Success Quote by Jeffrey Skilling

The sentence is corporate triumphalism with a hairline crack of confession running through it. Skilling frames Enron as an almost civic project: a "wholesale business" scaled into "one of the largest companies", then laundered into public good through the language of market evangelism. "Building new markets" and "opening markets for competition" reads like reformist heroics, the kind of Silicon Valley-adjacent rhetoric that treats deregulation as moral progress and complexity as virtue. It’s persuasive because it borrows the sheen of innovation while staying vague about the machinery that made it possible.

The most telling move is the quiet pivot from "we" to "that takes a personal toll". After the collective, impersonal force of empire-building, he suddenly claims intimacy and cost. The line functions as preemptive mitigation: yes, we remade the economy, and yes, it hurt us too. It invites sympathy without admitting culpability, substituting burnout for wrongdoing. In Skilling’s mouth, "toll" isn’t the price paid by employees whose pensions evaporated or by communities destabilized by energy-market manipulation; it’s the psychic burden of the architect.

Context matters: Enron’s rise depended on financial engineering, aggressive accounting, and a culture that prized winning over verifiable value. So the subtext behind "opening markets" is power - the ability to define the rules, monetize volatility, and call it competition. The sentence wants history to remember disruption, not devastation, and it almost works because it mimics the familiar American script where size equals significance and significance begs absolution.