Obituaries

Enron Was America's Most Admired Company Right Up Until It Was a Crime Scene

Fortune named it America's most innovative company six years running. The innovation, it turned out, was mostly in the accounting.

Enron corporate logo (1997), designed by Paul Rand. Public domain.

Through the 1990s, Enron was the future: an energy trading giant whose stock kept climbing, whose executives kept getting profiled, and whose books kept being audited and approved, year after year, by one of the five biggest accounting firms in the world. Fortune named it "America's Most Innovative Company" for six consecutive years.

The innovation was Special Purpose Entities — off-the-books shell companies Enron used to hide billions in debt and inflate profits, engineered largely by CFO Andrew Fastow with sign-off from auditor Arthur Andersen, which was simultaneously being paid handsomely as Enron's consultant. In October 2001, Enron announced a $638 million quarterly loss and a $1.2 billion hit to shareholder equity. On November 8, it admitted to inflating income by $586 million since 1997.

On December 2, 2001, Enron filed for bankruptcy: at the time, the largest corporate bankruptcy in American history. Stock that had traded above $90 a share was worth less than a dollar. In between the loss announcement and the filing, Arthur Andersen's own legal counsel instructed staff to start shredding Enron-related documents — a detail that requires no satirical embellishment whatsoever.

Andersen was convicted of obstruction of justice in 2002 (later overturned on appeal, well after the firm had already ceased to exist) and dissolved as a company. Enron's collapse gave America the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and a permanent case study in what "the smartest guys in the room" actually means.

Filed from public reporting:

Milwaukee County Required Augmented-Reality Game Publishers to Apply for Park Event Permits After Pokémon Go Crowds Overran Lake Park. The Law Was Undone by a Cowboy-Themed Poker App and Cost $83,000 in Legal Fees.

In July 2016, Pokémon Go was released, and Lake Park, a public park on Milwaukee's East Side, turned out to be full of places the game told people to visit. Hundreds of players arrived, and sometimes thousands, at all hours. According to the Associated Press, the result was

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The Man Who Wrote the Password Rules Said in 2017 That He Regretted Them. His Own Guideline Had Predicted in 2004 That Everyone Would Capitalize the First Letter and Put the Symbol at the End.

In June 2004 the National Institute of Standards and Technology published Special Publication 800-63, the Electronic Authentication Guideline, by William Burr, Donna Dodson and Timothy Polk. It was written for US federal agencies. Its Appendix A set out a method for estimating how strong a password was, and it

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Milwaukee County Required Augmented-Reality Game Publishers to Apply for Park Event Permits After Pokémon Go Crowds Overran Lake Park. The Law Was Undone by a Cowboy-Themed Poker App and Cost $83,000 in Legal Fees.

Panera Launched an Unlimited Self-Serve Drinks Subscription in 2022 Alongside a Lemonade With Up to 390 Milligrams of Caffeine. The Only Limit at the Fountain Was One Cup Every Two Hours.

The Man Who Wrote the Password Rules Said in 2017 That He Regretted Them. His Own Guideline Had Predicted in 2004 That Everyone Would Capitalize the First Letter and Put the Symbol at the End.

Ofo Put Millions of Yellow Bicycles on China's Streets for Anyone to Ride and Took a Small Deposit to Make Sure They Came Back. At Last Count, More Than Fifteen Million Riders Were Still Waiting for the Deposit.