Flashback, June 2001: Early Alarm Sounds About Enron

John Olson (pictured) is not a well-known name, but when he died a few weeks ago, this retired energy analyst was remembered in obituaries for his warning 25 years ago this month about one hot stock—which the object of his skepticism tried to tamp down.

Too bad that others didn’t perform proper due diligence on Enron, which six months later collapsed, in the largest bankruptcy filing to that point in U.S. corporate history.

The initial outsized expectations about Enron’s stock reminded me of a phrase coined by the otherwise colorless former Fed chair Alan Greenspan (who also died this month): “irrational exuberance.” Though Greenspan was discussing speculative market bubbles as a group, I think it applies just as much, maybe even more so, to individual stocks today.

Take a bow, Elon Musk.

You heard about that guy, right? World’s richest person. World’s first trillionaire, courtesy of a very generous compensation plan approved by shareholders of his company, Tesla.

More about him in a minute. But first, a refresher on Enron:

Through much of the Nineties, Enron was a Wall Street darling for advancing from a natural-gas provider to an energy-trading colossus. It reported incredible returns, reaching $90.75 per share on August 23, 2000 with a market capitalization of more than $70 billion, making it the seventh-largest publicly traded corporation in the U.S.

Who wouldn’t want to invest after a management guru like Gary Hamel had praised it for creating “a capacity for perpetual innovation” with an organization consisting of “potential revolutionaries”? Even pundits across the political spectrum like Bill Kristol and Paul Krugman took fees to serve on the company’s advisory committee.

Wall Street was particularly enamored of Enron head Kenneth Lay, a corporate leader used to being listened to. That respect derived not only from the eye-popping numbers he produced but from his cozy relationship with George W. Bush, a rising politico so grateful for the $122,500 contributed to his Texas gubernatorial campaigns that he nicknamed the gray-haired businessman “Kenny Boy.”

In March 2001, Lay and his successor as Enron president, Jeffrey Skilling, were annoyed when a young financial journalist, Bethany McLean, wondering how the company made its money, asked, in a Fortune Magazine article, if Enron was overpriced.

But they really grew incensed when Olson—a local analyst with long experience monitoring the energy industry—told U.S. News and World Report three months later that Enron was "not very forthcoming about how they make their money" and said no "analyst worth his salt . . . can seriously analyze Enron."

Olson chuckled over a misspelled handwritten note that Lay dashed off to his boss in the wake of that interview. The analyst’s equanimity was justified: other observers were soon pursuing the hard questions that he and MacLean had posed about Enron’s operations.

By year’s end, it had all unraveled in a massive bankruptcy and corporate scandal. In May 2006, Lay and Skilling were convicted of fraud and conspiracy charges.

So now you may be wondering, how could Lay possibly relate to Elon Musk?

Some of you reading this might see my eyebrow lifted derisively in his direction because of my distaste for his involvement with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) at the behest of Donald Trump.

Or you might argue that, unlike Enron, Musk built something that can be seen—rockets, an AI startup fueling data centers, and, through Tesla, the EV, the most significant contribution to the American auto industry since Henry Ford’s assembly line.

You can even accept (as analyst Jeff Sommer does here, before swatting it down) that Tesla can build a successful colony on Mars and reap a bonanza from its military contracts.

But there’s a simpler yardstick for measuring how close Musk comes to the now-infamous Kenneth Lay: What did his prior financial reports promise investors, and did he achieve those goals?

That’s where matters become slippery. A New York Times analysis from earlier this month found that Musk was late or did not deliver on his company deadlines roughly 35 percent of the time. In 33 percent of his more than 600 claims, his companies did not provide a public update—or the plans were too vague to know if he succeeded.

And five years ago, Consumer Reports compiled a telling timeline of his continuous claims that Tesla models would shortly become fully autonomous, along with deaths of people who accepted these assurances that turned out to be—well, let’s just say premature.

In other words, if Musk were a musical, it would be Promises, Promises.

Unlike with Enron, nobody has yet proven that Tesla’s accounting practices are fraudulent. But it would be enormously difficult to decipher even if anyone tried to do so. Now with Vanity Fair, Bethany MacLean has questioned the ethics and governance behind his complicated 2019 acquisition of Solar City.

Testifying before Congress in 2002, Olson cautioned that “It is axiomatic on Wall Street that if a stock price is rising arithmetically, management egos tend to rise exponentially.”

That was the case as Lay pressured editors and analysts for better press coverage, and maybe even more so with Musk. He was only half-joking when he said, while hosting Saturday Night Live in 2021, “To anyone I’ve offended, I reinvented electric cars and I’m sending people to Mars in a rocket ship. Did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?”

Put that together with his use of ketamine, a dissociative drug, and you’ll understand why in The Atlantic last year, Shayla Love wrote that Musk’s “cognitive and psychological health is of concern not only to shareholders of his companies’ stocks but to all Americans.”

One last resemblance between Lay and Musk: each backed a successful candidate who then followed through on the ballyhooed businessman’s policy prescriptions. Lay, for instance, influenced Bush’s gubernatorial policies on electricity deregulation, taxes and tort reform.

Musk’s Presidential beneficiary-patron has permitted him even more latitude. Past robber barons were content to bribe and sway officeholders, but in taking his position with DOGE, Musk joined the government, if briefly.

That takeover was so swift and audacious that observers could hardly rouse themselves to ask if self-interest might be the principal reason for his lightning strike against the agencies that regulated his enterprises. Were he alive today, Kenny Boy might be asking, “Why didn’t I think of that?”

Song Lyric of the Day (World Party, on ‘Avarice and Greed’)

“Avarice and greed are gonna drive you over the endless sea
They will leave you drifting in the shallows
Or drowning in the oceans of history.”—“Ship of Fools,” written by Welsh singer-songwriter Karl Wallinger (1957-2024) and performed by World Party on their Private Revolution CD (1987)

I have to tell you that when it came to this song, I was late to the party—World Party, that is. Since I didn’t have access to MTV in the Eighties, I didn’t see the video for this tune, and the local rock station that I had listened to for more than a decade had become less experimental and more frozen in a classic rock format that downplayed more experimental newer music.

But once in a blue moon in recent years I would hear this on my car radio, and the other day I listened to it again, only this time it struck me with full force. Nearly four decades after its release, Karl Wallinger’s dystopian vision feels more relevant than ever.

“The world is in such a state,” he said in a 2018 interview with Billboard upon release of a new video. “The situation is getting crazy, isn’t it? It’s so ridiculous, this whole situation, mind-blowingly unintelligible.”

Any rational observer could only admit that it’s gotten worse. The “avarice and greed” that Wallinger scored, along with sexual corruption (“Sodom”), lie at the heart of the mushrooming Jeffrey Epstein scandal.

And above all there is the specter of environmental catastrophe. Even the bipartisan agreement that once held sway on the necessity of saving outdoor spaces has vanished. As Stephen Lezac noted in a recent New York Times op-ed, with the rise of the MAGA movement, Donald Trump’s “inner circle consists almost exclusively of hyperonline MAGA ideologues, whose passion for American landscapes generally begins and ends at the golf course. The [Theodore] Roosevelt Republicans are in retreat. The indoor Republicans have arrived.”

Last year he worst of the tech tycoons, Elon Musk, severely hobbled the Environmental Protection Agency through his work at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Just as predictably, his cuts to the Forest Service left it about 38 percent behind its recent pace for forest-thinning, prescribed fire and other work to remove potential wildfire fuel, according to Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, an advocacy group.

“You will pay tomorrow,” Wallinger (who, sadly, died two years ago) promised the oblivious officers of the “Ship of Fools” of the Eighties. Sadly, today’s equivalent seems likely to capsize all of us in their tech Armageddon.

(The image accompanying this post, of World Party performing at The Basement in Columbus, Ohio, was taken on May 26, 2015, by Bob Mateljan.)

TV Quote of the Day (‘The Beverly Hillbillies,’ With Granny’s Bone to Pick with the Weather Bureau)

[Despite the U.S. Weather Bureau’s new satellite service predicting fair and clear skies, Granny insists that her beetles indicate rain.]

Justin Addison [played by John McGiver]: “Today, we no longer have to rely on such things as prognosticating beetles.”

Daisy Moses (aka Granny) [played by Irene Ryan]: “Don't you call my beetles whatever it is you just called them!”— The Beverly Hillbillies, Season 2, Episode 25, “Granny Versus the Weather Bureau,” original air date Mar 25, 1964, teleplay by Paul Henning and Mark Tuttle, directed by Richard Whorf

Well, many people in my part of the Northeast think that ol’ Granny might be onto something with her disdain for the Weather Bureau. Sure, the agency (now known as the U.S. Weather Service) kept warning through the past week to expect a major storm. But their initial “prognostication” for my corner of Bergen County, NJ indicated 10-14 inches. Throughout last night, that prediction ended up nearly doubling.

Of course, the bureau had its escape clauses: it could depend on where and when it shifted to sleet. But the fact is, the snow totals kept ratcheting up the closer they got to the event.

Still, I suppose it could be worse. Maybe it has been, but those still left in the service (which is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) might be afraid to talk following the nearly 600 colleagues who left it through terminations, buyouts, and resignations pushed by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency last year.

By last summer, enough alarms were being raised about these reductions’ potential for slowing down warnings of extreme weather events that the service received permission to hire up to 450 meteorologists to restore some of those slots.

Only, as part of the rehiring process, applicants were asked to identify one or two of Trump’s executive orders “that are significant to you, and explain how you would help implement them if hired,” as well as how they would use their skills to improve government efficiency and effectiveness,” according to an August 2025 report by the Associated Press.

How much does anything of this relate to knowledge of meteorology? How many applicants were tempted to answer that it would help the President better anticipate major storms around his properties in Mar-a-Lago and Bedminster, NJ?

More than 60 years have passed since Granny faced off against the government’s weather forecasters, but we may be edging closer to her “prognosticating beetles” than we think.

TV Quote of the Day (‘30 Rock,’ Anticipating a Current Tech Bro)

Jack Donaghy [played by Alec Baldwin]: “Think like a robot. Be logical and dispassionate.”

Liz Lemon [played by Tina Fey]: “Are you okay?”

Jack: “See, that's exactly what I'm talking about. Human empathy. It's as useless as the Winter Olympics.” — 30 Rock, Season 4, Episode 4, “Audition Day,” original air date Nov. 5, 2009, teleplay by Tina Fey and Matt Hubbard, directed by Beth McCarthy-Miller

Empathy—or, as Elon Musk put it, in a podcast interview with Joe Rogan in late February, “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”

And, to answer Liz Lemon’s question above, about both Jack and Elon: No, they’re not okay. Their responses tell you why.

Quote of the Day (Robert Rubin, on ‘Outsiders Arriving in Washington’)

“I…recommend that outsiders arriving in Washington recognize how much they don't know about government and how different it can be from business. The best way to make a successful transition to the public sector is to do so with humility. The alternative, in many cases, is to have humility thrust upon you."—Former Treasury Secretary and Goldman Sachs co-senior partner Robert Rubin, “The Limits of ‘Running Government Like a Business,'” The Wall Street Journal, Jan. 18-19, 2025

You can put down at least one person from the private sector who failed to heed Rubin’s warning at the start of the second Trump administration: Elon Musk. 

The Tesla tycoon, having rode roughshod through the executive branch in his unelected, unconfirmed role at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—a “department” never authorized by Congress, by the way—now finds himself sidelined by the President he backed with all of his financial and social-media power, according to this post on the “Square” blog of the Binance Website.

Worse still, he is telling worried Tesla investors that he’s scaling back his involvement in DOGE to a day or two a week starting sometime in May. And not a moment too soon: his indiscriminate cost-cutting in service to Trump has caused such a backlash that the company’s revenue fell 9%, with auto revenue down 20%, and adjusted income plummeted 39%--increases steeper than forecast, according to Chris Isidore’s report for CNN. And profits have dropped a whopping 71% over the first three months of the year.

With any luck, the damage to Musk’s financial position will be permanent. Unfortunately, it is highly unlikely after all this time that Musk, any more than the President he supported so recklessly, has learned the “humility” that Rubin urged.

More tragically, Musk’s barbaric assault on institutions built over a century will result, in one way or another, damage to Americans in virtually every corner of their lives, from Social Security to veterans’ affair.

(The accompanying image of Robert Rubin was taken May 11, 2014, by Ralph Alswang.)

Quote of the Day (Shayla Love, on Elon Musk’s Ketamine Use)

“Ketamine is called a dissociative drug because during a high, which lasts about an hour, people might feel detached from their body, their emotions, or the passage of time. Frequent, heavy recreational use—say, several times a week—has been linked to cognitive effects that last beyond the high, including impaired memory, delusional thinking, superstitious beliefs, and a sense of specialness and importance. You can see why people might wonder about ketamine use from a man who is trying to usher in multi-planetary human life, who has barged into global politics and is attempting to reengineer the U.S. government. With [Elon] Musk’s new political power, his cognitive and psychological health is of concern not only to shareholders of his companies’ stocks but to all Americans. His late-night posts on X, mass emails to federal employees, and non sequiturs uttered on television have prompted even more questions about his drug use.”— Shayla Love, “What Ketamine Does to the Human Brain,” The Atlantic, Mar. 5, 2025

Okay, let’s see if Musk allows this post on X!

(The image accompanying this post, showing Elon Musk at the 2015 Tesla Motors Annual Meeting, was taken June 9, 2015 by Steve Jurvetson.)

Quote of the Day (Jacob Silverman, on the New ‘Authoritarian-Curious’ Tech Elite)

“The tech elite once limited themselves mostly to preaching crypto, artificial intelligence, and life extension to a public that mostly wants messaging apps, free health care, and cheap rent. But now, they seem to be possessed by a grievance-driven groupthink, intolerant of criticism. Living the cloistered, easy lives of the Burning Man set, microdosing on ego worship, this authoritarian-curious crew has helped frame the online discourse around—and lead the backlash against—criminal justice reform, urban homelessness, immigration policies, and transgender rights.”— American journalist and author Jacob Silverman, “The Tech Elite Swerve Right,” The New Republic, October 2024

The image accompanying this post, showing the tech entrepreneur, investor, engineer, and all-around nuisance Elon Musk, was taken July 13, 2018, by Duncan Hull and comes from The Royal Society.

Quote of the Day (Martin Luther King Jr., on Truths Forgotten About the Labor Movement)

“History is a great teacher. Now, everyone knows that the labor movement did not diminish the strength of the nation but enlarged it. By raising the living standards of millions, labor miraculously created a market for industry and lifted the whole nation to undreamed levels of production. Those who today attack labor forget these simple truths, but history remembers them.”—American civil-rights leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968), address to the AFL-CIO in Bal Harbour, FL, Dec. 11, 1961, in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., edited by James Melvin Washington (1986)

Martin Luther King’s leadership of the civil-rights movement hardly stopped with his successful campaigns against segregation and for voting rights. He recognized that a living wage was just as essential for African-Americans.

Nobody should forget that he reminded his audience at the AFL-CIO and the larger American public that unions, by raising wages, had created a mass market for industry in the postwar era.

His belief in the necessity of unions was so powerful that he was in Memphis to support striking sanitation workers when he was assassinated in April 1968.

One person today who has forgotten the “simple truths” that King identified 63 years ago—as well as that he lost his life while advocating for justice for striking workers—is Donald Trump. 

Then again, as a leader who sought to create coalitions for change through non-divisive rhetoric, Dr. King would have been appalled by Trump’s demagogic references these last few weeks to “black jobs.”

Even that doesn’t constitute a truly bizarre, unforced error by the GOP Presidential nominee. Instead, try his endorsement of firing striking workers in his recent X interview with Elon Musk—a mistake all the greater considering that union member votes may be more up for grabs than at any time since Labor Day was declared a federal holiday 140 years ago.

The GOP nominee’s observation unleashed widespread condemnation from union leaders. A typical denunciation— that Trump’s remarks constituted “economic terrorism”—came from Teamster head Sean O’Brien, who had addressed the Republican Convention only the month before.

The electronic Trump-Musk dialogue also prompted the United Auto Workers to file unfair labor practice charges against the GOP presidential nominee and the X impresario, alleging interference with workers who may want to exercise their right to join a union.

Even before the conversation between the tetchy ex-President and the tech billionaire, Trump had compiled a problematic labor-relations record dating back to his days in New York real estate, including a $1.4 million settlement for underpaying undocumented Polish workers who demolished the Bonwit Teller department store to make way for Trump Tower.

Without the Wagner Act of 1935—the so-called “Magna Carta” of organized labor—Trump would never have been called to account for that violation. 

Now, his loose remarks to Musk blatantly undercut another central tenet of this landmark legislation: that “no person shall be denied employment because of membership in or affiliation with a labor union."

That same legislation had previously benefited my father and maternal grandfather.

As Irish immigrants, their entry into the American middle class was eased by the benefits of union membership. When their way of life was threatened, it came via layoffs from bosses every bit as contemptuous (if not crude) as Trump.

If they were alive today, I’m sure they would have scoffed not just at Trump’s remarks but also his larger pretensions to being a working-class hero.

This Labor Day weekend, even with high-profile union victories in the last year involving the United Auto Workers and the Hollywood actors’ and writers’ strikes, it’s easy to forget that the position of most American workers remains tenuous.

But, if this country is serious about addressing income inequality and worker safety—and yes, as Dr. King noted, ensuring an adequate market able to pay for the products of American industry—then it will stop undercutting labor unions.

TV Quote of the Day (‘30 Rock,’ on Elites That Screw Up)

“What do we elites do when we screw up? We pretend it never happened and give ourselves a giant bonus.” —Jack Donaghy [played by Alec Baldwin] to Liz Lemon [played by Tina Fey] in 30 Rock, Season 3, Episode 8, “Flu Shot,” original air date Jan. 15, 2009, teleplay by Jon Pollack, directed by Don Scardino

This past week witnessed some interesting corollaries to what I call Donaghy’s Law:

*One tech mogul (whose surname rhymes with “Dusk”) who laid staggering debt on the social-media company he acquired, terminated half its workforce, and toyed with the idea of declaring bankruptcy—all within two weeks of taking control; 

*A second tech guru (whose surname rhymes with “Wahlberg”) who decided his social media company would transition to the metaverse and bet heavily that e-commerce revenues would continue to climb, saw earnings drop, told the 11,000 employees he was laying off that he would “take accountability” for his disastrous corporate change in direction—and then did no such thing;

*A third billionaire (whose surname rhymes with “Dump”), anxious to return to a political job he held until a few years ago, who informed an interviewer a few days ago, with a straight face, about the slate of candidates he’d endorsed: “If they win, I should get all the credit, and if they lose, I should not be blamed at all.” (“Did I really just hear that?” I thought to myself after the comment first aired.)

Whatever happened to the quaint notion of CEO responsibility?

Quote of the Day (Edward Niedermeyer, on the ‘Negligent and Sometimes Cruel Workplace’ of Elon Musk)

“For those of us who have followed Mr. Musk’s antics for some time, the latest twist in his bid for the social media platform [i.e., reevaluating his acquisition Twitter] is entirely in character. The way that he has managed and marketed his businesses from Tesla’s early days reveals a dysfunction behind the automaker’s veneer of technofuturism and past stock market successes. Often announcing new features without consultation with his team, he forces his employees to bridge the enormous gap between technological reality and his dreams. This disconnect fosters a negligent and sometimes cruel workplace, to disastrous effect.”— American automotive analyst and critic Edward Niedermeyer, “Elon Musk Masks Dysfunction With Hype,” The New York Times, June 5, 2022

Since Niedermeyer’s article was posted on the Web site of the Times four days ago, the owner of Tesla and Space X has engaged in additional “antics,” including:

*announcing that he plans to launch “thousands” of 394-ft.-tall rockets to Mars;

*demanding that Tesla employees currently working remotely should prepare to spend a minimum of 40hours a week back at the office, or resign;

*engaging in a bit of economic soothsaying by letting it out that he has a “super bad feeling” about the economy;

*informing employees that Tesla planned to lay off 10% of its workforce, then partially walking the statement back by saying that this only applied to “salaried employees,” and that the automaker is still hiring hourly workers.

These recent developments point to something that Niedermeyer only hints about when he explains that managers have taken to “deciding whether or not to take issues to Mr. Musk based on the shade of blond of his wife’s hair that day (with platinum shades being correlated with better moods).”

All of these multiple head-snapping mood swings beg the question of whether Musk is either a charismatic business and technological visionary or a megalomaniac. You can bet that not just his closest advisers, but also the shareholders in his ventures and even all of West Street, are sweating out the answer.

(The image accompanying this post, showing Elon Musk at the 2015 Tesla Motors Annual Meeting, was taken June 9, 2015 by Steve Jurvetson.)

TV Quote of the Day (‘Saturday Night Live,’ on ‘Elon Musk’s’ Acquisition Spree)

“What are you scared I’ll buy next? The Oscars?”—“Elon Musk” (played by Mikey Day), on fears that he’ll “make Twitter bad,” in the “Cold Open” skit for Saturday Night Live, Season 47, Episode 18, Apr. 16, 2022 

This Day in Scientific History (Death of Robert Goddard, Secretive Space Pioneer)

Aug. 10, 1945— Robert H. Goddard, a physicist who shook off academic bewilderment and even public derision to perfect the principles of rocketry that helped launch the Space Age, died at age 62 from throat cancer in Baltimore, Md.

The importance of Goddard to American aerospace can be summed up quickly enough. C.D.B. Bryan’s The National Air and Space Museum ranks the scientist’s March 1926 launch of the world's first flight of a liquid-propelled rocket as comparable to the Wrights’ maiden flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903. More than 200 patents led Goddard, along with Russian Konstantin Tsiolkovskiy and the German Hermann Oberth, to be considered among the three “fathers” of modern spaceflight. In 1959, the National Air and Space Administration (NASA) established the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, in his memory.

But, listed in such a fashion, the facts in the preceding paragraph are as inert as lines in a deadly high-school science text. Fundamentally, they tell us little to nothing about this pioneer.

They take on more significance—and more interest—when we understand the human being who achieved all this despite society’s misunderstanding and his own imperfections. That is when reading history is transformed, and that is what I’ll try to do in this short space.

Elon Musk’s Space X venture, for instance, would have been inconceivable without Goddard’s advances. (Indeed, another Musk concept, the futuristic “Hyperloop” transportation mode, owes much to another one Goddard’s speculations, contained in a 1905 paper that proposed traveling in a train-like vehicle inside a vacuum tube at very high speeds.)

The irony is that, while thousands around the world applauded in May as Space X carried humans once again, this time in a private commercial venture, into Earth's orbit—and as countless reporters and investors tracked the billionaire Musk’s every Tweet—the socially awkward Goddard was so appalled by ridicule directed towards him that he worked on many of his projects in utmost secrecy—and committed close associates to do likewise.

Introversion had so hamstrung Goddard at the start of his career that he almost gave up what would become his life’s work. Frail from a youthful bout with tuberculosis, he often proved preoccupied and absent-minded in chairing the physics and math departments at Clark University in Massachusetts. Early on, so few colleagues saw value in his work that in 1915, he had to look to the Smithsonian Institution for a lifeline to continue his research.

Not surprisingly, Goddard did not enjoy the instant name recognition that came to Wilbur and Orville Wright as aerospace pioneers. A few years after they made their breakthrough at Kitty Hawk, the brothers demonstrated their machine publicly. 

Unlike Goddard, they remained in the public eye because they formed a business and were ready to battle competitors in court for the credit for their invention. And unlike Goddard’s initial experiments with rockets, which carried neither human beings nor cargo, the ultimate purpose of the Wrights’ invention was easy for the human imagination to grasp: manned flight.

Yet Goddard differs from the Wrights in another sense that might make him more attractive to those fascinated by the lives of inventors: the deep devotion of a spouse. 

Neither Wilbur nor Orville ever married, and they depended crucially on their sister Katharine not only as a sounding board for their ideas but, in the case of Orville after a devastating injury, as virtually a nurse. (When she finally decided to marry, at age 52, Orville stopped speaking to her, only ending their estrangement two years later when she became fatally ill with pneumonia.)

In contrast, for all his shyness, Goddard was able to gain a wife who supported him personally and professionally. During a period in the 1930s, when he worked in Roswell, N.M., with a crew that never numbered more than seven people, Esther Goddard served as official photographer and was responsible for dousing fires caused by rocket exhausts.

Believing her husband to be a great man who never achieved his due in life, she worked unstintingly to ensure that he would in death. It wasn’t only that Esther filed more than three-fifths of the patents eventually credited to him after his demise, but that she mounted a herculean effort to document and promote his achievements. As recounted by biographer David A. Clary in Rocket Man: Robert H. Goddard and the Birth of the Space Age, this included:

*hiring two typists who helped transcribe her husband’s research—a voluminous collection of notes, photographs and photostats of his drawings that eventually amounted to 22 volumes;

*transcribing Robert’s diaries and lab notebooks (a task she was uniquely suited for, as she appears to have been one of the few who could decipher his frequently illegible scrawls);

*kick-started an authorized biography of her husband—then hired another biographer while the first suffered a nervous breakdown;

*helped compile her husband’s papers; and

*lectured extensively on Robert, attempting—successfully, as it turned out—to elevate him into what Clary calls “the Mount Rushmore of rocketry.”

Robert Goddard was fortunate that he had the love of Esther, as well as the support of three influential friends: Charles Greeley Abbot, Assistant Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, who helped him secure funds for his work; aviator Charles Lindbergh, who helped him secure grants from the Guggenheim Foundation; and philanthropist Harry Guggenheim, who not only provided Goddard with funding that amounted to $188,500 but helped bankroll Esther’s effort to preserve her husband’s memory.

But for them, he might have lived out his days in bitter disappointment. The media of the time did not help matters. His 1919 paper outlining his vision, “A Method for Reaching Extreme Altitudes,” led to the derisive nickname “Moon Man.” A New York Times editorial attacked him for lacking “the knowledge daily ladled out in high schools.” (The Gray Lady didn’t get around to a correction until 1969—after the launch of Apollo 11.) 

Even a particularly crucial breakthrough of Goddard’s in July 1929—a rocket that reached twice the altitude of his 1926 liquid-propelled launch—provoked snickers because of the noisy proceedings on his Aunt Effie’s remote farm in Auburn, Mass. (The next morning, one Worcester paper ran the headline, MOON ROCKET MISSES TARGET BY 238,799 ½ MILES.)

If man has been able to reach beyond his orbit, it is because figures like Goddard remained undeterred by such ignorant naysayers.