Includes index.

Our Values -- Lunch on a Silver Platter -- "Please Keep Making Us Millions" -- "We Were the Apostles" -- The First Prima Donna -- Guys with Spikes -- The Empress of Energy -- The 15 Percent Solution -- A Recipe for Disaster -- The Klieg-Light Syndrome -- The Hotel Kenneth-Lay-a -- Andy Fastow's Secrets -- The Big Enchilada -- "An Unnatural Act" -- The Beating Heart of Enron -- Everybody Loves Enron -- When Pigs Could Fly -- Gaming California -- Bandwidth Hog -- "Ask Why, Asshole" -- "I Want to Resign" -- The 45 Million Question -- "We Have No Cash!" -- Epilogue: Isn't Anybody Sorry?.

Until the Spring of 2001, The Houston energy giant Enron epitomized the triumph of the new economy. Feared by rivals, worshiped by investors, Enron seemingly could do no wrong. Its profits rose every quarter; its stock price surged ever upward; its leaders were hailed as visionaries. Then a young Fortune writer named Bethany McLean wrote an article posing a simple question -- How, exactly, does Enron make its money? -- and the company's house of cards began to collapse. Though other business scandals would follow, none has had the shattering effect of Enron's bankruptcy, which caused Americans to lose faith in a system that rewarded top insiders with millions of dollars while small investors, including many Enron employees, lost everything. Despite enormous media coverage of Enron, the definitive story of its astonishing rise and fall comes alive for the first time in this gripping narrative by McLean and her Fortune colleague Peter Elkind. Drawing on a wide range of private documents and well-placed sources, many of them exclusive, McLean and Elkind lead you behind closed doors and deep into Enron's past, to pierce the veil of secrecy that has surrounded the company's inner workings and corrupt culture.

The Smartest Guys in the Room is fundamentally a human drama -- of people drunk on their own success, people so ambitious, so certain of their own brilliance, so fueled by greed and hubris that they believed they could fool the world. The book explores the motives, thoughts, and secret fears of a fascinating array of characters. No matter how much (or how little) you already know about Enron, the revelations in The Smartest Guys in the Room will shock you. You'll witness the astonishing extent to which Enron's business was an illusion. You'll meet the enigmatic Enron executive who seemed interested in only two things: money and strip clubs. You'll learn the truth about the California power crisis. You'll see how much Wall Street knew about Enron's shenanigans and why the Street chose to look the other way. You'll learn the dirty secrets that Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, and J. P. Morgan Chase have kept out of the headlines to this day. Just as Watergate was the defining political story of our time, so Enron is the biggest business story of our time. And just as All the President's Men was the one Watergate book that gave readers the full story, with all the drama and nuance, The Smartest Guys in the Room is the one book you have to read to understand this amazing business saga.