Two traders at the new Enron who are actually based in New York, they started bezeling money from the company. They were funneling money to their own bank accounts. It's like amazing that it happened what 10 years before the big scandal. Almost a billion dollars, one B, that's a B, a billion dollars. That would be enough to bring down the whole firm at the get go.
The FTX fraud has dominated headlines now for weeks, during which we’ve debated if and how Acquired could uniquely add to the conversation. Then we realized there was an angle so perfect that we had to drop everything and enter Acquired research overdrive: Enron. Travel back with us to the granddaddy fraud of them all, 2001’s then-largest bankruptcy in US history and the impetus for the famous Sarbanes-Oxley Act. So much of Enron’s history parallels FTX that the uncanniness is almost unbelievable — right down to the same CEO running the two bankruptcies. Sit back and enjoy this crazy tale of villainy, greed, and the nature of humans and money. Maybe just don’t take notes on this one…
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