Their employees were persuaded to invest their salaries and bonuses exclusively in Enron stock. Brilliant earnings reports were presented to investors. It didn't matter that those reports were wrong. To make matters worse, top officials misappropriated the profits. Of course, the public has been kept in the dark about interesting new accounting practices, not to mention flawed profit and loss reporting. The rolling blackouts that have compromised California's power grid are also not believed to have been artificially created to drive up Enron's stock price by causing a supply shortage (Peavler). By applying Jeffrey Silling's gas bank model to other commodities, Enron allowed itself to create demand for virtually anything: its futures contracts included “coal, paper, steel, water, and even weather (Thomas). By the end of 1996, revenues of the Enron Capital and Trade Resources division had grown from $2 billion to $7 billion. From two hundred employees they became two thousand. It was the largest trader of natural gas and electricity in the world