Rees-Jones is the founder and owner of Rees-Jones Oil & Minerals, an exploration and production company. The Dallas, Texas-based family-owned company owns and manages about one million acres of oil and gas fields throughout the US. The bulk of his fortune comes the sale of assets including Chief Oil & Gas.
Trevor Rees-Jones's net worth of $5.41B can buy ...
... and is equivalent to ...
The majority of Rees-Jones' fortune is derived from asset sales in the oil and gas industry. This includes the sale of Chief Oil & Gas to Chesapeake Energy for more than $2 billion in January 2022.
Rees-Jones owned all of Chief, spokeswoman Kristi Gittins said in a 2014 phone call. Chief was calculated to have produced 385 million mmBTU (metric million British thermal units) of natural gas in 2020, based on production data compiled by Enverus.
Rees-Jones has collected more than $4 billion selling assets since 2006 based on a Bloomberg analysis.
The billionaire bought a one-third interest in PEC Minerals in 2006 for $75 million and, according to the Rees-Jones Oil & Minerals website, now controls the company. The company controls mineral rights to around one million acres in dozens of states, according to its website. PEC is valued based on state- and acreage-level information disclosed by the company against typical mineral rights sales per acre in those states.
Spokesperson David Margulies said Rees-Jones declined to comment on his net worth.
Trevor Rees-Jones was born to an oil and gas lawyer in Dallas. After graduating from Dartmouth College with a history degree in 1973, he got a law degree from Southern Methodist University and began representing energy industry clients. Rees-Jones realized by 1983 that his life would be miserable if he remained in law, he said in a 2012 video series with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
His experience with the oil industry gave him the knowledge to begin his own wildcatting company, Chief Oil & Gas. During the oil-industry recession of the early 1990s, Rees-Jones cut costs everywhere he could, including paying cash for Dallas road tolls to avoid the extra five cents-per-trip charge for using a toll tag.
"It was a business I really enjoyed, notwithstanding the difficult times," he said in the video for Stanford.
That business became a success by the 2000s. Following the lead of George Mitchell, who was an early proponent of finding new methods of extracting oil and gas in the Barnett Shale basin in Texas, Rees-Jones built exploration and production businesses that employed horizontal drilling and fracturing of rock to access fossil fuels. He began selling off a series of assets in Texas and Pennsylvania in 2005, collecting billions of dollars.