Kenneth Lay

No.

I think it's the Kenneth Lay thing.

I think they should just coop him up in a cell with Rumsfeld, and they have to live together.

I mean, he's done a lot for them.

I'll agree with the concept.

that if you are a Ken Lay character and you don't ask questions and you understand that your financiers are being aggressive in their bookkeeping, then ultimately if the ship sinks and you're the captain, you're responsible for it.

Okay, I'll buy that.

But Steve Ballmer wants to improve his team.

Humility and low public profile are easy to fake for a few years and almost impossible to verify from the outside.

Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling wrote calm, measured, reassuring shareholder letters right up until Enron's accounting completely collapsed.

A quiet CEO who says all the right things in a letter isn't automatically a great capital allocator.

Sometimes they're just quiet.

The combined company became Enron.

Kenneth Lay became the company's chairman and chief executive.

At first, Enron was fundamentally a pipeline business.

But the company was about to change dramatically.

Inside the company, however, some employees were already deeply concerned.

One of them was Sherron Watkins, a vice president at Enron.

Watkins became concerned about the accounting treatment of certain transactions and wrote a memo to Kenneth Lay.

She warned that the company could potentially implode under the weight of the accounting problems.

So it's, you know, it's just a humbling experience because, you know, you point out the book, the smartest guys in the room and it's right.

They were the smartest guys in the room and not just the, not just Jeff Skilling and Andy Fastow and Ken Lay, but all of their advisors and directors and, and whatnot.

And, you know, they still managed to, you know, sink this company completely.

So, you know, that was, and the other enduring lesson, which is even a greater problem there then, I'm sorry, a greater problem now than it was then, is a lot of these vaunted corporate governance institutions, whether it's rating agencies or accounting firms or investment banks are a major problem that we have in my view from Enron that exists to this day, Will, is these are very oligopolistic industries, highly non-competitive, extreme barriers to entry, which created a significant part of this problem.

I heard a guy give a speech at the Chamber of Commerce, and he said, "Most people have a can-do attitude.

We have a Ken-do," K-E-N, because Ken Lay was a god man here.

He was being talked about for Secretary of Commerce, but he didn't accept it because he knew deep down that Enron's financia- finances were, were in trouble.

It is typically the case that there is, there is, after a crumbling, everybody says, "I saw it coming." Stanford Financial, which we lived through here, another Ponzi scheme.

So many people actually believe that as fucked up as things are right now And as they have been for the last twenty years, that they aren't needed.

What do you want to bet that Bernie Madoff follows Ken Lay's path? I can think of any number of criminal organizations that would benefit from a dose of Lake City quiet pills, end quote.

For context, Ken Lay was the CEO of Enron, an energy company at the center of one of history's largest corporate scandals.

He was convicted on ten counts of securities and wire fraud, but died before sentencing.

Bernie Madoff orchestrated the largest Ponzi scheme in history.

He was convicted of eleven federal felonies and was sentenced to a hundred and fifty years in prison on June 29th, 2009.

Here's where his post doesn't make sense.

If Bernie Madoff was going to follow in Ken Lay's path, wouldn't he have died prior to sentencing, which happened prior to this comment? So I'm not quite sure why he added that part.

If people remember Enron, a large energy company, that ended up going bankrupt, all employees losing all their retirement, and it went very badly.

The people running Enron, Ken Lay, the CEO, was very good friends with George Bush.

And people at Enron were giving hundreds of thousands of dollars to Bush.

And then Enron was getting very favorable government policy out of it in regards to the energy markets and deregulation and this sort of thing.