When You Make the Cover of Time

The shark has been jumped.

Sell, Sell Sell, God Damnit Sell!

SCHMIDT: We try very hard to look like we're out of control. But in fact the company is very measured. And that's part of our secret.

PAGE: We don't generally talk about our strategy ... because it's strategic. I would rather have people think we're confused than let our competitors know what we're going to do. That's an easy trade-off.

BRIN: You always hear the phrase, money doesn't buy you happiness. But I always in the back of my mind figured a lot of money will buy you a little bit of happiness. But it's not really true.

PAGE: If we were motivated by money, we would have sold the company a long time ago and ended up on a beach.

Lou Pai was motivated by money.

Then there is the "enigmatic" Lou Pai, one of the only higher-ups able to foresee the bad future and escape while Enron's stock prices were still unrealistically bloated. In the film, Lou Pai is first introduced as a kind of mad genius, in charge of a highly speculative new division of Enron, for which he grossed, during his tenure, over a hundred million dollars. But there's always a dark, seedy underbelly, and the film does not hesitate to amplify it for all it's worth during the Lou Pai "Chapter": the music turns dark, the screen flickers with sinister strobe effects, and we see video of the evil Mr. Pai speaking in slow motion. Did he kill someone? No. Did he gleefully participate in the My Lai massacre? No. Did he fund communists on the side? No.

Worse: he liked strippers.

So much so that he left his wife for one. Then he bought a bunch of Colorado and moved to a castle in Hawaii.

For more on Pai:

On February 25, 2000, Lou Pai sold 10,000 shares of Enron stock at $65.04 a share, yielding proceeds of $650,400.

On March 7, 2000, Lou Pai sold 100,000 shares of Enron stock at $72.02 a share, for a total of $7,202,000.

On March 22, 2000, Lou Pai sold 1,760,500 shares of Enron stock at $74.57 a share. Total return: $131,280,480.

Over the next two months, Lou Pai sold nearly two million additional shares of stock, worth more than $130 million.

During a single week in May 2001, shortly before he retired from his position at Enron, Pai cashed in additional shares worth more than $70 million.

When You Make the Cover of Time

The shark has been jumped.

John Battelle calls it.