Of all the brands you might expect to get a reboot, Enron is probably toward the bottom of the list.
The energy company declared bankruptcy and closed in 2001 after executives were found to have committed widespread fraud. The name itself has since become a synonym for white-collar grift.
So many Houstonians were surprised earlier this week when Enron conducted a full-on media blitz – taking out a full-page ad in the Houston Chronicle, launching a new website, and sending out a press release about this new Enron.
John Lomax V, breaking news reporter for the Houston Chronicle, spoke to the Texas Standard about the details of Enron’s return.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: How did you learn about Enron’s apparent revival?
John Lomax V: I actually started hearing a little bit about it last week. The billboard went up sometime either last week or the week before. People were kind of talking about it.
And so I started looking around, and I saw that the billboard did seem to be Enron trying to come back. And so that was when I first heard about it.
Well, who’s behind this?
You know, right now it’s not exactly confirmed, but according to like the trademark filings and stuff like that, it appears to be owned by the College Company, which purchased the rights to the trademark in 2020 for about $275.
They advertise themselves as a marketing and brand company. But they have a pretty prolific history doing sort of gag type of satire, parody things. They also own the trademark to Birds Aren’t Real, which was sort of a gag conspiracy theory that came to prominence around the time of the pandemic.
And so one of the individuals who is a co-owner of the College Company, his name is Connor Gaydos; his name appears on a lot of the filing documents related to the Enron trademark.
So is this just a joke, or is there possibly a legitimate business behind all of this?
It’s hard to say. There have been rumblings of some sort of tie to cryptocurrency, and that’s backed up in the trademark filings. They specifically carve out one of the uses for the trademark as for cryptocurrency exchanges.
And, you know, if this is a joke and just purely a joke, it’s an expensive one because, you know, they’re taking out ads, they’re doing a media blitz and already they’re selling merch on their on their website that is not cheap – like a hat for $40 or something like that. And that could be the main business aspect here.
But there is also a cryptocurrency that has been traded over the past week or so that we’re not sure if it’s affiliated, but it’s just like $Enron. I don’t fully understand the crypto world, but you know, looking at a few graphs, you can see some movement.
But at this point, it’s hard to say. We’ve been promised a big announcement next week. But right now everything has been fairly cryptic.
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Does the patent and trademark paperwork shed any light on this venture’s future plans?
I mentioned the crypto stuff, so it seems like at the very least they are carving out this intellectual property for the potential use for some sort of cryptocurrency.
And they also carved out the trademark for towels and shirts and stuff like that. So it’s possible it could just be an ironic merch company, or it could be in some way tied to cryptocurrency, or both. Right now it’s just difficult to say.
There in Houston, what has been the reaction? That was such a painful chapter for so many people. And now, as you said, maybe it’s a business, but they’re playing off that name that has this kind of history.
You know, it’s ranged from people kind of in the finance sector sort of ironically celebrating the return of Enron. And then you have a lot of people who still feel the pain of losing their pensions, their investments, their retirement accounts and who are rightfully upset at the idea of somebody kind of coming in and inhabiting this husk of a kind of disgraced company that hurt so many people for what may very well just be a joke.
So it’s ranged a lot. I think, in a lot of ways, sort of a lot of the immediate pain from Enron has kind of faded from public consciousness. So it hasn’t been as much of a sort of rage reaction as I think some people would have expected, but those feelings are definitely still out there.
What will you be looking for in the near future as far as this company? You said there there could be an announcement next week.
Yeah, they have a countdown on their website that is currently at five days and 18 hours that is just kind of, you know, teasing something big.
A media rep from them told me that they’re going to have a big announcement in the energy sector. And then their Twitter account mentioned that they were going to be debuting their leadership team as well in the near future.
And so, you know, in terms of what exactly the announcement or the nature of the announcement will be, really hard to say at this point. But it seems like we will be getting more information sometime early next week.