Aubrey McClendon

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Aubrey Kerr McClendon is the chief executive officer, chairman, and co-founder of Chesapeake Energy.

McClendon is on the board of directors at Chesapeake, which, among others, includes prominent Oklahoma politicians Frank Keating and Don Nickles. He co-founded Chesapeake, one of the largest natural gas producers in the United States, along with the company's former president Tom L. Ward in 1989 with a $50,000 initial investment.^[1] In 2005 McClendon was named one of America's top-performing executives by Forbes Magazine.^[2]

Since 2000 McClendon has donated $678,050.00 to a variety of Republican candidates and conservative interest groups ^[3]. Most notable of these was a $250,000 donation to Swift Vets and POWs for Truth, a group whose purpose was opposing John Kerry's candidacy for the presidency in 2004. His donation made him the eighth largest contributor to the group.

McClendon is one of four primary partners in The Professional Basketball Club, LLC (TPBC), which owns the NBA Seattle Supersonics club. The NBA fined McClendon $250,000 for comments he made in The (Oklahoma City) Journal Record about his hopes of moving the Sonics to Oklahoma City.^[4]. Clay Bennett has stated that McClendon does not speak for the Sonics in any official capacity.

McClendon graduated from Duke University in 1981. He met his wife Katie, a 1980 Duke graduate, while attending college there.

He was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma in 1959 to Joe and Carole McClendon, and is a grandson of Robert S. Kerr, a former Governor of Oklahoma and US Senator.

In July 2006, Aubrey McClendon purchased 402 acres of Lake Michigan shoreline at the mouth of the Kalamazoo River in Saugatuck, Michigan^[5] for $39 million with the intention of developing the land into residential subdivisions.

In 2007 McClendon bought several full-page ads supporting the Duke men's lacrosse team in the 2006 Duke University lacrosse case.^[6]