Comment by bob_theslob646 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bob_theslob646 | Hacker News Reader

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Not even close to the scale of Enron. Even mentioning them in the same sentence is preposterous.

First off, Enron was publicly traded. Uber is private.

I will just leave this here.

>Between 1996 and 2000, Enron's revenues increased by more than 750%, rising from $13.3 billion in 1996 to $100.8 billion in 2000. This extensive expansion of 65% per year was unprecedented in any industry, including the energy industry which typically considered growth of 2–3% per year to be respectable. For just the first nine months of 2001, Enron reported $138.7 billion in revenues, which placed the company at the sixth position on the Fortune Global 500

>the company used accounting limitations to misrepresent earnings and modify the balance sheet to indicate favorable performance

Yes, exactly.

Enron purposefully caused brownouts throughout the western US as part of their price-manipulation schemes.[0] . They shutdown a power plant in direct contravention of a federal order to maintain full output to help with the (enron-induced) crisis.[1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisis

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/04/us/tapes-show-enron-arrang...

They also caused rolling blackouts in Los Angeles by manipulating energy markets.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisis

I'm baffled: If you're going to make up your numbers, why go with something preposterous instead of credible?

It seems like in a lot of these cases, there are plenty of parties who can intuit that something is wrong, but they choose not to dig any deeper because they're happy with the results of the way things are.

I wouldn't be surprised if ego entered in to it a little too on the not digging deeper side. "Clearly everyone else in the industry are idiots, or they'd be as profitable as we are".

I just think back to some of the stuff I listened to about the Bernie Madoff case where they were saying, essentially, that a lot of the bigger institutions bringing him clients had to have known something was up with the numbers, but they chose not to understand because they were making money and didn't want to rock the boat.

Assuming peoples bonuses were tied to the ridiculous numbers I can see people being incentivised to do that

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