Tom Hicks

The son of a Texas radio station owner, Hicks was born on February 7, 1946, in Port Arthur, Texas, and had graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School, in 1964. Hicks earned a bachelor's degree in finance from the University of Texas in 1968, and his Master of Business Administration from the University of Southern California in 1970. He was a member of the Sigma Phi Epsilon social fraternity.

Hicks became interested in leveraged buyouts as a member of First National Bank of Dallas's venture capital group. Hicks and Robert Haas formed Hicks & Haas in 1984. The next year that firm bought Hicks Communications, a radio outfit run by Hicks's brother Steven – the first of several media companies bought or created by the buyout firm that involved Steven (Capstar, Chancellor, and AMFM).

In the mid-1980s, Hicks & Haas bought several soft drink makers, including Dr Pepper and 7 Up. The firm took Dr Pepper/7 Up public just 18 months after merging the two companies. In all, Hicks & Haas turned $88 million of investor funding into $1.3 billion. The pair went their separate ways in May 1989. He wanted to raise large pools to invest, while Haas preferred to work with investors deal by deal.

In 1989, Hicks co-founded the investment firm, Hicks, Muse, Tate & Furst with former Prudential Securities banker John Muse. The firm raised $250 million, with early investments including a life insurance company, Life Partners Group (bought in 1990 and sold in 1996). In 1991, Morgan Stanley's Charles Tate and First Boston's Jack Furst became partners. Hicks was chairman from 1989 to 2004, Hicks Muse raised $12 billion of private equity funds, consummated over $50 billion of leveraged acquisitions, and grew to become one of the largest private investment firms in the country.

But Hicks Muse hit a rough patch by the early 2000s, when investors in Equity Fund IV were burned by a $1.2 billion plunge into telecom investments in 1999. Hicks announced that he would leave the Hicks Muse on March 8, 2004, to spend more time with his family and his sports teams. (Hicks Muse was subsequently renamed HM Capital Partners.) He has remained active in his own ventures. He created Hicks Holdings, a vehicle for his sports and real estate empire, and then started buying companies again in the $10 to $250 million level, including: a Chinese electronics firm, a venture with DirecTV selling bundled TV-telecom services to condos, a landscaping materials company in the Midwest, a pet food firm in Argentina, and Gammaloy – an oil field rental outfit he bought from his wife's family, paying approximately $20 million in the 1990s.

Additionally, Hicks formed Hicks Acquisition Company I, Inc. (HACI). In September 2009, HACI merged into Resolute Energy Corporation (REN), an oil and gas firm. Hicks did not sit on REN's board of directors, but his son, Thomas O. Hicks, Jr., represents HACI on the board.

Hicks and his wife, Cinda Cree Hicks, had six children.

Hicks died from complications of heart and lung disease in Dallas, on December 6, 2025, at the age of 79.

Tom Hicks Elementary School in Frisco, Texas, part of the Lewisville Independent School District, was given its name after Hicks donated the land for the school.

Hicks donated a gymnasium to the St. Mark's School of Texas in Dallas. Hicks was also the 1996 co-chair of the Dallas Jewish Coalition for the Homeless "Vogel Alcove" project, and received the 2000 Henry Cohn Humanitarian Award from the Anti-Defamation League.

Hicks was a member of the political action committee for the 2008 presidential election campaign for former Republican Mayor of New York City Rudy Giuliani. Hicks was previously neighbors with former U.S. President George W. Bush and First Lady Laura Bush. Each neighbor's property shared a boundary between Daria Place and Holloway Road, within a gated community of Preston Hollow, Dallas, Texas respectively.

Hicks, with the help of then-Gov. George W. Bush, helped create the University of Texas Investment Management Company (UTIMCO) to manage the Permanent University Fund. Almost a third of the $1.7 billion private equities portfolio UTIMCO invested between 1995 and 1998 was with firms personally or politically connected to then-UT Regent Tom Hicks or then-Gov. George W. Bush.