No he didn't.
Anyone who put their life savings in Enron stock instead of diversifying his portfolio is a moron who can only blame himself for his own stupidity.
Note to slow-on-the-uptake investors: the stock market is risky.
Lay himself was one of the largest individuals holders of Enron stock and he clearly wasn't trying to destroy the value of stock he owned.
He was greedy and he lied to his stockholders.
He deserved to go to prison and to forfeit the money he took.
But discussing him as if he were a murderer or a rapist when he was just a thief and a pretty lousy one at that is ridiculous hyperbole inspired more by the media spin on Lay than the actual facts of the case.
Agree that you shouldn't put all your money into your company's stock, but the employees were hung out to dry when Lay and his cohorts were dumping their stock at the end, but the employees were not allowed to sell theirs.
We will have to disagree on this one. Your view might be different if you were one of the stockholders who lost their life savings because of the lies that Ken Lay told. Fortunately, I am not one of them.
On behalf of the employees, may I request that you exempt them from the moron designation? They had no choice in the matter as far as their 401k was concerned. The entire employer contribution component was in Enron stock and they couldn't sell it until they were 50 years old even if they left the company. That created an retiremement portfolio oveweighted in Enron whether they liked it or not.
Dear wideawake,
"Note to slow-on-the-uptake investors: the stock market is risky."
Actually, the stock market is more volatile than risky. At least when you don't stupidly put all or most of your money in the shares of a single company.
The problem is that a lot of the shareholders who were left holding the bag weren't as much greedy as they were stupid. They didn't know any better. They figured, "Hey, the company's doing great, I have umpteen hundreds of thousands of dollars of stock, why would I invest in other investments that wouldn't do as well?"
Nonetheless, I don't think that Mr. Lay was responsible for their stupid behavior.
sitetest
"he was just a thief"
If Mr. Lay was "just a thief", then Adolph Hitler was "just a murderer."
It is the scale of Mr. Lay's thievery that sets him apart. Thousands of lives were affected.. and who knows the full effect this debacle will have in those lives.