The movie starts with a man named Kenneth Lay, he founded Enron.
The idea of the film is a documentary of how Enron was managed, and by who it was managed, and what scandals they were up too. The name of the movie “ Smartest guys in the room” was given because it was not only Kenneth Lay behind the desk, he had a group of smart people managing Enron, one man by himself cannot manage to create a scheme, he needs help from a group of smart and brilliant people to help him out.The idea of Kenneth was to sell Enron to the people, the way he sold the Enron Image was by hiring Jeffrey Skilling a new CEO, a visionary man who is in condition to make Enron gain millions, by using the mark-to-model accounting, allowing the company to book potential profits on certain projects immediately after the deals are signed… this was done whether or not those projects turn out to be successful. By doing this they tricked the stockholders by saying they had gained profit when actually they had lost money.This gave Enron the ability to subjectively give the appearance of being profitable company even if it isn’t; they also made employees be more competitive by annually firing the bottom fifteen percent of the people, which created a highly competitive and brutal working environment.
Skilling hired smart people but these people were only smart in stealing money, his two lieutenants who enforce his directives, J. Clifford Baxter and Lou Pai, they were both crazy and had an obsession with strippers, Lou Pai was the CEO of ENRON Energy Services, and stole $250 million he then disappeared.They had executives push up their stock prices and then cash in their multi-million dollar options in a process called “pump and dump”, by doing that they stole millions. They lied about being profitable and stable, even though its worldwide operations performed poorly. They then create an idea of selling Broadband technology to deliver movies on demand, and trade weather like a commodity; both ideas failed.
They continue to become successful as it became one of the few Internet related companies to survive the dot-com bubble burst in 2000.They became very famous they sold out an image that really never existed. People never imagined what was being done behind the table, but then an Enron investor and a Fortune reporter start making questions of irregularities about the company’s financial statements and stock value. Skilling responded with calling the man unethical and accusing Fortune of publishing her reporting to counteract a positive piece on Enron. Then Enron executives including CFO Andrew Fastow, meet with the men to explain about the company’s finances.Enron knew they were going to be caught somehow, so they had the man to hide Enron’s incredible debts, by using Fastow they were able to hide great debts, Fastow created ventures, he controlled everything and also took advantage to take some money for himself, he created a network with the shell companies designed to do business with Enron, for the ostensible dual purposes of sending Enron money and hiding its increasing debt.
