Enron: The Smartest Guys in The Room

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room

The movie “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” is documental, that is why a lot of archival materials and interviews are used in it. The story tells us about the bankruptcy and fraud scandal of Enron Company in 2001.

As I got it, authors’ attitude towards the Enron’s culture and way of doing business is completely negative. This position is clearly stated in the beginning of the film, when introduction is made with the usage of very evil voice. Some of the parts’ titles also emphasis on this opinion.

The film is very well structured and divided into 12 parts. This structure helps a lot to get the complete story of Enron case starting from its CEO Ken Lay.

The first part describes how Ken Lay, who was CEO of Enron starting from 1985, was struggling for deregulation of energy market. Another interesting detail mentioned in the first part is tight relations between presidential family and Enron Corporation.

The second part is about Jeff Skilling, who became chairman of Enron in 1991 as a man who would help in making money. He introduced some methods of cooking books, which gave the company an opportunity to announce high profits. As a leader, he influenced everyone with his desire to change the World.

In the third part of the film we can understand that company was seen by top-managers only as an instrument to make wealth quickly without taking ethic into consideration. A good example is Lou Pai, who went from the company with $250 million.

The next part describes ways of acting of Jeff Skilling and other managers of Enron to persuade everybody, especially men from Wall Street, in the power and success of the company.

However, some analytics raised questions about Enron’s profits and debts, but bribes and “very good acting” solved these problems.

The sixth part describes how Enron tried to hide its huge debts using other companies.

According to interviews in the seventh part everybody involved in cheating (banks, analysts, auditors) knew about it, but did not blow the whistle while it was giving them money.

While the situation was going on and on, it was becoming more and more difficult to hide debts and announce profits that is why Jeff Skilling sometimes lost self-control.

To get more money Enron started to use deregulated energy market in California in a very unethical way by creating artificial shortages.

However, at that time nothing could help to stop the downfall of the company. It went bust in 2001 and its employees lost