Enron began operations approximately 18 years ago, in July 1985. Huston Natural Gas merged with InterNorth, a natural gas company. After their merger, they decided to come up with a new name, Enron. Enron grew over those 18 years to become one of America's largest companies. A man named Kenneth Lay, an energy economist, became CEO of Enron. He was an optimistic man and very eager to do things in a new way. He built Enron into a huge corporation, and in just 9 years, Enron became the largest electricity distributor in the United States. Only 6 years later, in the summer of 2000, the stock reached an all-time high and sold for over $80 per share. Enron was doing great and everything you could see was perfect, but that was the problem, it was what you couldn't see that was about to propel Enron into the record books. Enron was in trouble because of something that almost every major company of the time this time was guilty of. They inflated their profits. Things weren't looking good for them at the end of 2001, so they made a joint decision and restated their profits for the past four years. If it had worked for them, they could have hidden millions of dollars in debt. This completely admitted that they had inflated their profits by hiding their debts in confusing partnership agreements. Enron couldn't keep up with its debt, so they did the only thing left to do, they filed for bankruptcy (Chapter 11). This company became one of the largest companies to file for bankruptcy in United States history. In just three months, their stock price fell from $95 to less than $1. No recent events have brought any of their problems to the fore. They were going through a difficult time and therefore decided to restate their funds from the last four years. When they did that, it showed huge differences in money from what they had published and what they had reworded. In fact, so much so that they were eventually forced to file for bankruptcy. They got themselves into trouble. If someone hadn't become suspicious after Skilling left, he probably could have gotten away with it for a few more years. But I think they would have been caught eventually. Many companies have experienced and are still experiencing what Enron experienced..