Something to watch tonight: Thursday 16 October

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (Gibney, 2005)

When two entirely sep­ar­ate pieces of cor­por­ate news and ana­lys­is prompt people to start mak­ing com­par­is­ons with Enron, you know that things ain’t great.

Today it was announced that Elon Musk is using two of his com­pan­ies (SpaceX and xAI) to buy the bil­lion dol­lars worth of unsold Cybertrucks that are oth­er­wise “rot­ting away in aban­doned mall park­ing lots”. Using ima­gin­ary wealth to prop up the for­tunes of a fail­ing product is a kind of Ponzi scheme, send­ing the money in one dir­ec­tion while the debts go round in circles until some poor unfor­tu­nate is left hold­ing the empty parcel.

Here’s a link to that art­icle in the screen­shot above:

We have AI star­tups val­ued at $12 bil­lion before announ­cing any product. Capital expendit­ures on AI now account for some­thing like 40% of U.S. eco­nom­ic activ­ity. And the big play­ers are all engaged in (ahem) “cir­cu­lar deals” so com­plic­ated you need to sub­scribe to Matt Levine’s news­let­ter to have the faintest chance of under­stand­ing them.

Even the New York Times is start­ing to see what’s up.

Anyway, I felt sure that I had reviewed Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room at some point but it was actu­ally released before I star­ted the weekly gig at Capital Times.

No mat­ter. This was the film that put doc­u­ment­ari­an Alex Gibney’s name on the map, lead­ing to career that includes Taxi to the Dark Side (Iraq War), The Armstrong Lie (cheat­ing cyc­list), Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief and In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon.

Enron was a cor­por­ate suc­cess story of the late nineties and early 2000s. Ostensibly an energy com­pany, they got into all sorts of oth­er busi­ness as a way to boost the short-term stock price allow­ing exec­ut­ives to “pump and dump” that stock to enrich them­selves at the expense of ordin­ary investors.

To keep this going — and to juice the every­day num­bers — they also cre­ated shell com­pan­ies solely for the pur­pose of doing busi­ness with Enron. These com­pan­ies for­war­ded cash to the com­pany and were also vehicles for hid­ing debt.

This may seem like a com­plic­ated story best told via the medi­um of a spread­sheet but Gibney tells it like the scan­dal­ous cor­por­ate thrill­er it is. It is grip­ping and enra­ging and it reminds us what can hap­pen when we remove even the tiny guard­rails that pro­tect us against crooked cap­it­al­ism. These people are all the same and are always the same. And they are not “on the side of the angels”.

Where to watch Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

Aotearoa and Australia: Streaming on Prime Video or DocPlay

Canada: Digital rental

India: Not cur­rently avail­able online

USA: Streaming on Prime Video, Roku (free with ads), Kanopy (free from par­ti­cip­at­ing lib­rar­ies) or Philo

UK: Digital rental