Christophe de Margerie was the kind of outsize character you wouldn’t expect to survive in in a homogenized global business environment. He loved single-malt whiskey, he cursed like a French sailor on shore leave, he stayed out way too late partying and he got in trouble with the law at home in France and abroad.
De Margerie was also uncannily smart about the oil and gas business, and he built Total, the French company he ran, to become one of the biggest corporate giants in Europe and a major force in the energy world. Over the seven years he was Total’s chief executive, he sharply increased the company’s market capitalization and made it the fourth-largest oil company in the world.
In a grotesque accident, de Margerie was killed Monday night when his private jet collided with a snowplow on an airport runway in Moscow as he was leaving after a dinner with Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. An account in The New York Times said that, according to Russian sources at the airport, the snowplow driver was drunk.
With a bushy handlebar mustache, de Margerie looked like someone who could play a swashbuckling French grenadier or the detective in a bedroom farce, depending on the director’s needs of the moment. He delighted in saying outrageous things, the more inflammatory the better. He was also one of the few prominent oil executives who took the issue of climate change seriously.
The last time I saw him, several months ago at a small dinner party in Washington given by his friend Robin West, a prominent energy consultant, I wondered for a moment whether de Margerie was going to punch the U.S. Cabinet secretary sitting across from him who had just made a wisecrack about Russian President Vladimir Putin, who was one of de Margerie’s many questionable friends.
In that confrontation, de Margerie opted for a blustery retort and laughed the matter off. But he made his point that evening that the United States should not assume that it could impose its dictates on global energy markets. The supply of natural gas for Europe was limited in the short run, and if Russian pipelines were closed for political reasons, he said, some Europeans could go cold this winter. The next day, a detailed Total statistical study of the European market landed in my inbox.
De Margerie often criticized U.S. policy, in the Middle East or in dealing with Russia. But he saw the United States as a newly dominant force in the energy world, thanks to shale oil and gas, and pushed to invest Total’s money in U.S. projects. His only unshakable rule seemed to be that the interests of Total’s shareholders come first.
I first met de Margerie in Paris 14 years ago when he was running Total’s Middle East exploration business. He gathered a circle of journalists regularly for dinner and shared the kind of inside information that allowed those around the table to look smarter about the region than we really were. He seemed to know everyone — in Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the smaller Gulf countries. He was indicted in France in the oil-for-food scandal and survived. He was targeted in France and the United States for allegedly paying a prominent Iranian in a gas deal. He survived that one, too, by a whisker. He appeared to regard lawyers as regrettable but necessary encumbrances.
De Margerie was a throwback to an age when business and political leaders were bolder and less constricted by legal rules. He was a builder more than a manager, similar in spirit to the roaring business titans who transformed the United States during the Gilded Age. I remember feeling sorry for his staff members who had to follow behind and clean up whatever large or small problems the chief executive had created in his freewheeling conversations the night before.
What was indisputable about de Margerie was that he could get things done. He would have made life easier for himself (if less lucrative for his many legal counselors) if he had taken fewer chances and paid more attention to rules. But he wasn’t built that way, and it often seemed a small miracle that he could come so close to the edge without going over. It helped that he wasn’t a greedy man and that money didn’t seem to tempt him particularly. By American CEO standards, his compensation was relatively low. What de Margerie liked was adventure, and he got it.
David Ignatius’ email address is davidignatius@washpost.com.
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