Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Okay, before we come back to the wheels starting to fall apart in 2001, there's one more piece of the intervening go-go years we should talk about. You want to talk about Enron Online? Yes. Of course, we were referring to the bandwidth trading, which also is much more difficult than trading natural gas. How exactly is that all going to work? Trading available bandwidth, especially when there's this massive last mile problem to everyone's homes? If someone needs more bandwidth in one place than another, how's that going to work? Are you just physically going to widen the wires? I think people just didn't really understand these concepts yet. There are lots of excitement around what Enron's doing in trading bandwidth, around being an internet company, but they actually do launch an internet product. Now, the internet product is really just to advantage their in-house business. This one to me seems like it's probably not fraud. It's just an example of evil but beneficial for shareholders' business strategy. In November of 99, they launched something called Enron Online. What this is is it allows all of Enron's counterparties to trade with them electronically. They stand up an exchange, like an exchange you can access through a web browser, much like FTX, but Enron itself is the counterparty to every trade. They don't even pretend that they're not on the other side of most transactions. Oh, my God. I didn't make the FTX-Alameda connection in this. This is too good.…

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