Enron - The Smartest Guys in the Room (13 of 51)

Enron - The Smartest Guys in the Room

In reality, he's a gambler.
He gambled away huge sums of money before he was 20 years old, by making wild bets on the market.
To Jeff Skilling, risk was glamorous.
He was a huge risk taker.
He actually talked about wanting to go on trips that were so perilous that someone could actually die.
This manifested itself in trips that Jeff Skilling led for a small group of friends and customers.
A core cadre of Enron guys used to go on these wild adventures: Andy Fastow would go; Ken Rice would go.

The trips were legend.
You know, we can sit and think about what strange insecurities they were trying to overcome.
But it made them feel good as men.
And they took a particularly memorable trip to the Baja twelve hundred miles of very rugged terrain in Mexico.
This is a trip where people crashed bikes.
Ken Rice was on the trip, and he busted a lip and required a bunch of stitches.
People broke bones.
One guy flipped a jeep and almost got killed.
Those sorts of stories at Enron became legend.
And it fed the whole macho culture of the place.
Jeff Skilling had a way of describing people that he liked.
He said, 'I like guys with spikes.'
He liked somebody with something extreme about them.
Ken Rice was one of the Men with Spikes.
He was the salesman of the group.
Very amiable, fun, man's man.
And was the guy out selling deals to energy companies.
In the case of Cliff Baxter, the company's chief dealmaker he was extraordinarily talented at just doing a deal.
But he was a manic depressive.