Scandal. Greed. Devastation.
“Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” is a front-row seat to the biggest corporate screwjob ever, where rich Houston execs got fat while their employees lost everything.
In just 24 days, a handful of wealthy Houston execs turn a $74 billion empire into rubble, leaving 20,000 employees out in the cold.
It’s “The Big Short” meets “Goodfellas,” but every crime is real.
This is the best Enron documentary I’ve seen and will likely rank high in my list of “Best Documentaries on Corporate Fraud” when I get to it.
Enjoy!
Trailer for “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room”
Watch “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room”
You can watch XYZ for free on Kanopy and Hoopla (with library card); free with ads on Roku, Tubi, Pluto, Distro and Amazon Prime. You can also rent it on Apple TV, Amazon, Microsoft and Flix Fling (#.99 last I checked).
You can find the latest streaming options at https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/enron-the-smartest-guys-in-the-room
Ratings:
- My Rating: 94/100
- IMDB Rating: 7.6/10
- Rotten Tomatoes Ratings: 87/100 (Users); 94/100 (Critics)
Release Date: April 22, 2005
My Review of “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room”
This doc pulls back the curtain on one of the biggest corporate scandals in U.S. history.
“Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” takes us inside the fall of Enron, a company that went from Wall Street darling to utter disgrace.
You’ll see how a mix of arrogance, greed, and outright fraud led to its collapse, wrecking lives in the process.
It’s a tale as compelling as any fiction, but this time, the truth is even scarier.
A Closer Look at Greed
This doc is based on the best-selling book by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind.
Director Alex Gibney (who also directed “Taxi to the Dark Side” and “The Inventor”) lays out the details of how Enron’s top brass—Ken Lay, Jeffrey Skilling, and Andy Fastow—created an illusion of a company that could do no wrong.
They cooked the books to make it seem like Enron was flush with cash, while in reality, it was bleeding money.
Gibney doesn’t just throw numbers and accounting jargon at you.
He paints vivid portraits of the people at the heart of the disaster. Skilling’s obsession with “mark-to-market” accounting allowed Enron to count potential future profits as current earnings.
That move gave them the appearance of soaring profits, even when those profits didn’t actually exist.
You Can’t Make This $hit Up
- The Nigerian Barges Scam: Enron executives sold power barges to Merrill Lynch with the guarantee they’d buy them back just days later—purely to fake profits. It was a sham sale, but they counted it as real revenue anyway. This scheme played a key role in their downfall.
- Skilling’s “Raptor” Investment Vehicles: Skilling and CFO Andy Fastow named one of their debt-hiding entities “Raptor” after the predatory dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. These entities were supposed to “eat” Enron’s losses, but instead, they became a ticking time bomb of hidden debt.
- “Ask Why” Slogan Backfire: Enron’s corporate motto was literally “Ask Why.” It was plastered all over their building and marketing materials. Ironically, when employees or investors did ask why things seemed fishy, they were ignored or dismissed.
- Unearned Bonuses — They paid out bonuses for money they hadn’t even earned yet.
One of the most gut-wrenching parts of the doc is the human cost. Thousands of employees lost their jobs and savings overnight. They trusted the company. And then it was gone. This wasn’t just numbers on a page—it was real people’s lives.
Wild Anecdotes Behind the Scenes
- The infamous “rank and yank” system at Enron created a cutthroat environment where only the top 15% of employees kept their jobs, fueling a toxic culture of backstabbing and fear.
- Enron executives threw lavish parties, like renting out the entire Houston Astros stadium for a private event—while they were secretly hemorrhaging money.
- Fastow’s wife, Lea, also got entangled in the scandal, ultimately serving prison time for tax fraud related to their ill-gotten gains.
- At its height, Enron was named “America’s Most Innovative Company” by Fortune magazine six years in a row—an accolade that now seems like a sick joke.
- One whistleblower, Sherron Watkins, tried to warn Lay about the company’s looming implosion, but he ignored her.
- It’s chilling to think about how different things could’ve been if anyone had listened.
The Bigger Picture Gibney weaves in expert interviews, including those with journalists and former Enron employees, to explain how Enron’s failure wasn’t just the result of a few bad apples.
It was the system itself—the deregulation of the energy markets, Wall Street’s obsession with short-term profits, and corporate greed on a colossal scale.
This doc clocks in at 110 minutes and it never drags. Gibney uses footage of Enron’s glitzy conferences, where execs would hype the stock while hiding massive losses.
You’ll be shocked, entertained, and maybe a little sickened by the audacity of it all.
Corporate Hubris in Focus
This isn’t just a doc about financial corruption—it’s about human nature. The culture at Enron encouraged risk-taking to the point of absurdity.
Skilling himself embraced Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest ideals, calling his traders “the best and the brightest.”
But those same traders were gambling with the livelihoods of millions. The company’s energy traders are shown manipulating the California energy crisis, leading to blackouts, while they joked about “grandma millie” freezing in the dark.
You can’t make this stuff up.
Impact and Legacy
The collapse of Enron wiped out $74 billion in stock value (most of it in 24 days), led to 20,000 job losses, and forced people to question the very nature of corporate governance.
You’ll walk away from this doc feeling like you’ve peeked into the soul of corporate America—and you might not like what you see. Lay and Skilling were convicted, but Lay died before sentencing, and Skilling served time.
But the lasting impact of “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” is how it forces us to ask: How much do we trust those who hold power?
The documentary is as much about the 2001 Enron scandal as it is about what can go wrong when unchecked ambition and greed take over.
Thanks for reading!
Rob Kelly, Chief Maniac, Daily Doc