B Roll Footage of Strip Clubs, Don't Watch This Movie With Your Kids

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In the movie, they literally say he was obsessed with strippers. And not just conceptually, he would eventually leave his wife and marry a stripper. Lu Pai is sort of the cowboy who's sort of like hurting them all. Because of that, he gets divorced from his wife, he ends up leaving Enron well before default. He sells his stock to finance the divorce for a quarter billion dollars. He makes $250 million.

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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