David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…I think people forget the Enron scale. FTX is really bad. This is a terrible bunch of illegal stuff that happened, unethical stuff that happened. But the scale of Enron, I think, because it happened 20 years ago, people forget how big it was. I think also on that point, on a reflective note, studying the Enron history, it's crazy seeing the length of time that it took for everything to come out and for everything to be resolved. That's a good reminder for now and for FTX. We're not even in any one yet of figuring out what happened here. It was years and years before all this stuff came out in the Enron case. Yup, so true. I have one more observation to make, and then I'm curious to talk Sarbanes-Oxley with you. The last observation, I first had reading the book, and then I tried to search for any counterexamples and a bunch of articles and couldn't find any. I don't think there's a single interaction between Enron and a human, like most of the employees, where the human didn't make out versus the company like a bandit. Every single time there was any confrontation—this is probably like the legacy of Ken Lay, this is his non-confrontational thing—every single person that walked away from Enron, walked away with some incredible golden parachute, or amazing sweetheart deal on an asset that they bought from the company, or sign this paper, stay quiet, and here's a bunch of money or here's a bunch of stock. Every person just pulled one over on the company and its shareholders over, and over, and over again. I don't think the company ever had a hard line with anyone. You look at a person we didn't even talk about is Rebecca Mark, who ran all the international stuff, who ran Azurix, the international water project that both failed, but was also never set up to succeed, so it's hard to really blame her.…

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