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The company sent a small contingent to New York to meet with Bethany and her editors, including me. But with our deadline fast approaching, the Enron PR department decided that if Mohammed wouldn’t come to the mountain, they would have to visit Fortune.
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The Enron public-relations department insisted that if she would just come to Houston and visit the company’s headquarters, the fog would soon lift. One analyst admitted to her that the company’s earnings were “a black box.” When she reached Skilling himself, the Enron CEO first complained that she “didn’t get it,” something he often said to people who questioned Enron. Some of them told her that Enron was a company you just had to trust. She started calling around to the Wall Street analysts who were so bullish on Enron, asking her simple question. Just a month before Bethany’s story ran, Businessweek had put Enron’s chief executive, Jeffrey Skilling, on its cover, posing with what appeared to be harnessed electricity in his hand, with the cover line “Power Broker.”īut Bethany had been poring through Enron’s financial documents, and what she realized was not just that they were complicated (most big companies have complicated financials) but that they were incomprehensible, even indecipherable. It was seen as the paradigmatic example of a company that had transformed itself from an old-economy stalwart-operating pipelines that moved natural gas-to a new-economy marvel, creating dazzling efficiencies and hedging risks (like the weather!) that no one had ever thought to hedge before. Her story was entitled, simply, “Is Enron Overpriced?”Īt its core, Bethany’s article asked one very straightforward question: How does Enron make its money? For years the company had been a Wall Street darling, its stock moving steadily upward with each new quarter’s rising profits. In February 2001, as the editorial director of Fortune magazine, I helped edit a short, rigorous story-just four pages long-by a young writer named Bethany McLean, who had joined the magazine some six years earlier from Goldman Sachs and quickly become one of Fortune’s brightest stars. Business failures-United States-Case studies. Energy industries-Corrupt practices-United States. The smartest guys in the room : the amazing rise and scandalous fall of Enron / Bethany THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS: Used with permission “Perfect Day” by Tim James and Antonina Armato, © 2001 WB Music Corp., Out of the Desert Music, and Tom Sturges Music o/b/o Antonina Songs. Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following copyrighted works: “Hotel Kenneth Laya” by James A. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission.
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Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. This edition with a new foreword and afterword published 2013Ĭopyright © 2003, 2004 by Fortune, a division of Time, Inc.Īfterword copyright © 2013 by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind USA | Canada | UK | Ireland | Australia | New Zealand | India | South Africa | Chinaįirst published in the United States of America by Portfolio, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2003
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Now editor-at-large at Fortune, he lives in Fort Worth, Texas. A former editor of the Dallas Observer, he has been an associate editor at Texas Monthly and written for The New York Times Magazine and The Washington Post. McLean is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and a columnist at Reuters.Įlkind, an award-winning investigative reporter, is the author of The Death Shift and Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer. She now lives in Chicago with her husband, Sean Berkowitz, who was the head of the Enron Task Force when they met in 2006. McLean’s March 2001 article in Fortune, “Is Enron Overpriced?” was the first in a national publication to openly question the company’s dealings. Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind were Fortune senior writers when this book was originally published in 2003.