Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room

The devastation of taking investors money and doing absolutely nothing with that cash but to line their own pockets and sell a success story with fake stocks.

Fine. Very interested in business. Found the narrative a bit all over the place. Maybe I don't have the context of following it at the time

A remarkably engaging documentary about how "the boys" were selling potential profits for 20 years with just their smiles, audacious demeanor, and a little bit of fraud. It's been almost twenty years, and the story of Enron doesn't even seem that unique anymore. There have been so many ludicrous stories of "fake it until you make it" and general accounting fraud incidents that the question of how they could think they would get away with this seems foolish. Moreover, some of them got away with it. Everyone sentenced for this has since been released. Lou Pai has been affected at all, and Jeff Skilling is doing energy trading again. And what has changed since anyway? Everyone still fabricates numbers and facts to keep that share price high because that's paramount to success. Corporate ethics or lack thereof are still toxic just in a more refined way. Likewise, everything is still run by people who will go to their graves before they acknowledge that they prioritize their bottom line and hundreds of millions in offshore accounts over tens of thousands of employees.

Explaining Enron's vast labyrinth of lies is a tall task, but Alex Gibney's Oscar-nominated documentary does a good job laying it all out... and making you furious in the process.

So going into this movie I thought it was a movie like Wall Street but it's a documentary. I've heard great things about this but people must be joking. This documentary is the stereotypical documentary about a corrupt company. I've never heard of Enron and I never knew they were a big company better yet a huge scandal. After watching this I felt like it was a waste of time. The moral of the story is don't steal money because you'll never get away with it nobody how "smart" you are. Maybe if you want to see a failing company fall watch this but I prefer to see documentaries about companies succeeding and then 10 years later they fall. Whatever this is, is not for me. Nov 5 22

It's clear the Writer/Producer/Director Alex Gibney has an ideological ax to grind. An inordinate amount of time is spent on the Bush family's connection to disgraced Enron CEO Ken Lay without once mentioning that the vast majority of Enron's deceptive practices occurred during the Clinton administration. Gibney makes it seem like California Governor Gray Davis' recall was due to a conspiracy between Schwarzenegger and the Bushes, ignoring the budget crisis that enveloped California after the dot com bubble burst and Davis' insistence on raising taxes. For some reason he also veers off into the Milgram experiment where subjects were told to administer electric shocks in response to incorrect answers. The actual inner workings of Enron and the fraud that ensued, most notable Andy Fastow's shell companies, are given short shrift, as is the story of whistleblower Sherron Watkins. If you want the true story of Enron without the political hatchet job and anti-free market viewpoint I recommend Kurt Eichenwald's book, "Conspiracy of Fools."

An excellent, informative, and entertaining introduction to the Enron scandal, an odious chapter in financial history of which I had relatively little knowledge prior to seeing this film. The film doesn't stop there, exposing the flaws in American corporate and political culture which allowed Enron to operate a massive scam with impunity for so many years.

I just loved how this documentary movie looks at the people making the decisions that led to Enron having to file for bankruptcy - Need to be more documentaries like this on how people/corruption from Wall Street affects so many people

This documentary does a good job of bringing out the scarcely believable level of fraud and callousness that Enron executives displayed at the turn of the century.

A must about how great companies cheat the whole world.