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I just finished reading the smartest guys in the room and couldn't believe how many parallels Enron's story has with Elon's. Obviously some of these are immaterial and just coincidences, but I think some of them get to the heart of how the companies got away with so much.
For the record I'm not saying that Tesla is a fraud like Enron was. The accounting rules that were put in place after Enron's bankruptcy make accounting fraud a lot less likely these days. I'm just calling attention to the company culture and some of the bad behaviors it causes.
I tried to cut the content as much as possible but there's so much here that it's difficult.
Everything below other than the headings is a direct quote from the book, written in 2003 with a few quotes from the 2013 update. Again, the parallels are impressive.

Outside Investors

Blaming the shorts and the media

In Internet chat rooms, individual investors flamed analysts who downgraded their favorite stocks. Even sophisticated institutional investors—the analysts’ primary clients—often became angry at research analysts who turned bearish on stocks they held. It didn’t matter if the analyst’s insight was correct or perceptive; all that mattered was that he or she had hurt the stock.
Enron, he told the jury, was “a wonderful company—a shining star.” Its failure had resulted not from fraud but from an irrational panic (the “run-on-the-bank” theory) triggered by irresponsible media stories (especially those Wall Street Journal articles) written by reporters in cahoots with short sellers bent on destroying the company.

Banks and analysts complicit

Analysts who worked for Wall Street banks later claimed that they had been deceived by Enron. But if they were indeed victims, they were willing ones. “For any analyst to say there were no warning signs in the public filings, they could not have read the same public filings that I did,” Howard Schilit, an independent analyst who is the president of the Center for Financial Research and Analysis, later told Congress.
But analysts got to be rich and famous only if they were bullish. That’s what got them appearances on CNBC, not to mention loving profiles in The New Yorker,
What if an analyst tried to get beyond Enron’s pat explanation of its business? Executives would imply that they were slow and stupid, and most of the other analysts would agree with that assessment.
For the analysts, there was a final reason they needed to keep their buy ratings on Enron: the ugliest and most powerful reason of all. There was simply too much investment-banking business at stake not to have a screaming buy on the stock.

Aggressive fan boys against the shorts

Over at Kynikos, Jim Chanos was in hysterics. He had never heard the CEO of a Fortune 500 company lose it like that. After listening to the conference call, Chanos was more convinced than ever that Enron was hiding serious problems. Even owners of Enron stock thought Grubman’s questions were perfectly valid—and if they hadn’t been, Skilling should have dealt with them more adeptly. “Any CEO should be able to handle the hardest of questions from the most aggressive of shorts,” says analyst Meade.

Large investors started dumping shares

Instead, in private deliberations in sequestered boardrooms, major institutions were beginning to reevaluate their position on Enron. Unlike the public buy recommendations from the equity analysts, though, these private decisions never came to the attention of the small investor. Between March and the end of June, four large holders—Janus, Fidelity, American Express, and American Century—sold a total of 21.3 million shares, according to an internal Enron document. One major Wall Street firm that traded with Enron began to watch its exposure more carefully and ever so slowly cut back the amount of money it would allow Enron to owe at any point. “We thought Enron was a very funky animal that kept getting funkier and funkier,” says a credit officer there.

Shorts leading the way with information

It was short sellers who first asked tough questions about Enron. Their interest was sparked by the tremendous run-up in the stock, which can suggest that a company is overvalued. It was fueled by the hype about broadband and the collapse of Azurix.
Though most of the mainstream business press was unaware of Roberts’ report, it was widely circulated among hedge-fund managers and other large institutional investors. A reporter named Peter Eavis, who wrote for the popular online financial site, TheStreet.com, followed up on Roberts’s research and began writing a string of negative stories about Enron. Slowly, the heat was being turned up.

All the information was public

The circle of people who knew—or should have known—that Enron’s glittering surface masked a different reality was surprisingly large. Much of what Enron did—such as generating billions in off-balance-sheet debt—was out in the open. Many of the analysts knew full well that the company’s earnings far outstripped the cash coming in the door. The bankers and investment bankers, who worked for the same firms as the analysts, certainly understood what Enron was doing; indeed, they made Fastow’s deals possible. The credit-rating agencies knew a lot. The business press, which could have looked more closely at Enron’s financial statements, couldn’t be bothered; the media was utterly captivated by the company’s transformation from stodgy pipeline to new economy powerhouse. And of course there were any number of Enron’s own employees who could see for themselves how the company was making its numbers. And yet, they all chose not to make the logical leap, to see where it was inevitably headed. Instead, they all chose to believe. Everyone loved Enron.

Company Leadership

Nepotism, the company is mine

His top executives were also dismayed at the way he and his family openly fed at the Enron trough. “If you’re the CEO of a public company, it isn’t yours,” says a former executive, but Lay seemed oblivious of such distinctions. Over the years, he seemed to have cultivated a powerful sense of personal entitlement. Not only did he use the company’s fleet of airplanes for his private use; so did his children. Enron employees called the planes the Lay family taxi, so frequently did family members use them. Linda Lay used an Enron plane to visit her daughter Robyn in France. Another time an Enron jet was dispatched to Monaco to deliver Robyn’s bed.

The CEO was a visionary genius

When people describe Skilling they don’t just use the word “smart”; they use phrases like “incandescently brilliant” or “the smartest person I ever met.”
“What Skilling did so well was to motivate other people to his vision,” says a former Enron trader. “I still believe in a lot of the things he said.” Several of the traders did think that some of Skilling’s personal habits, such as hanging out in Houston dive bars until the wee hours, were strange. But they liked that in a way, too. “Enron people, who cares about normal?” asks another former trader. “We don’t like normal. People at Enron didn’t want a typical CEO.” And in a way, Skilling was just like them.
Skilling and Lay found themselves mentioned in the same breath as GE’s Jack Welch, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Apple’s Steve Jobs, and the very small handful of other celebrity businessmen.
By all appearances, Skilling was on top of the world. BusinessWeek celebrated his new position with a worshipful cover story, featuring Skilling precisely as he wanted the world to see him, dressed in ultracool black, electricity sizzling through his body. Worth magazine described him as “hypersmart” and “hyperconfident”—and named him America’s second-best CEO

The fans became disillusioned with CEO

And suddenly, Skilling was no longer infallible. Always before, when Skilling said the stock would go up, it went up. But not this time; now, his insistence that the stock was worth $126 a share had the scent of desperation. Skilling now hated riding in the elevator with employees.

Unstable CEO, harassing employees

A few years earlier, when he was still COO, he gave the finger to an employee who had almost run into his car during the morning parking rush. It was hardly the sort of gesture one expected from a big-time corporate executive. But Skilling blew off complaints about the incident, word of which spread like wildfire. “I’m an entrepreneur, not a politician,” he said.
As for Skilling’s mood, it seemed to oscillate between depression, righteous indignation, and manic excitement about the next big enchilada.

Margin calls

Lay’s finances, however, were built around the belief that Enron’s stock would never go down. During most of the 1990s, Lay had most of his net worth in Enron stock. In 1999, his advisers began pestering him to diversify. But he did so in a manner that wound up, in effect, doubling his bet on the stock. Here’s what he did: Lay pledged almost all of his portfolio of liquid assets—primarily Enron stock—as collateral for bank and brokerage loans.

Genuinely believed in their work

For all of Skilling’s public bravado about how great everything was at Enron, he spent most of his time dealing with a host of serious problems, the part of the job he had always despised. Part of him was caught up in maintaining the illusion that Enron was, indeed, the World’s Leading Company. But it seems likely that another part of him was being forced to confront the darker reality. Holding those two conflicting notions in his head at the same time—at a minimum, it had to be exhausting.

Pushover board

And here’s the most amazing denial of all: Even Enron’s board of directors—the people formally entrusted with serving as a check on management and with guarding the interests of the shareholders—disclaimed any responsibility.
Lehman Brothers was so shocked that the Enron board would approve such an arrangement that it insisted on receiving a certified copy of the board resolution approving Fastow’s conflict. Then it signed on for $10 million.

Insider selling

Pai had continued unloading his shares. Just between May 18 and May 25, 2001, he sold almost a million shares. When he had finally parted with his last share, Pai had sold over $250 million worth of Enron stock—more than anybody else at the company.
Skilling also took care of his own finances. Since May 2000, he had sold over 450,000 shares of Enron worth some $33 million. In mid-September, he sold another 500,000 shares, bringing his total proceeds to over $70 million.
Lay, of course, didn’t reveal that in the previous two months, he had secretly cashed in $20 million of his own stock by drawing down his company credit line, then repaying it with Enron shares—part of the $78 million Lay had pocketed this way over the previous 12 months.

The Company

The company was good for humanity and disrupting dinosaurs

Just as he had when Enron was riding high, Skilling labeled ExxonMobil a “dinosaur”—as though it didn’t matter that the oil giant was thriving while Enron was nearly extinct. “We were doing something special. Magical.” The money wasn’t what really mattered to him, insisted Skilling, who had banked $70 million from Enron stock. “It wasn’t a job—it was a mission,” he liked to say. “We were changing the world. We were doing God’s work.”
He was openly scornful of steady, asset-based businesses that grew slowly but generated cash—then swept them away to make room for a series of ever-bigger, ever-riskier bets that brought in almost no cash at all.
According to their view, what the Enron executives had done was nothing worse than what dozens of CEOs had done in Silicon Valley, where people who worked for companies with far less to offer than Enron had fed Internet hype, cashed out, and walked away unscathed. A more extreme version of this thinking was that Enron’s sins were not incompetence and fraud but rather innovation and free-spiritedness. Enron’s dwindling collection of defenders made the same argument as Michael Milken’s defenders had in the 1980s: They were being prosecuted because they were a threat to staid, old corporate America. “You can always tell who the pioneers are, because they’re the ones with arrows in their backs,” became their refrain.

Telling the market what they want to hear, pointing forward

Besides, the Enron story, when Skilling told it, sounded so good; otherwise intelligent people were reduced to nodding their heads in agreement. Skilling listened to what the market wanted and sold Enron that way.
Always before, Skilling was able to come with a new big enchilada to drive the business—and the stock price. That was the part of being a businessman that he loved. But he was out of big ideas. Righting Enron required lowering everyone’s expectations—something he could not bring himself to do—and fixing problems, which he hated. “It was getting hard,” says a former executive, “and Jeff doesn’t do hard.”

All the appearances of success

“Enron is literally unbeatable at what they do,” raved David Fleischer, a securities analyst at Goldman Sachs. “The industry standard for excellence,” chimed in Deutsche Bank’s Edward Tirello. “Enron is the one to emulate,” wrote the Financial Times.
That Skilling himself sometimes seemed unable to give a coherent explanation of Enron’s business—at times, he got by with saying “We’re a cool company”—bothered no one. All that mattered was that the stock was going up. Because the stock was rising, Enron’s executives were seen as brilliant.
It was so easy to believe, for signs of success were everywhere. Enron was building a flashy 40-story skyscraper, designed by the architectural superstar Cesar Pelli, at a cost of about $200 million—complete with a $1 million, hand-etched relief map of the world that hung from the atrium ceiling on 18-foot glass panels. Lay told employees that the building “may become kind of the landmark for downtown Houston.” (It was still under construction when Enron collapsed; the building was sold for $102 million in 2002.) In London, Enron’s expensive new offices overlooked Buckingham Palace. “You walked through the offices every day and thought, ‘Someone is paying for this,’ ” says a former Enron Europe employee. “We all had faith based on empirical observations.”

Good ideas but unrealistic

Skilling also had a tendency to oversimplify, and he largely disregarded—indeed, he had an active distaste for—the messy details involved in executing a plan. What thrilled Skilling, always, was the intellectual purity of an idea, not the translation of that idea into reality. “Jeff Skilling is a designer of ditches, not a digger of ditches,” an Enron executive said years later. He was often too slow—even unwilling—to recognize when the reality didn’t match the theory.
Most executives believed Lay’s makeup included an unhealthy capacity for self-delusion: he tended to deceive himself about harsh truths he didn’t want to face. “He invents his own reality,” says one.
In many ways, broadband stands as the logical evolution of the accumulating problems that ultimately brought down Enron. What Enron was trying to accomplish was bold, even inspirational. It looked dazzling in a hotel ballroom, presented to analysts by Skilling on PowerPoint slides. But in the real world, it ran headlong into the reality of a thousand technical, economic, competitive, and logistical roadblocks that keep any business plan—especially one so exceedingly ambitious—from unfolding perfectly.
Attempting even one of these plans would have been an enormous undertaking for any company, requiring a tremendous commitment of resources, time, and talent. To try to do them all at once, without any previous experience, virtually overnight? It was crazy.
While EBS was never what Enron claimed, certainly much of the work being done was real. Teams of engineers were struggling with the technology, trying to crack the code on the networking problems, testing video-streaming, spending hundreds of millions on hardware, and cobbling together the promised 15,000-mile fiber network, which Enron had pledged to extend to Europe (where it was putting yet another hundred employees). The traders were developing standard contracts, trying to drum up trading partners, and courting the phone companies. EBS’s mergers-and-acquisitions team gobbled up software companies that might help the business along. Broadband even had its own venture-capital division, investing in start-ups and public tech stocks. Considerable effort was also devoted to giving Wall Street the impression of rapid and dramatic progress.
Energy trading, which Enron pioneered, is very real today, as is video on demand—which was supposed to be part of Enron’s broadband business. Corporate energy-efficiency retrofitting—the intended business of EES—is all the rage today. Compare all that to the making of loans to people who couldn’t pay them back and the packaging of those loans into securities to be sold to clueless investors. The former was genuinely creative; the latter was simply opportunistic and destructive. Or to put it a different way, there was so much possibility in Enron, and there could have been a different ending. There was never going to be anything but a bad ending to the inflation of home prices. By some measures, maybe the Enron guys really were the smartest guys in the room.

Fake it till you make it

It was also a veritable sham. The war room had been rapidly fitted out explicitly to impress the analysts. Though EES was then just gearing up, Skilling and Pai had staged it all to convince their visitors that things were already hopping. On the day the analysts arrived, the room was filled with Enron employees. Many of them, though, didn’t even work on the sixth floor. They were secretaries, EES staff from other locations, and non-EES employees who had been drafted for the occasion and coached on the importance of appearing busy. One, an administrative assistant named Kim Garcia, recalls being told to bring her personal photos to make it look as if she actually worked at the desk where she was sitting; she spent most of the time talking to her girlfriends on the phone. After getting the all-clear signal, Garcia packed up her belongings and returned to her real desk on the ninth floor. The analysts had no clue they’d been hoodwinked.
When the executives talked about the Enron Intelligent Network, they made it sound as if it were working already. “This software layer, is this a pipedream, is this something that we’re going to get done in the next five years?” asked Joe Hirko, co-CEO of the business. “No, this is something that exists today.”
At the time, Enron had portrayed this network as “lit, tested, and ready.” In fact, it wasn’t close to operating on a commercial scale, and much of the promised technology never made it out of the lab.
Top executives Ken Rice, Kevin Hannon, and Joe Hirko, as well as two others, were charged with fraud and insider trading, accused of lying to the investing public about EBS’s technological capabilities to inflate market valuations of the business while collectively selling more than $150 million of stock.

Thought they were a startup

Everybody talked about moving at Internet speed. Much of what Skilling was selling had the effect of positioning Enron as a company that had more in common with the dot-coms than with an old energy giant like Exxon. Of course it also helped that no one suspended disbelief more than Skilling himself: he seems to have truly thought the culture he was establishing would give Enron a huge competitive advantage in the new age.

Obscure reporting metrics

“It was a PR message embedded in a financial disclosure,” says one former divisional EES accountant. “That even made Rick Causey cringe.” It served the same purpose as the dot-com metrics: it gave Wall Street something to focus on besides profits.

Slippery Slope

There have been accounting frauds over the years where companies created receivables out of whole cloth or shipped bricks at the end of a quarter instead of products. In such cases, someone at a company has to consciously consider the fact that he or she is about to commit a crime—and then commit it. But for the most part, the Enron scandal wasn’t like that. The Enron scandal grew out of a steady accumulation of habits and values and actions that began years before and finally spiraled out of control.

Employees

Using employees

But even inside Enron, the old Skilling magic wasn’t working anymore. The questions were skeptical. How’d we make our numbers this quarter? Why are you selling so much of your own stock? And finally, from Margaret Ceconi: “You say we’re going to make half a billion a year, Jeff. How in the world are we going to do that? What’s your strategy?” “Well, that’s what you guys are for,” Skilling responded. “You guys are the creative ones—you’ve got to figure it out.” That afternoon, EES laid off three hundred people, including Ceconi.

Trusting the experts

the vast majority of people who worked for Enron simply assumed that the Global Finance team and Enron’s accountants at Arthur Andersen—not to mention the stock analysts and credit analysts—knew what they were doing and that there was nothing for them to worry about.

Performance tied to stock price

For Skilling himself, says a former aide, “the stock price was his report card.” When it rose, he was exultant; when it dropped, he was glum. Whenever he was on the road, Skilling would call several times a day just to check on how the stock was performing. Lots of corporate executives were fixated on their companies’ stock price during the bull market of the 1990s, but Skilling’s obsession went beyond most of them. As a businessman, his thought process revolved almost entirely around the stock, to the point where he began to believe that Enron’s market capitalization—that is, the total value of the company’s stock—was the only measure the company should be concerned with. Eventually, he would justify business decisions entirely on the basis of what it would mean to Enron’s valuation.

Lying about layoffs

Two days later, CBS MarketWatch, another online financial site, quoted Skilling as saying that the rumors of broadband job cuts were “absolutely not true”; Enron’s PR department said the redeployments were “standard daily practice” and went so far as to say there were sixty job openings in broadband.

Expert in everything

Enron was promising to run the cooling and heating systems, hire the energy-maintenance staff, change the lightbulbs, and pay the bills. Enron had never shown that it could manage that sort of operation.

Finance

Financial manipulations at end of Quarter

In fact, it was anything but effortless; there was nothing at Enron that required more effort, more cleverness, more deceit—more everything—than hitting its quarterly earnings targets. As out of control as Enron was on a day-to-day basis, the place went practically bonkers when the end of the quarter grew closer. For this, Skilling deserves the lion’s share of the blame.

Unwilling to raise capital

Although Enron clearly needed capital—it had by then billions in debt and was preparing to spend billions on new business ventures—Skilling and Lay were cool to the idea. Skilling, in particular, was opposed to anything that might hurt the stock price, even temporarily. That’s always the danger when new shares flood the market: the new supply can outstrip the demand for the stock and push the price down. Additional shares also make it harder to hit an earnings-per-share number because there are more shares outstanding. As they say on Wall Street, existing shareholders are diluted.
Rumors had been floating in recent days that Enron would need to do an equity offering to raise money; Skilling went out of his way to flatten the rumor. “From a credit standpoint, there is absolutely no need to issue additional equity, either this year or for the foreseeable future,” he said. “So overall, I have no understanding of why [our] stock price is in the $53, $54—that’s just crazy.”

Bad Credit rating

But to get an A rating would have meant, at the very least, cutting debt, controlling costs, and funding fewer big enchiladas, and that Enron was not willing to do. The highest rating Enron achieved was BBB+, just a few notches above junk-bond status

Risk of credit

Why would investors be willing to buy the Marlin debt? Because once again, Enron promised that if Azurix couldn’t pay it would make up the difference by issuing stock or buying back the debt itself. As was the case with Osprey, investors got extra protection: if Enron’s debt rating fell below investment grade and its stock fell below $37.84, the company would be obliged to pay off all the Marlin debt at once.

Refinancing Debt

Once again, Enron’s enablers came to the rescue, allowing Enron to refinance the Marlin debt. In a CSFB-led deal, Enron raised a fresh $1 billion to pay off old investors and extend the terms of the debt for another two years. This new deal contained the same provisions as the old one: all the debt came due at once if Enron lost its investment-grade rating status—and if its stock fell below $34.13.

Desperate raises

Still, by November 1, Enron was able to announce that it had secured another $1 billion in financing. But as it turned out, $250 million of the package was merely the refinancing of an existing loan from Citi that was expiring at year-end. It improved the bank’s collateral position but gave Enron no new cash. Even after hocking its pipelines, Enron had generated only $750 million more, which wasn’t going to last long.

Cash problems

While Enron’s reported earnings were growing smoothly, the business didn’t seem to be generating much cash—and you can’t run a business without cash. In fact, Enron had negative cash from its operations in the first nine months of 2000.

Bonus coincidences

Used a hair growth drug

He later started using a hair-growth drug to recarpet his balding scalp. At the age of 43, he’d never looked better.

Young inexperienced CFO

Lay told Enron’s board that he felt the best candidate was an internal one: rising star Andy Fastow. In March 1998, Fastow, just 36 years old, was named CFO of Enron. Once again, Enron had installed the wrong man in the wrong job for the wrong reason.
He lacked something else: the knowledge that being a CFO demanded. Fastow knew so little about accounting that one person who knows him wasn’t even sure he could dissect a balance sheet.

Backdating documents

For a price, LJM2 made all sorts of accommodations to Enron, even backdating documents.

Customer deposits boosting cash balance

In 2000, Enron reported an unprecedented $4.8 billion in operating cash flow. Roberts noted that almost $2 billion of it was from customer deposits—because energy prices were so high, Enron’s counterparties had to provide more collateral. But this money didn’t really belong to Enron. If prices fell, it would have to be returned to the counterparties.

Ross Gerber lookalike

Launer was a longtime, well-respected natural-gas analyst. But by the late 1990s, his career had become a perfect example of the rewards an analyst could reap by playing the game according to the new rules. In his reports, he didn’t seem to have any particularly deep insights into Enron’s business. His understanding of the business was such that he told at least one investor that Enron was “a ‘trust-me’ story.” Some at the company didn’t think much of him. “He loved going to lunch with Skilling and Lay,” recalls one former top executive. “He was never into the numbers. And he didn’t understand the trading business even after we spent years explaining it to him.” But he pounded the table for a soaring stock.

70 billion valuation

On August 23, 2000, Enron’s stock closed at $90—its all-time high—giving Enron a market valuation approaching $70 billion.

Larry Ellison

What outsiders would buy into this arrangement? Friendly ones. In the first step of the transaction, the broadband division formed a joint venture, called EBS Content Systems, with two partners. One was a vendor involved in the Blockbuster trial called nCube—a tiny video-on-demand equipment company privately owned by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison.

Jim Chanos

After Chanos saw Jonathan Weil’s story in the fall of 2000, he flipped open Enron’s 1999 10-K. He read: “The market prices used to value these transactions reflect management’s best estimates.” He thought: “A license to print money.” He began talking to Enron’s competitors, Wall Street analysts, and virtually anyone else he thought might have information on the company—though not to the company itself, which he viewed as a waste of time. (“You can call the analysts and get the company party line,” he says.) The more Chanos poked around, the more he felt that the Enron story didn’t make sense. Chanos had made a fortune researching—then shorting—telecom stocks. He knew how much trouble they were in. How could Enron’s broad-band unit be doing so well when the rest of the industry was on life support? “We know telecom cold,” he says. “And here’s Enron bleating about this great opportunity.” Enron’s return on invested capital was abysmally low, around 7 percent—and that figure didn’t even include the billions upon billions of off-balance-sheet debt. “They were chewing up capital,” says Chanos. He was struck by a three-paragraph disclosure in Enron’s third-quarter 2000 filing about its dealings with a related party. No matter how many times he read it, he still couldn’t understand what it said. He showed it to derivatives specialists, corporate lawyers, and other experts; they couldn’t figure it out either. Chanos thought: “They must be trying to hide something.” And then there were the insider sales. Lay was consistently selling about 2,500 shares a day. Skilling was also selling in big chunks. Chanos and the others who shorted Enron’s stock didn’t have any special information that wasn’t available to the bulls. “As soon as anyone looked, they could see the stuff we saw,” says Chanos today. At first, he adds, “We didn’t think it was some great hidden fraud. We just thought it was a bad business.” By November 2000, he had begun taking a big short position in Enron stock.

Billion dollar payment

The debt, which amounted to almost $1 billion, was due at the end of 2001, and just as the short sellers had long suspected, Azurix wasn’t worth nearly enough to pay it back. Which meant, of course, that Enron itself was on the hook for the money. Back when Marlin was set up, in 1998, Enron promised to issue stock if the assets backing Marlin proved insufficient to repay the debt. But now that the moment was arriving, Enron was adamant about not wanting to issue new stock. Given the questions that were swirling around the company, that was the last thing Enron wanted to do.

Attacking the WSJ

“WSJ investigative reporter is doing an expose on LJM-Enron. Obviously, we’ve done everything we’re supposed to, plus some, but they are going to do a character assassination on me based on hearsay from unnamed sources. Major hack job. I probably fired one too many people this year. You may not want to be seen at the pub with me.”

2 billion doesn't last long

Despite the $2 billion that had arrived on November 13, Enron had only $1.2 billion left. Counting the money it had in hand before getting the $2 billion, that meant Enron had burned through at least a billion dollars in six days and $2 billion in less than a month. Clearly Enron no longer had ample liquidity.

Aimed to be the largest company

“When we talk about becoming the ‘World’s Leading Company,’ the target I think we all ought to have in mind is how do we become the company with the highest market value of any company in the world,” he said. At that time, those honors belonged to General Electric, which had a market value of $400 billion—almost six times larger than Enron’s.

Failed massive partnership, blamed the partner for supply problems

Enron announced it was ending its 20-year deal with Blockbuster. Enron publicly blamed Blockbuster, saying the video giant had failed to provide the “quantity and quality” of movies the project needed. Here’s the most amazing part, though: Enron’s spin machine, which had shamelessly hyped the Blockbuster deal to the analysts, now labored to dismiss the significance of its implosion—and the analysts bought it!

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