🧯📉Grifted: Enron — The Energy Empire Everyone Worshipped (Part II)

🕵️‍♂️ Grifted: Volume 2b

Top of the Series: WorldCom — The Telecom Giant That Billed Us for a Fantasy

Previous: Enron — The Energy Empire Everyone Worshipped (Volume 2a)

🕵️ Grifted: Success That Survives the Scam

Installment 2B – “The Greatest Scam Belief Ever Bought”

🌀 Grifted: Enron, Part Two – The Crash and the Lesson

This building once housed “America’s Most Innovative Company.” Then came the subpoenas. Soaring profits. Zero gravity.

From Installment 2A: The Energy Empire Everyone Worshipped

In Part One, we watched Enron rise like Icarus, wings of arrogance and accounting wax stretched toward Wall Street’s glowing sun. We watched it fall—faster than it rose—leaving behind lawsuits, layoffs, and losses.

Now comes the Crash: how the illusion unraveled, who was really behind the curtain, and what we missed until it was too late.

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💣 The Crash – How It All Unraveled

When people think of Enron’s collapse, the spotlight usually lands on Jeff Skilling, the slick strategist, or Ken Lay, the soft-spoken founder who claimed ignorance like it was a legal strategy.

But the real manipulator—the architect of deception—was Andy Fastow, Enron’s Chief Financial Officer.

Fastow wasn’t just cooking the books. He built a second set of books entirely—then billed Enron for using them.

The architect of Enron’s off-balance-sheet empire walks into court—carrying 45 million reasons to plead guilty (CFO – Andrew Fastow)

The SPE Shell Game: LJM and Chewco

Fastow masterminded a complex network of Special Purpose Entities (SPEs), companies that allowed Enron to keep billions in debt off the balance sheet. Two of the most notorious were:

• LJM (named after his wife Lea and sons Jeffrey and Matthew) – a series of partnerships where Fastow wore both hats: Enron executive and outside investor. He sold Enron’s worst assets to LJM at inflated prices, using fake profits to boost Enron’s stock.

• Chewco – a dummy partnership set up to buy Enron’s stake in another SPE, JEDI. Chewco needed independent investment to qualify as “off-balance-sheet,” but Fastow faked the independence with a loan guarantee backed by Enron itself. It was Enron pretending to do business with… Enron.