William studied the young man in front of him with sharp, searching eyes.
Bruce sat across from him, young, composed, and carrying the kind of confidence that did not need to be performed.
For a moment, William said nothing. He was clearly pulling up everything he knew from the file Heidrick & Struggles had given him.
Then he spoke.
"Can I ask what your plan is?"
Bruce's eyes narrowed slightly.
Telling an outsider, especially one who had not even signed on yet, about an active investment thesis was reckless by any normal standard. It exposed too much, too early.
Still, after thinking it through, Bruce gave a small nod.
At least for now, William Zhang was the best fit for what he needed. If he let this opportunity go and sent the headhunters back out to find someone else, he would lose time he did not want to lose.
So Bruce answered plainly.
"I'm going to short Enron."
He said it one word at a time, each one crisp and deliberate.
William's expression changed immediately.
"Enron? The Houston-based company?"
"That's right."
William took a slow breath, visibly absorbing it before he answered.
"You realize we're talking about the largest integrated natural gas and electric company in the world."
Bruce cut him off without hesitation.
"I also realize Fortune just ranked it seventh on the Global 500. I realize it's been named one of the hundred most innovative companies in America for six straight years. I realize its market cap is north of eighty billion dollars.
"And none of that means it's clean."
His tone was hard now.
Bruce knew exactly what Enron was. The French media empire Vivendi and Enron would become two of the biggest corporate scandal stories of the early twenty-first century. Enron collapsed. Vivendi survived only by selling assets and bleeding its way through the crisis.
Since he already knew that, there was no chance he was going to let an opportunity like Enron pass him by.
As for why Enron instead of Vivendi, the answer was simple.
Bruce wanted something Vivendi owned, so for now he had no interest in making an enemy there. Enron, on the other hand, was a cleaner short. If the company was going to implode anyway, then the risk-reward was better.
William leaned forward slightly.
"What makes you so sure Enron's rotten? Do you have internal information, or..."
He stopped himself.
A second later, he shook his head.
"Sorry. That's not a fair question."
As a finance professional, he knew exactly what he was asking for. If Bruce really had the kind of information that could support a trade like this, there was no world in which he would hand it to someone who had not even signed an employment agreement and a confidentiality package.
The fact that Bruce had named Enron at all was already a meaningful gesture.
Bruce smiled slightly and moved the conversation forward.
"With your track record, your relationships, and your reputation, how much leverage can you get us in the secondary market?"
William thought about it.
Then he gave him the answer.
"Ten times."
Bruce nodded.
"Ten times is more than enough."
In truth, even though he knew Enron was headed for disaster, ten times leverage was too aggressive for the way he wanted to structure the trade. This was going to be a long-duration short, not a quick hit. At that kind of leverage, the margin burden alone would become dangerous, and if the big banks or hedge funds decided to squeeze the trade for sport, the downside could be brutal.
Bruce's original target had been five times.
William already cleared that bar comfortably.
Bruce looked at him and laid it out.
"I'm putting up four hundred million dollars as the initial short capital. After that, I'll add at least sixty million a month. At five times leverage, that gives us a position north of three billion dollars.
"For any fund manager, controlling that kind of money is the opportunity of a career. If you join Phoenix, then when you retire, you won't be walking away quietly. You'll walk away with something real on your record. And if this plays out the way I think it will, you may leave behind more than a record. You may leave behind a name."
William felt the force of that.
Bruce was selling hard, but he was not wrong.
Very few fund managers ever got the chance to direct capital on that scale.
Even so, William kept his tone measured.
"You make a compelling case, Mr. Guo. But in this business, extraordinary upside usually comes attached to extraordinary risk. Are you really that certain Enron's stock is going to break?"
Bruce met his eyes.
"The market will answer that question soon enough. If you don't come to Phoenix, the answer won't matter much to you anyway."
William smiled faintly at that.
Then he fell silent.
Bruce left him alone.
There was no point crowding the moment.
The room went quiet for five or six minutes before William finally looked up again.
"I'm a few years from retirement," he said, "but I still have some curiosity left in me. So yes. I'm in."
His tone was firm now.
Bruce already understood the logic behind the decision.
For a fund manager, the chance to control three billion dollars was incredibly hard to turn down. And if Enron collapsed the way Bruce expected, William would make serious money on the performance participation alone. Professionally, financially, and reputationally, the upside was obvious.
Bruce stood and held out his hand.
"Within a year, you'll realize this was one of the smartest decisions you ever made."
William stood and took it.
"I look forward to finding out."
They shook once, clean and professional.
Wendy stepped forward immediately and placed the employment agreement and confidentiality documents on the table.
William reviewed both, found nothing buried in them, and signed.
Once he was done, he looked up with a faint smile.
"I suppose I should be calling you Mr. Guo now."
Bruce laughed.
"Then should I start calling you Old Zhang?"
William's smile widened.
"Old Zhang? I like that."
After a few lighter exchanges, Bruce got back to business.
"Wendy will get you the operating material we've gathered on Enron tomorrow. But reading files isn't enough. I need you back in New York immediately. Within one week at most, I want the core team in place: traders, intelligence analysts, security staff, the whole structure.
"On August 1, we enter the field."
There was something contagious in the way Bruce said it, all resolve, momentum, and forward pressure.
Even William, in his fifties, felt his pulse quicken a little.
"No problem," he said. "Leave it to me."
A lifetime on Wall Street had taught him where the real talent was and how to find it.
After that, Bruce shared part of the research his team had already gathered on Enron and talked it through with William.
They discussed the fact that senior Enron executives were publicly talking up the stock and hinting it could reach $130 a share, while privately selling their own positions.
They discussed the losses tied to overseas projects, including Enron's investment in Britain's Wessex Water and the company's massive power investment in India.
On the surface, Enron still looked untouchable. But if someone cared enough to dig, the information was there. Investigative firms could find it. Once those pieces landed in the hands of someone who knew what they were looking at, it was not hard to conclude that Enron was in far worse shape than the market understood.
The public had not caught on yet, not because Enron had hidden everything flawlessly, but because major institutions were helping keep the illusion alive.
Morgan. Citi. Bank of America. Arthur Andersen. Elite law firms. Too many powerful players were tied to Enron one way or another.
They needed time.
Time to unload stock.
Time to move risk onto someone else.
Time to flip the trade and short it themselves.
They just had not done it perfectly.
When Enron finally blew up, Arthur Andersen went down with it. WorldCom, another company tied to the same ecosystem of manipulation and accounting fraud, would collapse too. The scandal got so big that the U.S. government came down hard, and the resulting penalties and fallout shook both the financial system and the capital markets.
And in every major dislocation, there was opportunity.
Enron was one of the biggest.
After parting ways with William, Bruce took Wendy back to the Plaza Hotel.
He closed the suite door behind him, went into the bedroom, opened his laptop, and pulled up the development plan he had drafted earlier for the year 2000.
The file was encrypted.
Inside was a detailed roadmap, and at the end of the major sections were four red circles, each labeled with a separate strategic pillar.
The first was broad entertainment.
The second was the internet.
The third was finance.
The fourth was investment.
Those three industries, combined with the investment layer built around them, formed a closed loop from capital to operations and back again.
For now, every piece of it was still thin. Every pillar needed more time, more money, and far more effort before it could become something truly formidable.
But a skyscraper still started at ground level.
The foundation was already in place.
All that remained was to keep building upward.
More important, from Bruce's perspective, these were the three fields where his prior knowledge created the most leverage and where the present market put the fewest real constraints on him.
He looked at the calendar and the funding schedule again.
August was almost here.
He had done the groundwork.
He had laid the track.
Now it was time to start collecting the return.
His eyes sharpened as he reviewed the capital available to him.
The ABS issuance had brought in $350 million.
On top of that, he still had more than $60 million in royalty income sitting in his accounts before tax.
That was enough to support the first phase of the Enron short.
After that, his publishing flow would keep feeding the machine. He was bringing in around $30 million a month in royalties. By leaning on the charitable deduction rules that let him shield up to fifty percent of personal taxable income, he could push the actual tax drag down to around twenty percent of usable cash flow.
That meant roughly $24 million a month remained available.
And that was before layering in Thornbird.
Bruce still controlled Thornbird outright, which meant he could temporarily pull cash from the company when needed. Put those two streams together, and maintaining a monthly $60 million contribution was well within reach.
As for margin collateral, he had no reason to panic there either.
Future royalty flows from upcoming books could cover a large part of it. Bruce still held titles like The Da Vinci Code, Twilight, The Hunger Games, and The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, books he knew could sell in the tens of millions, some even far beyond that.
That kind of publishing pipeline meant one thing.
He was never going to run out of ammunition quietly.
And there were more cash engines coming.
The box office and ancillary revenue from Paranormal Activity.
The upcoming launch of Red Alert through Valve.
Those were not small projects. Those were high-margin assets capable of generating tens of millions, and in the right case much more.
Even in a worst-case scenario, if major institutions leaned against the Enron short and the royalty, film, or game income did not arrive fast enough, Bruce could still pledge his Thornbird equity to a bank and pull down emergency capital in the tens of millions.
So no, margin was not what worried him.
And in truth, he doubted Enron would have much chance to recover once he started leaning into the short in size. There might be temporary rebounds, sure. But as long as the stock did not break through his highest short level, he would not trigger a forced margin call cycle.
As for Matrix Pictures and film financing, that was simple.
Short-term commercial credit from the banks would cover it.
That was how Hollywood financed projects every day, and Bruce had no intention of pretending he was above the standard playbook.
Once he had run through the entire structure, tested the weak points, and prepared an answer for each one, Bruce finally closed the laptop.
Satisfied, he turned out the light and went to sleep.
Read up to 50 chapters ahead right now on Patreon! 🔥
patreon.com/YATOOOO