Rome Falls
By Caleb Morrow
April 26, 2026
Graphic by Porter Callendar
But what happens when the audience demands a closer look at the curtain? How does a magician silence these skeptics? Does one simply persist and declare that the show must go on, or do they blow the mirage into smithereens?
Sometimes magicians aren’t magicians at all. Sometimes the illusion is much grander than pulling coins from behind ears or extracting rabbits from hats.
Enter Enron, the magician. Widely considered the Wall Street darling of the late 1990s, Enron was a Houston-centered corporation that specialized in energy trading and similar commodities. Under the leadership of CEO Kenneth Lay, the company led the rest of North America in sales of natural gas by 1992, obtaining a whopping $122 million. Though quite a feat, their net worth wasn’t a result of purely ethical business practices. Lay’s close relationship with George H.W. Bush during his presidency allowed the CEO to push for legislation that would benefit Enron, including deregulating natural gas, which loosened government oversight and allowed for Lay and Enron to sell energy at much higher prices than ever before. Despite pushback from those concerned with the price spikes, the legislation withstood.
Corruption etched itself into Enron’s origins, but its audience was none the wiser. Enron’s boom continued into the early 21st century, with Fortune, the premier business magazine in the US, hailing the enterprise as the most innovative company in America. The company’s earnings were undeniable, as long as no one dared to read between the lines. Enron successfully convinced the general public that their illusion was reality.
For Lay, however, the company’s success was not yet satisfactory. He craved perfection, and thus held each and every employee to nearly impossible standards. Lay instituted a company policy that fired the bottom 10% in terms of performance. As if threatening these alleged slackers wasn’t harsh enough, he also plastered the company’s stock price all over Enron’s headquarters building, establishing a culture completely dependent upon the health of the company. His tactics transcended the typical toxicity of a corporate workplace; he enacted a system that punished underachievers and rewarded employees that would do anything it took to uplift Enron, even at the cost of their own morality.
In fact, back when Enron was still considered an underdog in the energy sector, two of the corporation’s head traders used market manipulation tactics and shadow accounting tricks to make the company appear more profitable. Rather than punishing the wrongdoers, Lay instead sent the traders a letter where he encouraged them to “keep making Enron millions.” Pushing Enron’s corrupt culture a step further, Lay sought to incorporate the traders’ unethical practices into Enron’s wider economic structure. Enron utilized an accounting tactic called mark-to-market accounting, which essentially allowed the company to book the predicted profits of deals without ever confirming if those predicted earnings ever actualized. This tactic ensured that their balance sheet wouldn’t raise any red flags or doubts from external eyes. In turn, Wall Street frequenters and analysts were oblivious to Enron’s deceitful ways. Who could dispute the A-list stock?
But someone could. Enter Bethany McLean, the skeptic. McLean was a journalist for Fortune who went against the grain by being the first to publicly question Enron. Publishing her piece in early 2001, McLean raised legitimate concerns about how Enron was making its money. After doing her own research on their accounting habits, McLean grew weary of explanations from Enron that their balance sheet was simply complicated and something that couldn’t be easily deciphered. McLean’s article, bravely labeled “Is Enron Overpriced?”, didn’t make immediate waves in its release, largely going unnoticed or disregarded completely by her finance peers. No one was ready to suspend their belief in the illusion.
It wasn’t until Enron’s new CEO Jeffrey Skilling called a Wall Street analyst and Enron skeptic Richard Grubman an “asshole” during a conference call that the armor began to crack. It became clear that if a Fortune 500 CEO was quick to verbally assault someone who questioned the legitimacy of his company, something must have been wrong. Though Skilling later brushed off the encounter, it left an irrefutable bad taste in the mouth of anyone who concerned themselves with what was supposed to be Wall Street’s pride and joy.
The pendulum continued to swing in favor of the skeptics. Enron’s reputation suffered another blow when their role in California’s electricity crisis came to light. Traders at Enron who had fed into the company’s competitive culture saw an opportunity to make Enron more profitable than ever before by shutting down the state’s power plants. As fires spread across the blazing hot terrain, California’s citizens suffered tremendously. Enron’s traders, however, made a mockery of the disaster and preferred to see the price of energy in California continue to rise. In one call from the trading floor, an Enron trader gleefully exclaimed “Burn, baby burn!” in response to the fires causing widespread damage to the state. It was no longer just Enron’s top executives who sought money over morality; their employees had fed into the greedy chase for capital as well.
The controversies became too much to withstand. In August 2001, Jeffrey Skilling stepped down as CEO, sending Lay scrambling. To make matters worse, Enron executive Sherron Watkins wrote an anonymous letter to Lay, urging him to acknowledge Enron’s unethical and illusory accounting practices. The whistleblowing didn’t do Enron any favors, and investors in the company finally began to acknowledge that they’d fallen for a scam. As 2001 came to an end, the company announced it was bankrupt after their illegitimacy proved too severe to be rectified by a merger with another company. In a sweeping moment of poetic justice, Lay and Skilling went to trial and faced years of prison time for their wrongdoings at Enron. With no more tricks up their sleeves, the curtains closed on the illusionists.
The rise and fall of Enron has echoed across similar stories of financial fraud and corporate greed over the past couple decades. It’d be foolish to consider Enron an isolated incident — as long as we live in a world that demands productivity and capital no matter who it hurts, companies like Enron will undoubtedly continue to emerge.
But as long as these illusions exist, so will the skeptics. It’s inevitable that someone peeks behind the curtain and discovers that what the elites claim is the future is really just a trick of the light. ■
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