Success Quote by Arthur Levitt

Levitt is skewering the late-90s/early-2000s market hallucination with a line that sounds like a riddle but lands like an indictment. “A thousand times nothing” isn’t just a cute turn of phrase; it’s a compressed autopsy of the era’s valuation logic, when hype, “pro forma” earnings, and story-stock momentum could masquerade as fundamentals. He’s borrowing the language of multiples to point out the punchline: you can’t responsibly apply precision math to an absence of substance. Multiply zero by any number and you still get zero. Investors weren’t merely fooled; they volunteered to be fooled.

The intent is quietly prosecutorial. Levitt, as a regulator and former SEC chair, isn’t letting corporate management take the whole fall. Enron and WorldCom were frauds, but he’s widening the blame to the ecosystem that rewarded them: analysts who smoothed numbers, institutions that chased quarterly juice, retail investors seduced by “new economy” narratives, and auditors who treated skepticism as bad for business. “Partially failures of investors” is a polite phrasing that still hits hard: democracy in markets means complicity is broadly distributed.

The subtext is a warning about incentive structures. If the market will pay venture-capital prices for mature-company opacity, executives will learn to manufacture opacity. Levitt is also defending the unfashionable idea that accounting and disclosure aren’t bureaucratic nuisances; they’re the only brakes on collective delusion. The line arrives in the Enron-era reckoning, when “trust the market” suddenly sounded like a punchline and the cost of believing in “nothing” got tallied in pensions.