The Smartest Guys in the Room (2003)

Like the story of a plane crash or bridge collapse you know what’s going to happen. Gravity is going to win in the end, and so it is with Enron. A company that tried to defy the laws of thermodynamics and conjure money from thin air with a sort of accounting perpetual motion machine. It’s an old story, over twenty five years now, but the details of the collapse still hold fascination. And there’s a bit more catharsis involved when you’re rooting for failure then when you are rooting for the pilots to land the plane against all odds in an episode of Mayday. There’s another compelling reason to read this story in the spring of 2026 though. The inescapable drumbeat of AI calls to mind the story of Enron, so I thought it made sense to go over the history. I’m not going to write my own version of an Ed Zitron article, because he’s already done it, better than I could have. I planned on going through everything in the book and linking it to specific articles, but I don’t think that’s really…