We built Enron a company brain
We gave an AI 45,047 of Enron's emails, and it wrote 214 pages about the companies, regulators and banks Enron dealt with. Every fact cites the email it came from. When the mail shows a fact stopped being true, the page expires it on that date. No one edited a page or a fact.
The last two come from a held-out audit by a second AI; see how we checked it.
These are the most-discussed organizations in the corpus. Each page has a slider. Drag it and the page shows what was known on that date, with facts that were only true for a while expiring in front of you.
| Entity | What it was to Enron | Messages |
|---|---|---|
| FERC | The federal regulator overseeing much of Enron's business, where Enron pushed for RTOs and open transmission access, opposed California price caps, and sought to narrow refunds. | 1,501 |
| General Electric | General Electric was an Enron turbine supplier whose consent governed turbine contract assignments, a Dabhol co-investor, and in late 2001 a rumored rescuer and then bankruptcy creditor. | 1,499 |
| Pacific Gas and Electric | California's largest utility: a gas and power trading counterparty and retail-market incumbent whose 2001 Chapter 11 left Enron a $404 million creditor on its unsecured creditors' committee. | 773 |
| Dynegy | Houston rival and one of Enron's largest trading counterparties that agreed to acquire Enron in November 2001, then terminated the merger and claimed its Northern Natural Gas pipeline. | 593 |
| El Paso Corporation | A Houston competitor and top-ten Enron trading counterparty that bought Enron's Cogen interests, bid for other Enron assets, and restricted its trading with Enron in November 2001. | 478 |
| California Public Utilities Commission | California's electricity and gas regulator, which subpoenaed Enron's records from 2000, received its PX credit complaint, and suspended direct access in September 2001 over Enron's opposition. | 477 |
| Duke Energy | Duke Energy was an Enron rival and one of its largest trading counterparties, a co-defendant in California price-manipulation suits, a buyer of Enron assets, and a creditor in its bankruptcy. | 471 |
| California ISO | California's grid and spot-market operator: Enron's trading venue and counterparty, then its adversary over price caps and refund claims, and a debtor owing Enron tens of millions. | 460 |
| Dow Jones | Dow Jones supplied Enron's custom news clipping service, worked with it on power indexes, and through the Wall Street Journal published the October 2001 Fastow partnership stories. | 418 |
| Reliant Energy | Houston rival and top-ten trading counterparty that coordinated with Enron on California subpoenas and faced contempt alongside it, then limited and slowed its Enron trading in late 2001. | 400 |
Facts on these pages are sentences, each with a date and a source, rather than fields like headcount or revenue. Fields belong in a CRM or another system of record, and a brain like this one sits beside it, holding what changes too often or doesn't fit in a field. We describe the three kinds of company knowledge, and where each one lives, in The missing middle of company knowledge.
The pipeline proposed 57 narrow types and a person kept 54 of them. Almost all were kinds of organization, so we group these lists by a coarser class and keep the pipeline's own type as a tag on each entity.
Companies, regulators, law firms, banks, newspapers. What the company deals with.
209 pages · 929 entities found Enron's own business units, desks, platforms, systems and codenamed projects.
5 pages · 551 entities found The pipeline also found 78 products and platforms, 76 facilities and market points, and 49 events, listed without pages. Choosing which kinds of entity deserve a page is the setup a person does when configuring a company brain, and we made that choice before building any page. Every company's mail names things it doesn't need to track, in categories that are a bit of a mess: restaurants from catered events, airports from travel, movies mentioned in passing. Enron's mail is no different. The facilities include trading hubs, Enron Field, a parking garage and two tankers. The events mix business conferences with charity bike rides and Cirque du Soleil. The products mix software with an exchange, a statute and trade associations.
The right choice depends on the company. An event company should have pages for its events, a property manager for its facilities, and a hardware maker for its products. For Enron we gave pages to organizations named in at least 25 messages, and to the five most-discussed parts of Enron itself: three business units, a trading platform and a trading system. A real company brain wouldn't filter by count. A customer you signed today might have sent one or two emails, and you'd still want its page. The cutoff stands in for the judgment a person makes about what's worth keeping in the brain.
We're this+that. We made these pages with a prototype of something we're building.
We wanted a corpus anyone can check our work against. Enron's mail is public because the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) released it during its investigation, and Carnegie Mellon has maintained it since 2003. It's a large, free and widely used body of a real company's internal correspondence. The company's history is also settled, so a page claiming, for example, that Dynegy agreed to acquire Enron in November 2001 can be checked against the record rather than taken on trust.
The mail shows the story in pieces. For the whole of it, read The Smartest Guys in the Room by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, who covered Enron's rise and fall as senior writers at Fortune.