College Student Tweets Oil Tycoon for Tuition Assistance…and Gets a Response!

Chances are if you’re a college student, you have a Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and/or Reddit account and with all that social media at your fingertips, you have a few options: 1. Repost a someecard that your friends have seen no less than 20 times (it’s still hilarious to you!) 2. Spend some time analyzing Taylor Swift’s latest breakup 3. Catch up on Grumpy Cat memes or 4. Tweet billionaire oil tycoons for some financial assistance. Well, you wouldn’t be the first to partake in the latter pastime.

Seth Samuelson, a current freshman at Oklahoma State University, had been hounding billionaire T. Boone Pickens on Twitter since September asking for help in paying for his college education. Last week, he finally got a response...though not one that he was hoping for. The social media-savvy billionaire tweeted back, “Give me 10 good reasons why I should do it,” following up a day later with, “Admire your guts but unless your [grade point average] is 3.0 or better, don’t worry about the 10 reasons.” Although getting a response at all was quite a shock, we should mention that Samuelson had tweeted Pickens a total of 68 times. “He’s a generous man, so why not ask?” Samuelson, an 18-year-old sports media major, told FORBES on Monday. Alas, Samuelson did not reply because he does not meet the GPA requirements. Jay Rosser, a spokesman for Pickens, wrote in an email that the billionaire “appreciated Samuelson’s persistence and wished him the best.”

Do you agree with Samuelson’s attempt to coax a billionaire into paying for his college education? Let us know in the comments section. In the meantime, if you’re looking for a different route in financing your college degree, Scholarships.com is a great place to start!