Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, “Part-Time Paradise.”
Former Enron CEO Ken Lay made out like a bandit, in a manner of speaking, when he sold his three Aspen houses and a land parcel in the wake of the energy giant’s bankruptcy. Lay sold a six-bedroom, six-bath house on more than three acres overlooking the Roaring Fork River, which he and his wife had used as their personal getaway, in February 2002, two months after he resigned his Enron post. The Lays had bought it for $1.9 million in 1991. They sold it for $10 million.
That turned out to be more than enough to make up for anything the Lays might have lost in 2003, when they sold two other Aspen houses that had apparently been used as guest quarters. One of them went for $5.5 million (the Lays paid $6.1 million), the other for $4.5 million (they paid $4.8 million). The lot, for which they paid $1.6 million, sold for $2.1 million.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Former Enron CEO took his money and ran.
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