Success Quote by Don Nickles

WorldCom is doing a lot of work here: not just as a corporate corpse, but as a cautionary prop hauled onto the Senate floor to make an argument feel inevitable. Don Nickles isn’t marveling at a spectacular flameout; he’s sketching a recognizable American pathology of the era - growth-as-proof, dealmaking-as-virtue, scale-as-morality - and then puncturing it with the blunt instrument of accounting reality.

The line is built on a politician’s favorite rhetorical move: concede the allure before you indict it. “They grew dramatically” lands like admiration, the kind of baseline respect markets and voters are trained to offer. Then he tightens the vise: “buying companies that were bigger than they were.” It’s a neat reversal that exposes how “growth” can be an optical illusion, a company using its paper value to swallow real assets. The final phrase, “off inflated stock,” is the tell. He’s not describing organic success; he’s describing a currency scam that looks legitimate until the price collapses.

The subtext is regulatory and moral at once. In the early-2000s shadow of Enron and WorldCom, Nickles is signaling that the problem isn’t just a few bad actors; it’s a system that rewards leverage, hype, and financial engineering until it doesn’t. “Biggest failure to date” also telegraphs a politics of urgency: if this is the worst so far, the next could be worse. It’s an argument for skepticism toward boom-time narratives - and for treating soaring stock as evidence to interrogate, not applause to deliver.