When Enron, America’s largest energy company, collapsed in 2001, what began as a shocking and sudden bankruptcy quickly became one of the greatest business scandals in history. At the start of 2001, Enron employed 21,000 people – it claimed revenues of over $100 billion the year before in the areas of electricity, natural gas and communications. By the end of November that year, the company was filing for bankruptcy. The men at the top walked away with over a billion dollars, while investors and employees, particularly those at the bottom of the scale, lost everything, including their retirement funds. What had been the most blue chip of stocks was suddenly completely worthless. The story of Enron — as told in the Oscar-nominated documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room — is the story of the multinational corporate globe as depicted by Goya in his black period. Around the dwindling dollars and the escalating lies, monsters circle. It’s kind of a comic opera, only real people get hurt, and Arnold Schwarzenegger ends up governing a state. For years, billions of dollars of imaginary money were being pushed around by the corporation, at the behest of Chairman Ken Lay and CEO Jeff Skilling, and nobody was asking any questions. Not the banks, not the analysts, not the journalists. It was only nine months before the corporation declared bankruptcy that a journalist at Fortune, Bethany McLean, became the first journalist to seriously ask in print — just where do these guys make their money? She was surprised to find that Jeff Skilling could not answer such a simple question. Her article set in motion the events that would lead to the collapse. Speaking to her via telephone for the release of the documentary, I asked her just why it was that the checks and balances failed, and why nobody was asking any questions. Less