At least with Theranos, the was the media excuse of "new technologist isn't sharing the secrets of her device yet, but she showed enough to get big-names as investors and #37 on the Fortune list with as much revenue as MSFT is signed on to the tech to make it seem believable".
With Enron, they were very very good at obfuscating their scam. But it was the WSJ affiliate that was the first mover on Enron being fishy. A major short seller saw that article and shorted the stock, then turned a tip into another reporter. That reporter then pretty much started its downfall. It was, possibly, the best example of the media being the guardians against a scam since the internet started.
Enron was unlike Theranos, in that Enron was originally a legitimate company while Theranos was a scam from the beginning. Enron was a company that sold natural gas, a real product, that became a scam as they used increasingly dodgy accounting practices to push their stock ever higher. Theranos on the other hand never had a real product, and before Theranos even started Holmes was informed by experts (particularly Phyllis Gardner) that it would never work.
In the early days of Enron, an investigative journalist would have found a real gas trading company. But at no point in the history of Theranos would an investigative journalist worth their salt have found a real company.
All these are true. But I don't get how that relates to what I said.
Although, in the early days, a journalist wouldn't have found the gas trading. While Enron traded oil early on, they pretty much built the gas trading industry at the same time they were becoming more scammy.
With Enron, they were very very good at obfuscating their scam. But it was the WSJ affiliate that was the first mover on Enron being fishy. A major short seller saw that article and shorted the stock, then turned a tip into another reporter. That reporter then pretty much started its downfall. It was, possibly, the best example of the media being the guardians against a scam since the internet started.