Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room Page #2

but he took another

30 million out,

with his side deals.

I think there was just

an immediate sense of outrage

at Lay and Skilling and Fastow

when people realized

how much they had profited,

and how completely artificial

the appearance of

this company had been.

News of shredding at Enron

raised more questions.

What answers were lost

in the torn documents?

20,000 employees

had lost their jobs.

$2 billion in pensions and

retirement funds had disappeared.

Was Enron the work of

a few bad men

or the dark shadow of

the American dream?

Lay comes to the story of

Enron from very humble roots.

My father was

a Baptist minister and,

and he was ordained

a Baptist minister

while I was very young

probably two, three years old.

Ken Lay was a Baptist

Preacher's son in a family

that had been poor

all it's life

and he, throughout his life,

worked several jobs as a kid

and clearly had in mind that

things could be better...

and wanted things to be better.

He had a huge ambition to

make wealth for himself.

He told a story later

about sitting on a tractor,

dreaming about

the world of business

and how different

it could be from the way

things were for him

and his family.

Lay was a PhD in economics

and he became,

very early on,

a real apostle for deregulation.

He was way ahead of

the curve on this.

He was thinking

about energy markets

that would be deregulated.

And in particular,

the natural gas industry

that was shackled by regulation.

And he pushed aggressively in

Washington to change all of that.

In Washington,

Lay became part of

a new crusade

to liberate businessmen

from the rules

and regulations of government.

Government is not

the solution to our problem.

Government is the problem.

The societies which have

achieved the most spectacular,

broad-based economic progress

in the shortest period of time

are not the most

tightly controlled,

not necessarily

the biggest in size,

or the wealthiest

in natural resources.

No, what unites them all

is their willingness to believe

in the magic

of the marketplace.

The magic power of deregulation

pushed Ken Lay to

found Enron in 1985.

Through a merger of vast networks

of natural gas pipelines,

Lay thought Enron

would be poised to take

advantage of

the government's decision

to let gas prices float

with the currents of the market.

Ken Lay had

a view of deregulation

from the standpoint

of all the money

that he thought could be made.

Ken Lay wasn't alone.

A couple of Texas oilmen

shared his views

on how to get government out

of the energy business.

I think they could sort of

understand each other.

It was a professional courtesy

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