Enron, Ep 4: The Downfall
11/02/21 • 39 min
2 Listeners
The biggest problem for Enron wasn't that former CEO Jeffrey Skilling suddenly quit, or that former CFO Andy Fastow was enriching himself. It was that Enron's success was dependent on an image that was partly a facade. After Wall Street Journal reporters pulled back the curtain, it all came tumbling down. In this episode, how Enron fell from Wall Street darling to bankruptcy in just a matter of weeks.
Questions about the making of Bad Bets? Join John Emshwiller and Rebecca Smith for a live Q&A on Thursday, November 4th at 2 p.m. EST. Sign up at wsj.com/live-qa. We'd love to hear from you.
John Emshwiller hosts. 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
The biggest problem for Enron wasn't that former CEO Jeffrey Skilling suddenly quit, or that former CFO Andy Fastow was enriching himself. It was that Enron's success was dependent on an image that was partly a facade. After Wall Street Journal reporters pulled back the curtain, it all came tumbling down. In this episode, how Enron fell from Wall Street darling to bankruptcy in just a matter of weeks.
Questions about the making of Bad Bets? Join John Emshwiller and Rebecca Smith for a live Q&A on Thursday, November 4th at 2 p.m. EST. Sign up at wsj.com/live-qa. We'd love to hear from you.
John Emshwiller hosts. 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
Previous Episode
Enron, Ep 3: The Fixer and the Whistleblowers
Enron's stock price rose astronomically in the late '90s, buoyed by investor confidence in former CEO Jeffrey Skilling-and by earnings reports that seemed to show Enron's profits growing by leaps and bounds. But as we now know, those numbers were engineered by a man named Andy Fastow, Enron's chief financial officer at the time. In this episode, we take a look at Mr. Fastow and hear from the whistleblowers who exposed him and Enron's financial engineering.
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
Next Episode
Enron, Ep 5: The Enablers
1 RecommendationsAfter Enron's collapse, a congressional probe and a Department of Justice task force began investigating not just company executives - but also the auditors and banks that had enabled the company's business practices. In this episode, the groups that facilitated Enron's rise.
John Emshwiller hosts. The original reporting on which this season is based was done by him, Rebecca Smith and other reporters in the WSJ newsroom. Bad Bets is a production of The Wall Street Journal. This season was produced in collaboration with Neon Hum Media.
Correction: Senator Byron Dorgan represented North Dakota. A previous version of this podcast incorrectly said that he represented South Dakota.
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