Netflix Update - Enron: The Smartest Guys In the Room
This movie blew me away. A perfect example of the dangers of rampant corporate greed. In the late 90s, Enron was a company that could seemingly do no wrong. For six consecutive years, they were named “America’s Most Innovative Company” by Fortune Magazine. They were supposed to be the future of Corporate America.
Here is a chart of their stock:
Look at that drop-off! It’s breathtaking. I liken it to a giant balloon rapidly inflating to capacity and then popping. So what happened, exactly? The film does a great job of answering this question, while framing the whole debacle as human tragedy. As the filmmaker put it himself in the DVD extras, the story of Enron exposes a glaring flaw of capitalism: the belief that raw self interest, left untethered, will always result in the best possible social good.
In this case, raw self interest (greed), was the reason for the company’s downfall. Enron’s greed did not contribute to any social good at all. It contributed to fucking over a lot of unfortunate people and fattening the bank accounts of a handful of executives. At least Ken Lay is dead and Jeff Skilling is in prison for 24 years.
