Before its bankruptcy on December 2, 2001, Enron employed approximately 20,600 staff and was a major electricity, natural gas, communications, and pulp and paper company, with claimed revenues of nearly $101 billion during 2000.

The low cost of natural gas and the cheap supply of labor during the Great Depression helped to fuel the company's early beginnings, doubling in size by 1932.

Under the leadership of CEO Robert Herring from 1967 to 1981, the company took advantage of the unregulated Texas natural gas market and the commodity surge in the early 1970s to become a dominant force in the energy industry.

Less than a month from this meeting, on March 7, 1986, a spokesman for HNG/InterNorth rescinded the planned Enteron proposal, as since its announcement the name had come under scrutiny for being the same as a medical term for the intestines.

Another major shift was the gradual transition of focus from a producer of energy to a company that acted more like an investment firm and sometimes a hedge fund, making profits off the margins of the products it traded.

[24] In 1998, Enron constructed a building in a rundown area of Las Vegas near E Sahara, right over the "backbone" of fiber optic cables providing service to technology companies nationwide.

[27] In January 2000, Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling announced to analysts that they were going to open trading for their own "high-speed fiber-optic networks that form the backbone for Internet traffic".

[29] Seeing the success in England, the company developed and diversified its assets worldwide under the name of Enron International (EI), headed by former HNG executive Rebecca Mark.

By 1994, EI's portfolio included assets in The Philippines, Australia, Guatemala, Germany, France, India, Argentina, the Caribbean, China, England, Colombia, Turkey, Bolivia, Brazil, Indonesia, Norway, Poland, and Japan.

[38] In 1993, Fastow began establishing numerous limited liability special-purpose entities, a common business practice in the energy industry.

[citation needed] The states of California, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island had already passed power deregulation laws by July 1996, the time of Enron's proposal to acquire Portland General Electric corporation.

Enron was hailed by many, including labor and the workforce, as an overall great company, praised for its large long-term pensions, benefits for its workers, and extremely effective management until the exposure of its corporate fraud.

Although the conviction was dismissed in 2005 by the Supreme Court, the damage to the Andersen name has prevented it from recovering or reviving itself as a viable business even on a limited scale.

Chief Financial Officer Andrew Fastow directed the team that created the off-books companies and manipulated the deals to provide himself, his family, and his friends with hundreds of millions of dollars in guaranteed revenue, at the expense of the corporation for which he worked and its stockholders.

[citation needed] In 1999, Enron initiated EnronOnline, an Internet-based trading operation, which was used by virtually every energy company in the United States.

Thus, Enron could record gains from what over time might turn out to be losses, as the company's fiscal health became secondary to manipulating its stock price during the so-called Tech boom.

An advancing price meant a continued infusion of investor capital on which debt-ridden Enron in large part subsisted (much like a financial "pyramid" or "Ponzi scheme").

Attempting to maintain the illusion, Skilling verbally attacked Wall Street analyst Richard Grubman,[57] who questioned Enron's unusual accounting practice during a recorded conference telephone call.

Though the comment was met with dismay and astonishment by press, Wall Street analysts and public,[34]: 325–6  it became an inside joke among many Enron employees, mocking Grubman for his perceived meddling rather than Skilling's offensiveness.

[68] In March 2001 an article by Bethany McLean appeared in Fortune magazine noting that no one understood how the company made money and questioning whether Enron stock was overvalued.

[79][80] These acts contributed to the need for rolling blackouts, which adversely affected many businesses dependent upon a reliable supply of electricity, and inconvenienced a large number of retail customers.

The callousness of the traders' attitude toward ratepayers was documented in an evidence tape of a conversation regarding the matter, and sarcastically referencing the confusion of retiree voters in Florida's Miami-Dade County in the November 2000, presidential election.

"The traders had been discussing the efforts of the Snohomish PUD in Northwestern Washington state to recover the massive overcharges that Enron had engineered.

Morgan Stanley, which had taken Enron's place in the lawsuit, fought the release of the documents that the PUD had sought to make its case, but were being withheld by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

[82] Enron traded in more than 30 different products, including oil and LNG transportation, broadband, principal investments, risk management for commodities, shipping / freight, streaming media, and water and wastewater.

The company's Teesside plant was one of the largest gas-fired power stations in the world, built and operated by Enron from 1989, and produced 3 percent of the United Kingdom's energy needs.

[34] Enron also had other investment projects in Europe, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Mexico, Jamaica, Venezuela, elsewhere in South America and across the Caribbean.

The plant operator was unable to find alternate customers for Dabhol power due to the absence of a free market in the regulated structure of utilities in India.

[103] Mid-year of 2002, British Gas (BG) completed the acquisition of EGEP's 30% share of the Panna-Mukta and Tapti fields for $350 million, a few months before Enron filed bankruptcy.

The replies alleged a potential cryptocurrency scam, but others pointed to the new terms of service including a clause explicitly stating that the content on the website was parody protected under the First Amendment.