"I wasn't ever advised by Scott Sullivan of anything ever being wrong"
About this Quote
The brilliance of this line is how aggressively it refuses to be a line. Ebbers doesn’t defend WorldCom’s books; he defends his distance. In a scandal built on billions in accounting fraud, “I wasn’t ever advised” is a linguistic airbag: passive voice, doubled negatives, and temporal fog (“ever… anything ever”) designed to absorb impact without admitting motion.
The specific intent is courtroom-grade insulation. By naming Scott Sullivan, WorldCom’s CFO and the prosecution’s key bridge to the fraud, Ebbers narrows responsibility to one executive channel. The phrasing isn’t “Scott lied to me” or “Scott hid it”; it’s more surgical. It claims a failure of notification rather than a failure of oversight, recasting leadership as an inbox problem. If the warning never arrived, the duty to act never triggered. That’s the theory.
The subtext is a quiet wager on how power is perceived: CEOs are expected to be visionary, not forensic. Ebbers leans on that cultural script, implying that a chief executive can plausibly run a telecom empire while remaining untouched by the mechanics that make the numbers “work.” It’s also a reminder of how corporate language turns ethics into process. Wrongdoing isn’t denied; it’s reframed as information management.
Context makes it darker. WorldCom wasn’t a small miscommunication; it was one of the era’s defining collapses, the kind that torched pensions and faith in markets. Ebbers’ sentence performs the post-Enron playbook: not innocence, but non-receipt. In corporate catastrophe, the first defense is often not truth, but plausible silence.
The specific intent is courtroom-grade insulation. By naming Scott Sullivan, WorldCom’s CFO and the prosecution’s key bridge to the fraud, Ebbers narrows responsibility to one executive channel. The phrasing isn’t “Scott lied to me” or “Scott hid it”; it’s more surgical. It claims a failure of notification rather than a failure of oversight, recasting leadership as an inbox problem. If the warning never arrived, the duty to act never triggered. That’s the theory.
The subtext is a quiet wager on how power is perceived: CEOs are expected to be visionary, not forensic. Ebbers leans on that cultural script, implying that a chief executive can plausibly run a telecom empire while remaining untouched by the mechanics that make the numbers “work.” It’s also a reminder of how corporate language turns ethics into process. Wrongdoing isn’t denied; it’s reframed as information management.
Context makes it darker. WorldCom wasn’t a small miscommunication; it was one of the era’s defining collapses, the kind that torched pensions and faith in markets. Ebbers’ sentence performs the post-Enron playbook: not innocence, but non-receipt. In corporate catastrophe, the first defense is often not truth, but plausible silence.
Quote Details
| Topic | Honesty & Integrity |
|---|
More Quotes by Bernie
Add to List
