The death last week of 91-year-old T. Boone Pickens, the southwest oilman, corporate raider, hedge funder, and philanthropist, reminds us that business tycoons in America used to be more interesting characters than they are now.

The late 20th century was full of them: 1950s whiz-kid technocrats, conglomerate kings of the 1960s, and corporate raiders and junk bond warriors of the 1980s — that’s where Pickens comes in — were very different people from the current crop of dot-com moguls and programmers who camp at the heights of American capitalism. Earnest, reclusive, tight-lipped, and dressed for weekends, equally devoted to amassing more billions while saving the world, the princes of Silicon Valley would scarcely be recognized in public without their phalanx of bodyguards and press agents.