My cousin joined Enron around 6 months before they imploded.
Most people go “Oh, that’s too bad.”
But she was incredibly lucky - she only lost her job, compared to the thousands of people who lost their retirement.
MY cousin’s utility company was owned by Enron, who applied considerable pressure on employees to buy their stock. He fell for the pitch (although his wife refused to go along with it) and invested half of all their liquid cash in the company. Lost it all, of course, so instead of retiring in a couple of years, he had to continue working well into his sixties or longer. She divorced him.
Dave quietly explained that his (Dave’s) father had lost a huge amount of money in Enron and that – if we didn’t immediately exit the restaurant – Dave was concerned that he might do great bodily harm to Lay right then and there.
Along with everything else that Ken Lay did, then, he totally screwed me out of a notoriously great lunch.
And … sonofagun … this ties it all together elegantly:
It’s entirely possible that the meal referenced in the article refers to the day we were all there.
If anyone wants to see a blow-by-blow account of the Enron scandal, I refer you to this excellent documentary.
It won a boatload of awards and was nominated for a Best Documentary Oscar in 2006.
When I saw it in 2005 it curled my hair and boggled my mind, but in light of recent tricks, lies, scams, and skulduggery in the news, it might not have the same impact. Still worth watching.
It’s absolutely still worth watching - and it’s the perfect example of why people shouldn’t be overly invested in a single company, regardless of well it’s performed. Risk doesn’t stack linearly - it stacks exponentially. Diversify!!!
But it’s a solid piece of evidence showing them deliberately making people’s lives difficult for no reason other than to line their pockets. Faking energy shortages (rolling blackouts) to drive up rates, is, at best, being a piece of shit, at worst, people may have* died because of what they did.
One of the executives at the company I worked for went to Enron as one of its execs.
He hadn’t been with our company long (maybe 3 years?), so nobody missed him. But I had the “honor” of sitting at his table at one of our management banquets, and I thought he was a total creep (he drank too much and let his hair down also a bit too much). I wasn’t surprised the whole operation turned out to be essentially a scam.