Enron, Ep 1: Potemkin Village

Bad Bets

The Wall Street Journal

News, Business, True Crime

4.8 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 12 October 2021

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In 2001, energy company Enron was at the height of its power. Then, out of the blue, CEO Jeffrey Skilling resigned-just six months after he took the reins of a company he had helped turn into an innovation machine. Why? In this episode, we dive into the first cracks in the Enron facade.John Emshwiller is the host of this season of Bad Bets. The original reporting on which this season is based was done by him and Rebecca Smith. Bad Bets is a production of The Wall Street Journal. This season was produced in collaboration with Neon Hum Media. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	My name is John M. Schweiler.
0:03.3	For four decades, I was a Wall Street Journal reporter.
0:06.4	In that time, I wrote a lot of stories.
0:09.0	There's one that stuck with me more than any other.
0:12.0	Enron.
0:13.0	It's been 20 years now since Enron fell into bankruptcy.
0:17.0	Its list of creditors was 54 single-spaced pages.
0:21.7	So this was a massive bankruptcy filing.
0:24.8	Within weeks, tens of billions of dollars, thousands of jobs gone.
0:29.6	Retirement plans destroyed.
0:31.9	This was my life savings, my nest egg.
0:35.4	And that was just the beginning.
0:37.2	Congressional committees rushed to investigate.
0:39.3	The Justice Department launched an epic criminal probe.
0:42.4	The CFO, Chief Accounting Officer, Treasurer, and more than that dozen others pleaded guilty.
0:48.0	In perhaps the highest profile corporate fraud trial in U.S. history, former CEO Jeff
0:52.8	Skilling was convicted.
0:54.5	He maintained his innocence, but he spent more than a decade in prison.
0:59.5	Here's a measure of just how big a deal Enron was.
1:02.8	On the FBI's list of his most famous cases, JFK's assassination, Watergate 9-11, it's
1:09.8	the only corporate name.
1:12.0	It would, in fact, go from being this highly respected company into being this massive
	...

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