In 1979, Tom Long went to work in the accounting group at Texas Eastern. Forty-seven years later, he helped open a stock market from Energy Transfer’s Dallas headquarters. There are more theatrical ways to begin a career in energy. There are fewer ways to see, quite so consistently, what the machinery costs.
On October 5, 2026, Long joined James H. Lee, chairman and CEO of the Texas Stock Exchange, for a market-opening bell ceremony. Energy Transfer and three affiliated issuers were transferring their primary listings to the exchange. Long was already a TXSE Group director. The executive who had spent decades working with capital was now participating in the opening ritual of a venue built to trade it.
The distance between those two moments is the interesting part. Long became Energy Transfer’s co-chief executive officer in January 2021, sharing the job with Mackie McCrea. Before that came years as a chief financial officer, across companies whose names form a short history of energy consolidation. His career rewards following the connections.
The first desk was in accounting
Long was born in Houston and earned his accounting degree at Lamar University in 1979. His first professional address was Texas Eastern’s accounting group. He has recalled learning early that he needed a clearer idea of where he wanted his working life to go. A first job supplies a salary; occasionally it also supplies a useful question.
Accounting offered an entrance into an industry with a great deal happening outside the office. His early career included work on petrochemical facilities along the Texas Gulf Coast and in Saudi Arabia. In 1989, he participated in the $3.2 billion combination involving Texas Eastern and Panhandle. Long’s acquaintance with large energy transactions predates his present title by several decades.
Those experiences give the later CFO résumé some physical context. Energy finance concerns facilities with locations, customers and operating requirements. A transaction can be announced in a paragraph. Making the assets work together takes considerably more room, and usually more patience. Long’s subsequent career placed him repeatedly where those financial and operating considerations met.
Accounting group
Chief financial officer
Co-chief executive
Board vice chairman
A résumé with several sets of keys
From 1998 to 2005, Long held executive positions with Duke Energy subsidiaries. He then served as vice president and CFO of DCP Midstream Partners, followed by the same titles at Matrix Service Company from May 2008 to November 2010. At Regency GP LLC, he was executive vice president and CFO from November 2010 through April 2015.
By February 2016, he was CFO of Energy Transfer’s general partner. He joined its board in April 2019. In between, he oversaw the 2018 merger of Energy Transfer Equity and Energy Transfer Partners. That was a consequential finance assignment inside the organization he would later help lead.
Read together, the jobs show a long apprenticeship in how energy businesses are financed and combined. They also explain why Long’s promotion was a move from within. He had already worked through the partnership’s financial structure and a major corporate combination. When he reached the executive office, the business came with a history he had helped administer.
Two names on the office door
The succession announced in October 2020 had three principal characters. Kelcy Warren, Energy Transfer’s co-founder, would remain executive chairman. McCrea and Long would become co-CEOs on January 1, 2021. The arrangement preserved Warren’s involvement in strategy while transferring day-to-day leadership to two longstanding executives.
McCrea brought a background that included commercial and operating leadership. Long brought the finance career. The announcement described the pair working together through an office of the CEO and jointly directing the partnership. The public structure did not assign one executive exclusive ownership of the numbers and the other exclusive ownership of the pipes.
That distinction matters when considering Long. His current responsibility extends beyond his former CFO title, even if finance remains a substantial part of the experience he brings. At a pipeline partnership, a decision about expansion is also a decision about customers, construction, funding and how an additional asset will connect. There is plenty for two chief executives to discuss.
How seven billion becomes a bolt-on
Long has discussed Energy Transfer’s strategy in terms of a route from the wellhead to the water. The shorthand describes an interconnected business: products move from production through gathering, processing, transportation and storage toward customers and export facilities. Individual assets acquire meaning through the places they can reach.
On a May 2024 earnings call, he explained that the partnership continued to evaluate consolidation opportunities and considered how prospective assets would feed downstream through the value chain. That gives an acquisition a practical test. Alongside the price sits the question of what the purchase can do when attached to the existing network.
The scale can produce some entertaining vocabulary. Discussing acquisitions in 2024, Long observed that transactions exceeding $7 billion could still be described as bolt-ons. Most people would expect a rather substantial bolt. The description makes sense only when the surrounding business is already extensive.
“Even these acquisitions that are over $7 billion - you call them bolt-ons.”Tom Long · 2024
For Long, the context includes decades of exposure to businesses before and after combinations. An acquisition changes ownership immediately at closing; its usefulness within a network depends on geography and connections. His public explanation directs attention to the entire route rather than leaving the story at the announcement price.
The student who came back to the boardroom
Long’s relationship with Lamar began in 1975, after a high-school friend recommended the university and its business school. He has credited Larry Spradley with connecting him to internships and part-time work. The opportunities gave a student practical experience before his first full-time accounting position.
He also met Meg Price at a Kappa Sigma event. They married in 1979, the year both graduated: Tom in accounting, Meg in elementary education. The university sits near the beginning of both their professional and personal lives. In Long’s account of those years, education involved people who made opportunities accessible, as well as what happened in class.
In 2023, he joined the Texas State University System Board of Regents, whose institutions include Lamar. His term runs to February 2029. The appointment gave the alumnus a formal role in governing the system that includes his own university, decades after he first arrived as an undergraduate.
On May 29, 2026, the regents unanimously elected him vice chairman. He also chairs their finance and audit committee. The work brings his financial experience into a public institution, with a different set of people depending on the decisions. The former accounting student now has responsibilities on the other side of the university’s books.
A Texas network beyond the pipeline
Long’s board service extends into banking and capital markets. He joined Texas Capital Bancshares’ board in 2022 and TXSE Group’s board in July 2024. His other roles include chairman of USA Compression Partners’ board. The institutions differ, but each places him close to decisions about investment, capacity and the use of capital.
In September 2022, he was named to the National Association of Manufacturers’ board. That appointment connected an energy executive with a broader industrial membership and its advocacy on workforce, trade and competitiveness. Moving energy is one part of an industrial economy; the companies that use it have their own concerns about supply and investment.
These appointments also put the October 2026 exchange ceremony in perspective. Long’s participation linked his operating company with a capital-markets institution whose board he had joined two years earlier. A market-opening bell is brief. The corporate and financial relationships surrounding it have been developing for much longer.
A different kind of capital allocation
Education appears elsewhere in the Longs’ public life. Tom and Meg helped co-chair the British American Foundation of Texas’s November 14, 2025 gala alongside Amy and Rob Pierce. The event brought more than 600 guests to Houston’s Post Oak Hotel and raised over $1.1 million for scholarships supporting Texas students in business and STEM fields.
The evening included pipers and an auction, a livelier setting than a finance committee agenda. Its purpose was practical: helping students afford an education. Placed beside Long’s account of the people who helped him at Lamar, the event supplies a concrete connection between an early opportunity and a later responsibility. The fundraising achievement belonged to the event and its supporters collectively.
Long received D CEO’s Midstream Executive of the Year award in 2024. Such recognition supplies a neat line for a biography. His career itself is less neatly contained. It runs through accounting departments, energy transactions, shared executive authority and institutions responsible for other people’s capital and education.
Back in 1979, the work began with learning a business through its accounts. By 2026, the same career had reached a stock-exchange ceremony and the vice chairmanship of a university system. The route has become longer and the responsibilities broader. Its recurring question remains thoroughly practical: where does this investment lead?