The Devilish Flywheel

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The company went from 13.3 billion in 1996 to over a hundred billion in the year 2000. Skilling gets promoted from just being head of the unrun finance division to president and COO of the entire company. He's out there schmoozing politicals, he becomes super close with the Bush family,. And then you got to move mountains every quarter to make the numbers keep going up.

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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