As a CPA who is obsessed with corporate fraud and the history of corporate fraud, specifically Enron, I had full body chills reading this article.

As a CPA who is obsessed with corporate fraud and the history of corporate fraud, specifically Enron, I had full body chills reading this article and I don't know why more people aren't talking about it. Eight months before Enron collapsed, the exact same observations were made about that company by Bethany McLean that are being made right now about Meta. It wasn't a financial bubble or bad leaders that took Enron down, it was speculative investments in a special purpose vehicle, and that's exactly what this article says is happening with Meta. These AI companies, Meta included, all together are spending $3 trillion on data centers. Those are still speculative investments. There has never been a definitive ROI on any of these investments. They are hoping that they will prove profitable. That risk should be reflected in financial statements, but for Meta it's not. That's because all that debt has been moved into a different company altogether, a special purpose vehicle being managed by Blue Owl Capital. Enron did the same thing right around the dot-com bubble. It was Jeff Skilling, it was Ken Lay, it was Lou Pai. They had this idea that they were going to sell energy over the internet. It was not profitable, they had a ton of losses, took on a ton of debt, but they hid that in a special purpose vehicle. In March of 2001, Bethany McLean, along with two women whistleblowers, were the first ones to out Enron for these practices and eight months later the company was completely bankrupt. And by the way, if you need a recap of Enron, we did an episode about it on the podcast. It's definitely the only comparison of Enron and Vanderpump Rules on the internet. If insiders and boosters who understand what a big deal this is cannot handle this news coming out, they will start selling stock and that could trigger a sell-off. The less valuable Meta stock is, the more they have to sell to meet these debt obligations and the price goes lower and lower. You lose confidence in the market and the whole thing bursts.