The Smartest Guys in the Room
by Bethany McLean, Peter Elkind · first published 2003
86% recommend14% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Traces how Enron moved from a legitimate energy company to outright fraud, and explains how its failure happened through McLean's clear business writing.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
"Just as Watergate was the defining story of its time, so Enron is the biggest business story of our time. And just as All the President's Men was the one Watergate book that gave readers the full story, with all the drama and nuance, The Smartest Guys in the Room is the one book you have to read to understand this business saga."--BOOK JACKET.
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…have been repeatedly surprised at how these financial disasters came to be; it often seems like the people at the top were deceiving themselves more than anyone else. Bethany McLean's other book, "The Smartest Guys in the Room" (relevant but not cited here) was a particularly good example of this, and I came away from it with a very different view of Enron than I'd had going in.
on “Why didn’t any Wall Street CEOs go to jail after the financial crisis? (2019)” ↗I’d also recommend The Smartest Guys in the Room (and the documentary based on the book) [0]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/113576.The_Smartest_Guys...
on “Ex-Enron CEO Skilling launching new digital marketplace for oil investors” ↗I highly recommend Bethany McLean’s "The Smartest Guys in the Room" to read up on Enron. Also, Lucy Prebble - who is now a consultant on HBO‘s succession - has written a nice play on the matter.
on “How is this zombie enron site still going?” ↗…Shrugged --- WALL STREET / FINANCE --- When Genius Failed Liar's Poker Buffett (Lowenstein) Bull! Black-Scholes and Beyond (textbook) Fixed Income Securities (textbook) The Road to Serfdom The Smartest Guys in the Room Fortune's Formula The Fourth Turning Inside the House of Money --- ENTREPRENEURSHIP / COMPUTERS (non-textbook) --- Masters of Doom It's Not About the Bike Dot. Bomb Founders at Work The PayPal…
on “Ask HN: Good books?” ↗Bethany McLean is the best in business writing. The Smartest Guys in the Room was fantastic. As for Microsoft: the adage goes that success has many fathers. Failure has even more. It would have been nothing short of amazing if Microsoft was as dominant now as it was in the early…
on “The Microsoft Empire Reboots” ↗> Enron wasn’t a regular business caught committing crimes. The entire thing was fraud. There was no business left to operate. This isn't true. Read The Smartest Guys in the Room. Enron started out as a real company and slowly became increasingly fraudulent with time.
on “Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes must go to prison while she appeals sentence” ↗…parcelled up a little differently." This claim really does require a citation, because it is quite significant, and is not necessarily true. Bethany McLean (author of "All the Devils are Here" and "The Smartest Guys in the Room") once made a great point about people shorting stocks; she said that they are the only ones looking for bubbles, excesses, and other problems in the stock market and asset pricing in general, their vigilance…
on “How Everyone Got the Top 1% Wrong” ↗'Enron: The smartest guys in the room' by Bethany McLean. Be warned, it is difficult to read (a lot of jargon and the pages are too packed with new informations).
on “Ask HN: What are your favorite books? I'm bored” ↗