The Smartest Guys in the Room
Jun 5, 06:39 AM
I watched the documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room today. Mind blowing stuff.
For the less informed: Enron became the biggest corporate collapse the world has ever seen. It took just 24 days for the company to go from having 60 billion in assets to being bankrupt. Here, the term “cooking the books” hardly even begins to describe the levels of fraud and deceit involved. They cooked their books into a veritable smorgasbord, with money and assets that never existed. It’s reminiscent of that scene in the movie Hook where the lost boys are all sitting around the table eating what appears to be nothing. Peter Pan (Robin Williams) can’t see what all the other kids are eating, until he’s just told to believe…and suddenly it all appears. At Enron, the investors, analysts, bankers, lawyers, accountants….everyone was just told to believe. But here, instead of a table full of food appearing and comical food fight ensuing, billions of dollars of assets and income appeared and numerous law suits and criminal charges ensued.
The whole time I was sitting there, watching, I wasn’t thinking “Woah, these guys were idiots, trying to get away with all that fraud, how could they even contemplate doing that?” I was thinking “Woah, if only they weren’t so greedy they could have gotten out early and made a shit load of money.” One of them did just that, he left the business, took his 350 million dollars in the sale of his stock, left his wife and disappeared with his pregnant, stripper, mistress. Genius. The level of ingenuity involved in their money making scams and methods to cover up the billions of dollars of debt was astounding. These were indeed the smartest, brightest group of people in the corporate world at the time, except their brains were being used to cover-up the problems rather than rectify them. I sat there and I realised that my morals would probably have been compromised if I was in their position. Getting caught up in the ride that was Enron, this seemingly unstoppable, beacon of hope in the corporate world… you would have lost your soul and not even known.
The strangest part of all of this was that, rather than having an averse effect on my view of the corporate world, which up until this point was of mindless drones sitting behind computer screens in cubicles 8 hours a day. This film in fact made me start reassessing my decision not to get into the world of big business. Perhaps there is some fun to be had. Perhaps I could make my millions there…Perhaps I could disappear with my pregnant, stripper, mistress.
Maybe one day…if I’m lucky.
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