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Comment by alex_young | Hacker News Reader

After the dotcom crash I looked for some safe haven outside of the industry, and found a landing place at a global fiber optics networking division of an energy trading company called Dynegy. Sounded safe!

A month after joining they backed out of their planned buyout of their largest competitor Enron. Apparently this Enron thing was cooking their books.

Enron sued Dynegy, Dynegy countersued, and started laying people off. They decided that the fiber business wasn’t worth preserving since there were about a dozen such networks and not the demand to accommodate more than one.

Over my 11 months in of employment there I had 9 different managers and was finally one of the last 4 people keeping the lights on in the 500 person global HQ.

It was a weird time. For several months I kept the perp walk photo of Jeff Skilling in handcuffs as my desktop background. It was cathartic.

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You might have fun poking around their mail archive:

http://www.enron-mail.com/email/maggi-m/inbox/Enron_Dynegy_M...

> In addition, all information, documents and communications related to the merger between Enron and Dynegy should be coordinated through and approved by Mark Muller, Lance Schuler, Robert Eickenroht, Mark Haedicke, Rob Walls or Greg Whalley of Enron. It is absolutely critical that this procedure be maintained. To the extent that information is required to be disclosed to Dynegy under the merger agreement, then such disclosure should be approved by one of the foregoing individuals.

Most of the “foregoing individuals” are missing from the archive, but not all:

http://www.enron-mail.com/email/haedicke-m/

The (small) list of removed items is hilarious: http://www.enron-mail.com/email/removed

The other comments explaining that this is a restoration project make me wonder where this script came from. The archive of the original website?

There are more directories: http://www.enron-mail.com/email/

Probably a good idea to hide 22 freak emails from a 22 year ol(d scandal.)

Enron wasn't just cooking their books a little.

Enron created a "bandwidth marketplace", that is, a commodity market like there is for energy where providers can bid for data transit between locations. Then they estimated all the value of all the future trades on that market based on some very optimistic assumptions, estimated all their own future profit as the market maker using even more optimistic assumptions, and marked all that hypothetical profit to market and immediately recognized it as profit on their books.

It was tens of billions of dollars. Despite the fact that a "bandwidth marketplace" doesn't actually make sense (data transfer is a lot less fungible than energy, and there are usually only very few possible competitors for any route), and even if it had made sense, they couldn't have hoped to secure anywhere near the cut they assumed, and even if they had, the bottom was going to fall out of the market because people kept coming up with new and exiting ways to move more data on the same fiber, leading to massive overcapacity.

That takes wishful thinking to dizzying new heights!

Feels like those subprime mortgage risk markets in the mid 2000s: financial "instruments" that are incredibly complex and seem to offer amazing returns. Stated simply like that, we might wonder why so many people jumped on board, but in reality it wasn't introduced in such a straightforward way.

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