, without permission.
Tactic: Understand that independence is not free — it comes with concentrated risk and concentrated responsibility — but it is the prerequisite for concentrated conviction.
Principle 5
Erase the 'I' from the enterprise.
Monty Moncrief never spoke in the first person when discussing business. "We signed this deal. We figured out what was best. This is a 'we' kind of business. We don't tolerate any of that 'I' stuff around here." This was not humility. It was a deliberate erasure of individual ego in service of institutional identity.
The psychological effect of this discipline is profound. When the leader consistently uses "we," it signals to every person in the organization that their contributions are recognized and that the enterprise is larger than any individual. It also creates a cultural expectation that the enterprise will outlast the leader. You do not build a dynasty by making it about yourself. You build a dynasty by making it about the dynasty.
The counterfactual is illuminating. The Texas oil industry is littered with fortunes that collapsed in the second generation because the founder had been the sun around which everything orbited. When the sun went out, the system lost coherence. Monty's insistence on "we" was a structural choice designed to prevent exactly this outcome.
Tactic: Systematically remove yourself as the center of your organization's identity — in language, in decision-making, in public attribution — so that the institution can survive your absence.
Principle 6
Apprentice the next generation through immersion, not instruction.
Tex Moncrief was ten years old when he watched the Lathrop gusher come in. He did not learn about the oil business in a classroom or from a textbook. He learned it by being physically present at a wellsite when oil exploded a hundred feet into the air and grown men hugged each other and wept. "I decided on the spot that I wanted to become an oilman."
This is not a pedagogy you can systematize. It is a form of apprenticeship so total that the line between education and identity formation disappears. Tex went on to study petroleum engineering at the University of Texas — formal education mattered — but the foundational experience was visceral, not intellectual. He saw the thing happen. He felt the excitement. He absorbed, through proximity, the temperament of a wildcatter.
The same pattern repeated with Charlie Moncrief, who grew up in the business and brought his daughter Gloria in to work alongside him at Montex. The transmission of knowledge was direct, personal, and embedded in daily practice. You learned by doing deals, not by studying case studies about deals.
Tactic: Bring the next generation into the core of the operation as early as possible — not as observers or interns, but as participants who feel the stakes of what you do.
Principle 7
Die at the desk.
Monty Moncrief died at ninety-one, in his office, working on a deal. Tex Moncrief died at 101, still identifying himself as an active oilman, still looking for deals. "As long as your mind's in good shape you can work until you die. That's what my dad did."
This is not workaholism in the modern sense — the frantic, anxiety-driven overwork of someone who confuses activity with purpose. It is something closer to the opposite: a life so fully aligned with its work that retirement would be a form of death. The Moncriefs did not work for something. They were something. An oilman who stops looking for oil is no longer an oilman. He is nothing.
The practical implication is that the leader who stays at the desk — who remains engaged, who keeps making decisions, who refuses to detach from the enterprise — provides continuity and institutional memory that cannot be replicated by any governance structure.
The dark implication is that the leader who stays at the desk too long — who remains engaged past the point of competence, who continues making decisions when his faculties have dimmed — creates the exact succession vacuum that destroyed the Moncrief peace.
Tactic: Build your life so that the work and the identity are inseparable — but have the honesty to plan for the day when they must be separated whether you want them to be or not.
Principle 8
Let relationships compound as long as capital does.
The Davy Jones discovery came from a friendship between Tex Moncrief and Jim Bob Moffett that had lasted decades. The Scurry County campaign involved Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, golfing friends of Monty's. The East Texas discovery involved partners John Farrell and Eddie Showers, trusted collaborators. In every case, the deal emerged from a relationship that had been built over years — sometimes decades — before the specific opportunity materialized.
In the oil business, information flows through networks of trust. The best deals are not advertised; they are offered, quietly, to people who have earned the right to be in the room. Moffett did not call a broker when he needed a partner for Davy Jones. He called Tex, at 3:30 in the morning, because he knew Tex had the capital, the conviction, and the temperament to say yes without requiring a committee to approve it.
Tactic: Invest in relationships the way you invest in oil fields — with patience, consistency, and the understanding that the biggest payoff may come decades after the initial investment.
Principle 9
Turn your ranch into optionality.
Tex Moncrief's 20,000-acre ranch outside Fort Worth was a ranch — cattle, land, the pleasures of rural Texas life. Then the Barnett Shale happened, and the ranch turned out to be sitting on enough natural gas for hundreds of wells. This was not foresight. It was optionality. By owning a large piece of land in a geologically active region, Moncrief had created an option on whatever the earth beneath it might contain, without paying any explicit premium for that option.
The broader principle is that assets with unmeasured potential — land, intellectual property, relationships, domain expertise — can generate outsized returns when circumstances change. The Moncriefs did not buy the ranch because they expected a shale gas revolution. They bought it because they were Texans who liked ranching. The gas was a bonus. But the willingness to hold assets for long periods, without demanding immediate returns, is what transforms a ranch into a fortune.
Tactic: Acquire assets with unmeasured upside potential — land, knowledge, relationships — and hold them long enough for the world to catch up to what they contain.
Principle 10
Philanthropy is not an exit — it is the business model.
The Moncrief family gave more than $100 million to UT Southwestern alone. They funded hospitals, cancer centers, universities, churches, and civic institutions across Texas. This giving was not an afterthought or a tax strategy. It was integral to the Moncrief concept of what the business was for.
In the Texas oil tradition, the accumulation of wealth and the distribution of wealth are two phases of the same project. You extract value from the earth, you concentrate it in a family, and then you distribute it to the institutions that sustain the community in which you live. The cycle is not charity in the modern, detached sense. It is investment in the social infrastructure that makes the business possible in the first place — the educated workforce, the healthy population, the cultural institutions that make Fort Worth a place where talented people want to live.
Tex Moncrief always framed his gifts in terms of his father: "My Dad would be pleased." The philanthropy was not Tex's legacy. It was the family's legacy, extending the "we" beyond the business and into the community.
Tactic: Treat philanthropy not as something you do after you succeed but as something that is constitutive of the success itself — a way of binding your enterprise to the community whose support makes it possible.
Principle 11
Plan the succession or it will plan itself.
The Moncrief family fought a brutal legal battle over hundreds of millions of dollars in assets, with siblings accusing siblings of fraud, manipulation, and elder abuse. The fight erupted because the succession had not been planned — or, more precisely, because the patriarch lived long enough and the designated successor died soon enough to create a vacuum that the remaining family members rushed to fill.
This is the central paradox of the dynastic model. The same qualities that make a founder great — the refusal to cede control, the belief in personal authority, the conviction that the enterprise cannot function without the founder at its center — are the qualities that make succession planning impossible. Monty Moncrief ruled until he died at ninety-one. Tex Moncrief remained the patriarch until he died at 101. Neither man, as far as the public record indicates, created a clear, enforceable succession plan that survived his death.
The result was predictable, and it is the result that has attended every great fortune from the Vanderbilts to the Guccis: the generation that inherits the wealth fights over it, and the fight destroys something that the wealth itself cannot rebuild.
⚖
The Succession Crisis
Key events in the Moncrief family dispute
Oct 2020
Dick Moncrief enters Montex headquarters, fires CFO, and assumes control of operations.
Late 2020
Charlie Moncrief, in treatment for glioblastoma, allegedly signs documents restructuring the 1966 family trust.
Jan 2021
Charlie Moncrief dies. Gloria Moncrief Holmsten claims position as "planned successor."
Dec 2021
Tex Moncrief dies at 101. The succession vacuum becomes absolute.
Feb 2022
Fort Worth Report breaks story of lawsuits in Judge Gallagher's 96th District Court.
Tactic: The single most important decision a founder makes is not the first deal but the succession plan — and it must be made and documented while the founder still has the authority and clarity to enforce it.
Part IIIQuotes / Maxims
In their words
We're oilmen. We're one hundred percent family-owned, unincorporated, and independent, and we intend to stay that way.
— Monty Moncrief
Accumulate a lot of singles and gradually get into the doubles and triples before you try for the home runs.
— W.A. 'Tex' Moncrief Jr.
As long as your mind's in good shape you can work until you die. That's what my dad did. He died right here in the office working on a deal at age ninety-one.
— W.A. 'Tex' Moncrief Jr.
I'm still looking for deals. Just going to keep looking and hoping, looking and hoping, that's all you can do.
— W.A. 'Tex' Moncrief Jr.
It was just the greatest thing I ever saw. People were jumping around and hollering and hugging each other just like they'd won a football game. I decided on the spot that I wanted to become an oilman.
— W.A. 'Tex' Moncrief Jr., on the 1931 East Texas gusher
Maxims
Stick to your bush. The deepest competitive advantage comes from radical focus on a single domain, maintained across decades, resisting every temptation to diversify into what you do not deeply understand.
Family and business are the same thing. The desire to found an enterprise is inseparably tied to the desire to found a dynasty — the question is whether you build the structures to make that unity survive the founder.
Drill where the experts say you can't. Monty Moncrief found the northern extension of the largest oilfield in America by drilling where every major oil company's geologists said there was nothing. Consensus is not geology.
The "we" matters more than the "I." Erasing individual ego from the enterprise is not modesty — it is the structural prerequisite for institutional permanence.
Earn your right to take big risks. Twenty-eight successful wells in Scurry County funded the $100 million bet on Davy Jones. You cannot swing for the fences until the singles have built the bankroll.
Relationships are the real leases. The best deals come from friendships built over decades, offered quietly to trusted partners at 3:30 in the morning, not from deal books or broker networks.
Independence is expensive — and worth every penny. Being unincorporated, family-owned, and answerable to no one means absorbing the full force of every setback. It also means capturing the full value of every conviction.
The patriarch must have a plan for his own absence. The Moncrief empire survived two generational transitions and fractured on the third — not because the wealth ran out, but because the succession was unplanned.
Die at the desk, but write the will first. There is nobility in working until the end. There is recklessness in working until the end without ensuring that the end does not destroy what you built.
Give it back to the place that made you. A billion dollars extracted from the earth means nothing if it does not return to the community as hospitals, universities, and institutions that outlast the fortune itself.
