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The Smartest Guys in the Room
Fortune journalists Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind trace the rise and collapse of Enron, the energy company whose accounting fraud led to one of the largest bankruptcies in American history. The book examines its leaders, its culture and the banks, auditors and analysts who enabled it.
- Release Date
- 2003
- Length
- 440 pages
- Publisher
- Portfolio
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Our Review
About the book
Fortune journalists Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind trace the rise and collapse of Enron, the energy company whose accounting fraud led to one of the largest bankruptcies in American history. The book examines its leaders, its culture and the banks, auditors and analysts who enabled it.
Our review
Enron’s collapse, reported with rigor and told with the momentum of a novel; we know of no better account.
McLean was among the first reporters to ask publicly how Enron actually made its money, and that skepticism powers the whole book. With Elkind, she reconstructs the company’s culture of arrogance, the accounting tricks hidden in special-purpose entities and the personalities of executives who believed their own brilliance. What could have been an impenetrable tale of derivatives and balance sheets reads instead as a character study of ambition curdling into fraud, with clear explanations of how the schemes worked.
The detail can be overwhelming. Readers without a finance background may lose the thread during long passages on deals and partnerships, and the large cast is hard to track. Because it was published soon after the collapse, the book predates the trials and their outcomes, so the story ends before its legal conclusion. Those limits aside, it remains a model of business journalism and a warning that still feels relevant.
What we loved
- Meticulous reporting from journalists who broke the story
- Clear explanations of complex accounting schemes
- Sharp portraits of corporate culture and hubris
Keep in mind
- Dense financial detail and a sprawling cast
- Written before the criminal trials concluded
Read it if you like
Readers of Barbarians at the Gate, Bad Blood by John Carreyrou, or Michael Lewis’s The Big Short.
The verdict
Rigorous, propulsive and still relevant; we would put it near the top of any reading list on corporate fraud.
