Kenneth Lay himself was awarded a place in the Texas Business Hall of Fame for his achievement of bringing the small company to where it stood. Many surveys showed Kenneth Lay as one of the top managers for the nation. His background of academic and government positions helped back his position as a dedicated leader.

Disaster then struck the companies success was all smoke and mirrors created by artificially inflated profits, dubious accounting practices, and fraud. The company unraveled and came crashing down, resulting in thousands of people loosing their jobs and life savings that they invested in to the company.

Enron was born in July of 1985 with a merger of Houston Natural and Omaha-based InterNorth. Kenneth Lay was elected as the chairman and chief executive of the company. Around the same time Washington began to lift the controls over who produced energy and how it was distributed.

Kenneth Lay saw a chance to make the small company thrive and seized it. Enron guaranteed its customers stable prices during the energy regulation changes. The response to the stable energy prices that Enron was offering was huge. Everyone wanted future gas at the fixed prices of today.

Enron’s stock continued to drop and investors became more and more agitated. Lay tried to restore investor confidence back into the company, but at the same point he sold his stock options himself that totaled over 2 million dollars. On October 16th, Enron announced its first quarterly loss in four years, a massive 618 million dollars. The Enron staff began to panic, realizing that their company was in trouble. With Enron’s employees trying to pull out, Enron put a block on their employees selling their stock from within their pension schemes.

Then in May of 2001, Clifford Baxter, the Enron executive left the company. Rumor within the company was that Baxter and Skilling disagreed over the propriety of some of the partnership transactions. Soon after, Baxter took his own life. One of the executives that knew Baxter’s concerns confronted Kenneth Lay and told him that the company was on the verge of collapsing.

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