About a week ago, I wanted to watch something (out of the corner of my eye, as I often do during my trading day) that wasn’t Bob Ross or one of the movies I’ve seen a thousand times already. I fired up Netflix, and I decided to watch The Smartest Guys in the Room, the Enron story, whose trailer is here:
I love documentaries, and I love learning about business scandals, but even though I already knew the Enron tale fairly well, watching this movie made me really mad.
As long-time readers know, I’m a big fan of capitalism, and I’m absolutely all for entrepreneurs and innovators getting stinking rich. That’s just fine and dandy. Enjoy your jet, your mansion, and your yacht. Nothing wrong with any of that, so long as it is procured honestly. (This kind of leaves out 100% of Russian businessman, and 99% of the Chinese).
But when crooked accountancy or other nefarious means are the road to fortune, well, screw you. Society needs to confiscate everything you have and throw you into the slammer. And that is precisely what happened to Enron’s senior management, and it’s a sad tale.
I distinctly remember back in 2000 when Enron was the talk of the town. It was on the cover of magazines every week, and – – – believe it or not – – they actually flew out to Palo Alto to buy Prophet! I was soon thereafter, along with a couple of other Propheteers, brought to their Houston headquarters to explain the company. I was dazzled by the glitz and glamour of it all. But, Thank God, the deal never went anywhere. If it had, I would have wound up with absolutely nothing.
While watching the movie, I was reminded of the back-slappin’, Texas-drawlin’, frat-boy dumbshit good-old-boys that were running the place. By the year 2000, the hubris was something of Greek tragic proportions, including the time when Skilling famously addressed a Wall Street analyst as “asshole” during a conference call, simply because he has a non-softball question. The analyst – – perhaps one of the few in human history who actually did their job properly, since most Wall Street analyst are whores – – was prescient, to say the least:
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