Enron: The Satire

Some performance artists bought the name for peanuts and concocted an elaborate sendup of corporate excesses. Then they tried to bring Enron back for real. By Max Chafkin

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Enron the satire. Some performance artists bought the name for
peanuts and concocted an elaborate sind up of corporate excesses.
Then they tried to bring Enron back for real by
Max Chafkin read aloud by Mark Leedorf. In early December,
an advertisement appeared on social media with an inviting caption,

(00:24):
We're back, Can we talk? A time lapse video of
Manhattan followed the world is changing faster than ever. A
voice intoned, can you feel it? The announcer extolled dynamism
and innovation as a series of portraits flashed across the screen.
There was a protester embracing, a riot policeman, a stone

(00:44):
faced farmer surveying his field, an elegant ballerina dancing on
a beach, and an elderly man beaming while wearing a
virtual reality headset. The ad was instantly familiar to anyone
conversant in the language of corporate reputation management. It could
have been a promotion for a scandal prone chemical conglomerate,
a comically amoral management consulting firm, or the tourism bureau

(01:09):
of an authoritarian kingdom. In fact, it was a relaunch
video for an entity held in even lower esteem than
any of those. I am Enron, said, the stone faced farmer,
I am Enron, said, a young pregnant woman. We are Enron,
said the ballerina, as the camera pulled back to reveal
that she was among hundreds of people forming the energy

(01:30):
company's logo, an E cocked upward. That design was by
Paul Rand, who also did IBM, ABC and UPS, a
distinction befitting a company that, at its height was one
of the world's largest and most admired twenty five years ago.
Enron's revenue made it bigger on paper anyway than AT

(01:50):
and T, Volkswagen and JP Morgan Chase. Of course, that
revenue turned out to be a product of financial engineering
and creative accounting company collapsed in two thousand and one,
making fools out of the boosterish analysts and credulous journalists
who'd sung its praises. Its executives were charged with fraud
and received lengthy prison sentences. One of the world's largest

(02:13):
accounting firms shuttered, and Enron's brand name, a marketing neologism
meant to evoke the future of energy, became a byword
for corporate greed and crony capitalism. In twenty twenty five,
corporate greed and crony capitalism aren't quite as taboo as
they once were, though the new INRON promised it was
going to set a good example this time. The relaunch

(02:36):
video sent viewers to a website that explained the company's
name now stood for Energy Nurture, Repentant Opportunity NICE. A
few weeks later, Inron's social media accounts posted another video,
this one featuring a mysterious product the company claimed would
revolutionize three critical industries, the power industry, the independence industry,

(02:59):
and the freedom industry. As an audience looked on, an
executive in a Steve Jobs style get up lifted a
cloth to reveal a large, polished egg, proclaiming it the
first micro nuclear reactor for residential suburban use. Not only
was the device safe for the whole family, he said,
but my little ones they freaking love it. If anyone

(03:23):
wondered whether this was satire, the identity of the would
be nuclear energy entrepreneur Connor Gatos left little doubt. In
twenty seventeen, Gaetos helped create Birds Aren't Real, an absurdist
performance art project that satirized conspiracy theories such as Pizzagate
and QAnon. Gaetos and his co founder, Peter Mackindo financed

(03:43):
the project by selling t shirts that warned if it flies,
it spies, and bird watching goes both ways. I own
one of these items, along with the birds Aren't Real
sticker on my laptop that never fails to get a
laugh at airport security. The difference between Birds Aren't Real
and Enron is that Enron goes way further to commit

(04:05):
to the bit. At the same time Gaidos was promoting
his nuclear reactor on social media, Enron filed a real
application with the Public Utility Commission of Texas to sell electricity,
essentially attempting to turn the satirical energy company into a
real one. That was followed by allegations of actual financial
chicanery and investor losses. The deeper I got into the

(04:28):
reporting of this story, the harder it became to discern
satire from reality, and I started to wonder if anyone
besides Gados knew exactly where that line was to Gaidos,
a fan of Nathan Fielder, the stunt comedian who got
licensed as a real life commercial airline pilot for the
latest season of HBO's The Rehearsal. None of this is

(04:49):
as strange as it sounds. I think I'm more a
CEO than most CEOs. He says, everyone's an actor at
this point. To reinforce this idea, name drops a handful
of his friends in business, including Walt Disney's Bob Iger
and Gamestop's Ryan Cohen. On his relationship with Iger, We're

(05:09):
not buddies per se, but there's a level of mutual respect. Cohen,
Gaido says, is someone that I've not met a ton,
but I am familiar with. Disney declined to comment. GameStop
didn't respond to a request her comment. Fake or not,
the reference to GameStop seems deliberate. The company, after all,
was a near bankrupt mal retailer that was resurrected thanks

(05:32):
in part to a novel social media phenomenon in which
a group of Reddit users spontaneously banded together to pump
up the stock price, and to the performance of a
chief executive officer who so far has figured out how
to keep that community on his side. Similar observations could
be made about Tesla and Pallanteer, where charismatic executives have

(05:52):
persuaded retail investors to bid up share prices well beyond
what would make sense based on strictly business terms. Most
big tech companies trade at a share price equal to
about thirty times their earnings per share. As of mid September,
Pallineer's price earnings ratio was around five hundred seventy Tesla's
was above two sixty one. Possible explanation for this disparity

(06:16):
is that these companies have much brighter futures than their peers.
Another is that their meme stocks. Put this another way,
a more or less straight faced argument could be made
that running one of these meme stocks requires a performance
that isn't especially different from the orchestration of an elaborate hoax,
which is why ridiculous as it sounds, the Inron reboot

(06:37):
is worth paying attention to. Gatos is simultaneously sending up
an entire generation of fake it till you Make it
CEOs while attempting to profit from their playbook. When asked
whether the man Inron identifies as the creator of its
nuclear reactor is an actual nuclear scientist, Gatos smirks, I
mean he is a nuclear scientist. He says before Paul,

(07:00):
he also has an acting career. If he were a
normal CEO of a normal startup, and I were writing
a normal magazine profile, this would be the point at
which I'd note that Gato's is twenty nine tall and boyish,
with a tangle of curly hair and a slightly detached
manner that may or may not owe to his frequent
puffs on a vape pen. We're sitting in his home,

(07:21):
in a wood paneled room with a large window that
looks onto a leafy suburban neighborhood in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Because
we did birds aren't real. This seems like another performance
art project. Gaeto says, there's elements of that, but I
also think there's elements of things that we would accept
as being connected to reality in a media landscape which
has allowed Donald Trump to become president twice. After holding

(07:46):
forth on the line between satire and reality in Trump's America,
he excuses himself, walks to the other side of the room,
opens a door to the outside, and proceeds to urinate.
Nature is my toilet, he says, please quote me on that.
Is he making a point about the hypocrisy inherent and
the way energy companies talk about environmental responsibility. Is this

(08:08):
just the most convenient place in his home to relieve himself.
I'm not sure, and I can't tell if Gatos is either. Honestly,
it sounds insane, but I've sort of been following the
Inron story my whole life, he says. Perhaps it was
because his father worked as a stockbroker in Little Rock,
or maybe it was the way the company's troubles dominated
headlines when he was in grade school. But Gato says

(08:31):
he followed the trials of Inron executives Kenneth leyh Jeffrey Skilling,
and Andrew Fasto obsessively. He claims he came to regard
what they'd built with the same reverence with which some
of his peers viewed Apple under jobs. People have their
secret fantasy crushes, he says. My secret fantasy crush was
Enron of the nineteen nineties. Another part of Gatos's account

(08:54):
of his childhood has a greater ring of truth. He
says he was an enthusiastic consumer of conspiracy thing and
a regular viewer of the Alex Jones show. Gaetos seized
Jones a ranting fabuloust who was successfully sued and bankrupted
after he claimed that parents whose children died in the
twenty twelve Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting were Hector's as

(09:15):
a great entertainer, even if I don't subscribe to a
lot of the stuff he agrees with. Jones is appealing
the ruling against him. In early twenty seventeen, not long
after Jones had been promoting the idea that elites were
operating a sex trafficking ring out of a pizza shop,
Gaidos and his college roommate Mackindoe stumbled into a conspiracy

(09:37):
of their own. To make a little money. They'd been
selling novelty t shirts with nonsensical phrases, including one proclaiming
birds aren't real. Shortly after Trump's inauguration, Macindoe was visiting
friends in Memphis, whereas in many American cities there were
anti Trump protests as well as anti anti Trump counter protests.

(09:58):
Struck by the absurdity of the the whole spectacle, he
grabbed a piece of poster board, wrote birds aren't real
on it and began berating passers by with expressions of
avian paranoia. Have you ever seen a bird in real life?
He yelled? No, you've seen an Obama drone. The performance
was caught on camera and went viral, prompting Macindoe to wonder,

(10:20):
as he later put it in an NPR interview, if
he could convince the public that our satirical movement was
a real one. Macindoe and Gados decided to pivot their
business to conspiracy. They manufactured fake blueprints of the Obama drones,
a Wikileak style document dump poultry Gate, complete with hundreds
of fake emails and banned video footage featuring Gados as

(10:43):
the original movement's founder. Since the Eisenhower administration, the US
government has been committing genocide on the entire bird population,
Gatos explained in the video, which they shot on an
old VHS camera with the nineteen eighties movie set as
the backdrop and then posted on YouTube. The government, he continued,

(11:03):
was replacing these birds with sophisticated robot replicas. Over the
next few years, Gaidos ran the merch business while Macindoe,
wearing a pair of wrap around sunglasses and frequently shouting,
played the grassroots activist. He drove across the US in
a white van covered in slogans, birds charge on power

(11:23):
lines and equipped with a satellite dish and bird deterring
metal spikes. In July twenty nineteen, an anchor on a
Memphis morning show, which had covered one of his protests,
asked Macindo to explain the satire. Honestly, that's kind of offensive,
Macindoe said, wearing a look of aggrieved disbelief. I don't
think you'd say that if I said birds are real.

(11:46):
I don't know why the other side of the argument
can't be treated with equal respect. The performance, which simultaneously
mocked the paranoid petulance of Jones and his ilk and
the media's fetishization of balance, attracted even more more media
interest and more merch purchases. In an attempt to stop
online sellers from offering knockoff shirts, Gaeto started filing for

(12:08):
trademarks for Birds Aren't Real and its various catchphrases, and
in twenty twenty he added to his portfolio, paying a
two hundred and seventy five dollars filing fee to take
over Enron's expired trademark. He says he just randomly typed
the name into the US Patent and Trademark Office search
bar to see who owned it. I assumed it was
like a bank or someone who was incentivized to keep

(12:31):
it away from people like me, Gaeto says, but no
one seemed to do that. He sold a few novelty
tees with the phrase Ron Summer Internship nineteen ninety seven,
but he didn't seriously consider turning Ron into a full
blown performance art project energy company. At first. I didn't
truly believe it to be an interesting idea, he says,

(12:53):
but I'd sort of be a few drinks in and
let it slip. Gato's got more serious about the project
in twenty twenty two, imagining a Birds Aren't Real like
project that would involve bringing back this notorious company and
doing it in the most self serious way you could
ever imagine, he says. The only question you ever needed
to ask yourself was what would the real Inron do

(13:15):
in this situation? What would their marketing look like? He
started talking to Macindoe about the idea. By twenty twenty four,
the project was in full swing and had raised funding
from a group of crypto connected investors, and Macindoe had
recruited a half dozen writers, filmmakers, and other creative types
to help him develop a story for the fictional company.

(13:37):
The idea was to create a satirical rebranding campaign centered
on a misguided attempt to create home nuclear reactors. Gatos
played a sensitive but morally challenged to change the world type,
the kind of guy who, on a fake earnings call
that streamed in July, would complain about the noise that
an elderly board member's oxygen tank was making and ask

(13:58):
an assistant to turn that down. Later on, with the
board member seemingly slipping into unconsciousness, Gaidos cut their video
feed and then offered to pray us out. He then intoned,
just like Noah was a second chance for the world
with his arc, Enron is the second chance for the
United States, So thank you Amen. Like with birds aren't real.

(14:23):
The absurdist social media stuff would be bolstered with a
series of stunts and a community of supporters who'd be
hired as Inron interns. Gatos and Macendo, cast as the
chief technology officer, persuaded Paris Hilton to endorse the nuclear reactor.
Thank you at Enron and CEO at Connor Gaidos for

(14:43):
personally delivering the egg, a clearly amused Hilton wrote in
a Facebook post, and purchased a real life trucking company
in Texas to make the supposed deliveries of nuclear reactors
look more realistic. The company's tractor trailers have been making
their regular deliveries. Now they have the Inron logo and
the phrase nuclear you can Trust printed in giant letters

(15:05):
on the sides, leading to dozens of confused and or
amused social media posts featuring pictures of the trucks in
the wild, For instance, am I tripping? What is this
possibly transporting? There was a second part of the plan.
Gatos became convinced Enron could evolve from a satirical company
into a real one, and so about a month after

(15:27):
the December launch, he and Macendo found themselves at a
dinner meeting with two longtime energy executives, Gregory Ferrero and
Dj with about starting what's known as a retail energy
provider or REP in Texas, where state law allows companies
to buy power from producers and resell it to consumers.
Withy says the idea was proposed by an investor whom

(15:50):
he declines to name, but adds that he initially found
the whole thing offensive. If you guys are just using
this as a joke or some internet thing. I'm not
interested with the recalls, saying, But over the course of
the meal he came around I press withy to explain
how exactly this would work. The whole joke of Nuclear
you Can Trust is that there isn't a less trustworthy

(16:12):
company than Inron. The idea that Texas consumers will laugh
at the joke and then decide to trust the birds
aren't real guys with their power needs seems crazy. You mean,
crazier than a talking gecko that can save you fifteen
percent on your auto insurance with he asks. He notes
that even though deregulation has led to the formation of
hundreds of raps, most electricity consumers rarely change providers. The

(16:37):
challenge as a rep is to break some of those
loyal customers away with he says, to get in front
of them and then make your pitch. That is twenty
first century marketing. With the's definition of marketing, seems to
suggest that satirical stunts might be indistinguishable from whatever they're satirizing,
at least on social media. This concept, which in Internet

(16:59):
forum culture is sometimes called pose law, is undoubtedly true
and also somewhat depressing. In our first interview in Fayetteville,
Gato seemed to perfectly parody tech bro Hubris. He insisted
that the inraw nuclear reactor was real in theory, and
that we have a team of people that are developing

(17:19):
nuclear reactors to help the president solve the energy crisis.
He encouraged me to speak with the Eggs purported inventor
Daniel Wong, who refused to disclose the makeup of the
research team, his past experience, or pretty much anything else
concrete about the project. I have to remember my NDA's,
Wong said, though he did mention a recent appearance as

(17:41):
an uncredited extra on Law and Order Special Victims Unit.
This was funny, though. I couldn't help but notice how
Gato's nuclear pitch was basically identical to hundreds of pitches
I've heard from real life tech CEOs and investors, insofar
as it consisted of a flashy event, a collection of
wild claims, and absolutely zero useful details. Big venture capital

(18:05):
backed companies have been built on less frauds too. In February,
as members of Trump's inner circle frantically launched so called
meme coins, Gato's posted a video suggesting a new Enron
token would power the company's resurrection. People forget that the
Titanic was a beautiful ship, he said, it doesn't deserve

(18:26):
to be rotting away at the bottom of the ocean.
If you attempted to buy the token, a disclaimer warned
that the project represents First Amendment protected parity and performance
art and not an investment, adding that references to fuel
and energy were purely metaphorical and refer solely to motivational
or inspirational energy. On one hand, there was nothing surprising

(18:48):
about any of this, since it's basically impossible to be
a Silicon Valley huckster without having a cryptotoken. These days,
no tech culture parody would be complete without its own.
But then Enron's token actually went up for sale and
briefly reached a market capitalization of around seven hundred million dollars.
It crashed in the hours that followed after two early

(19:11):
investors sold off their shares. Enron said these traders, who
netted about nine million dollars in profit, were snipers, outside speculators,
having nothing to do with Ron, and the company later
posted an eighty minute video of Gatos undergoing a polygraph
examination to make the same point. The token launch led
to something resembling an actual scandal. A trade publication Defiant

(19:35):
described the Inron meme coin as predatory, and the investigative
reporter Stephen Findyson, better known by his YouTube handle coffee Zilla,
pointed out that Gatos's response to the controversy, in which
he claimed to be a victim rather than acknowledge his
own complicity in creating a dubious asset, was similar to
the one deployed by the boosters of other questionable meme coins,

(19:57):
such as the Hawk token promoted by Hayley Wan Welch
of the Hawk Tua meme google the phrase if you must.
Welch has said she only served as a spokesperson for
the token, she hasn't been accused of wrongdoing. I thought
it was really cringe, Fandyson said in a video posted
shortly after the Enron token was released, noting it was

(20:19):
kind of disappointing to see the guy behind a legitimately
funny project do what is not actually that funny. He
noted that ironic scams are still scams, though he did
acknowledge there was irony here. If you can't trust Enron,
he said in mock rage, who can you trust? He
recorded the video wearing a hoodie he'd bought from Gato's

(20:41):
online store. Satire, of course, isn't always ha ha funny,
And watching all this play out, I'd assumed that the
token launch, the crash, the polygraph, and even coffee Zilla's
reaction were part of a deliberate storyline. But when I
began reporting on the crypto token, several people familiar with

(21:01):
the inner workings of the project said it wasn't a joke.
The token launch had been a legitimate screw up that
led to a power struggle within the company and a
frantic scramble at damage control. These people, who requested anonymity
to avoid reprisals, say that Macindoe and Gados were pressured
into releasing the token by an Inron investor, an entertainment

(21:22):
entrepreneur named Craig Watson, and that Macindoe left the project
essentially in protest. Macindoe declined to comment. Many of the
token's early buyers, according to these people, were part of
the team Macindoe and Gados hired to orchestrate the prank.
According to the account of these sources, they were victims
of a reanimated version of the original Inron fraud. An

(21:45):
Inron spokesman says that Watson is not an investor but
an executive who helped Gaidos and Macindo raise funding, and
that the core Inron team were all aligned on launching
a coin. He blamed bad actors and noted that Ron
has been actively gathering evidence since the attack, and we'll
soon be filing a fullsome legal action against the perpetrators.

(22:07):
Up until this point, Gatos's manner with me had been
of the uber confident CEO, But when I brought up
Inron's crypto token a month later on a call, he
took a deep breath, then he broke character. He declined
to discuss the specifics of his relationship with Watson or
of Macendo's exit, but he didn't dispute the account I'd heard.

(22:28):
He said he'd raised money from outside investors to buy
the inrn dot com domain name, a six figure expense,
and because he thought the joke of Inron's rebranding would
be funny only if it were absolutely convincing, which meant
spending lots of money. We needed money because it was
a sort of barrier between us and doing the project
at the level we felt like it needed to be done,

(22:50):
he says, and then you just become what you're satirizing.
There was a second setback in early August, the staff
of the Public Utility Commission of Time Texas filed a
brief recommending that the state deny Inron's application. By attempting
to market potentially legitimate retail electric services alongside satire, Enron

(23:11):
has made it unnecessarily difficult for Texans to differentiate between
real information and humor, the brief said, citing the fake
earnings call and the nuclear reactor. The public interest is
not served by forcing consumers to meticulously sort fact from
fiction when selecting an electric provider. Enron disputed the rationale,

(23:31):
but responded to the ruling by pulling its application on
August twenty second, while promising to find another way to
enter the energy market for real. Shortly after doing so,
the company and its erstwhile partners Withy and Ferrero cut
ties WITHI, declined to comment further. Ferrero didn't respond to
a request for comment. Gato seems unsure of what's next.

(23:53):
When I think back on the way I was thinking
about Enron three or four years ago. It was driven
by the desire to poke fund and turn a mirror
around on the state of corporate America and the institutions
that have been our overlords for a long time. He says,
that's where I really thought Inron could have. He pauses
and corrects himself. I think Inron can have a generational

(24:15):
impact on the way that we view corporations and on
marketing and branding, entertainment, whatever. Sometimes that gets lost. Not
long after, a person familiar with the company told me
that Gatos was resigning but might stay involved within Ron
in some other capacity. Gatos says he's been thinking about
the economic changes he's been a part of during his

(24:37):
years as a social media prankster and performance artist. These
include the corrosive cultural effect of social media and the
potential job losses coming from the tech industry's unregulated embrace
of artificial intelligence. He hoped Inron could be a warning
about those things, and of course, if this is where
the company's second act ends, it will be