Incorporating Gordon Gekko: How A Forgotten Lesson Shaped The Management Vision Of Frontieras North America
By Matthew McKean, CEO & Co-Founder, Frontieras North America
When Oliver Stone released Wall Street in 1987, it was meant to be a warning - a story about the dangers of greed. But for those who looked deeper, it contained something far more profound: a message about ownership, accountability, and the will to build.
As a young teenager watching that movie in the theater, I thought something very different. I didn’t see Gordon Gekko as a hero or a villain — I saw him as a truth-teller in a system that had lost its way. Everyone remembers “Greed is good.” What they forget is the most important line: “The management of Teldar Paper owns less than three percent of the company.”
That’s the real insight - and its one that shaped how we build Frontieras North America.
At Frontieras we don’t view innovation as a fact of financial engineering. We view it as an act of creation - a return to ownership. The same way Gekko lamented that Teldar’s Papers managers were disconnected from their company’s outcomes, we’ve seen an entire energy industry detached from the real world of production, infrastructure, and value creation.
Our management philosophy grew out of that realization. Financialism - where valuation matters more than value — has consumed American enterprise. Too many companies are rewarded for stock buy backs, not breakthroughs; for speculation, not substance.
Frontieras was built to challenge that culture. We built our company the way America once built its great industries: by owning the process, the technology, and the results. That belief is embodied in our patented FASForm™ technology — a zero-waste system that converts coal and other hydrocarbons into clean fuels, hydrogen, and fertilizers. We built it not because it was easy or trendy, but because it was necessary.
The Philosophy Of Ownership
When Joe Witherspoon and I founded Frontieras, we were intentional about one thing above all: Control. From the very beginning, we knew that the vision of this company — to redefine the use of hydrocarbons and rebuild American industrial capacity — couldn’t survive if we handed it over to early to financial interests that didn’t share that vision.
There were times when venture groups and institutional investors approached us with offers — large sums that would’ve accelerated near-term valuation but at the cost of long-term independence. We declined.
Why? Because history is full of examples of companies that sold too much, too soon — and lost their soul. When ownership becomes diluted, mission becomes management. When management becomes detached, bureaucracy creeps in. And when bureaucracy takes hold, the enterprise stops building and starts extracting.
That’s the trap Gekko warned about. When management commitment to the mission is too little, the company becomes a financial instrument rather than a productive enterprise. Decisions are no longer made to create value — they’re made to extract it.
Joe and I understood that staying majority owners wasn’t about control for controls sake; it was about protecting the integrity of the mission. It was about ensuring that the company remained focused on building things of substance, not on chasing quarterly optics.
We didn’t found Frontieras to trade stock. We founded it to build infrastructure, to create energy abundance, and to restore American industrial excellence. That requires freedom — and freedom requires ownership.
The Real Message: Ownership And Accountability
What Gekko was saying, and what still echoes today, is that ownership drives excellence. When the people who make decisions no longer have skin in the game, decay follows. That’s true of corporations, governments, and nations alike.