The documentary is based on the best-selling book of the same title, co-written by Fortune magazine's Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind. In hindsight, Enron was a corporation devoted to maintaining a high share price at any cost. It moved on into other futures markets, even seriously considering "trading weather." At one point, we learn, its gambling traders lost the entire company in bad trades, and covered their losses by hiding the news and producing phony profit reports that drove the share price even higher. The corporation basically created a market in energy, gambled in it and manipulated it. What did Enron buy and sell, actually? Electricity? Natural gas? It was hard to say. well, take out the period and put a space between "y" and "a." Yass." These "companies" were named with a reckless hubris: One stood for "Maxwell Smart" and the other one. We're shown a schematic diagram tracing the movement of debt to such Enron entities. One Enron tactic was to create phony offshore corporate shells and move their losses to those companies, which were off the books. During a Q&A session with employees, Lay actually reads this question from the floor: "Are you on crack? If you are that might explain a lot of things. When a New York market analyst questions Enron's profit and loss statements during a conference call, Skilling can't answer and calls him an "a-hole " that causes bad buzz on the street. Skilling and Lay were less than circumspect at times. In an astonishing in-house video made for employees, Skilling stars in a skit that satirizes "HFV" accounting, which he explains stands for "Hypothetical Future Value." Little did employees suspect that was more or less what the company was counting on. One accounting tactic was called "mark to market," which meant if Enron began a venture that might make $50 million 10 years from now, it could claim the $50 million as current income. To keep its stock price climbing, Enron created good quarterly returns out of thin air.