The bizarre world of Patrick Byrne's Overstock

[regic]

An article that is favorable to Byrne's crusade against Wall Street:

Wall Street's reaction was swift and vitriolic last August when Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne unveiled what he called the Miscreants Ball — an alleged conspiracy to drive down his company's stock.

Analysts and financial scribes hooted that he was being frivolous, erratic or even off the deep end. Others insisted that Byrne was the leader of the "tinfoil hat" brigade, or at least one of those "overeducated weirdos" looking for market windmills to tilt.

Flash forward nine months, and Byrne's claims aren't so quickly dismissed — and he is hardly alone in making them. Lawsuits from other companies have followed, and the Securities and Exchange Commission has begun its own investigations related to the practice Byrne hates most: manipulative, or naked, short selling.

full article: http://www.azstarnet.com/allheadlines/128899

[mandy]

Update on Byrne's Crusade:

A bill approved by the Utah Legislature is causing an angry revolt among Wall Street firms with Utah operations.

The measure cracks down on a stock trading practice defended by some as necessary for orderly markets and assailed by others as easily exploited for stock manipulation...

At issue is short selling...

Overstock.com Inc., a Utah Internet retailer, contends it has been a target of naked short selling: brokers’ sending IOUs to buyers when they can’t deliver shares borrowed earlier for short selling, then delivering the shares later after making a profit...

full article: http://www.journalstar.com/articles/2006...102726.txt

[Kristijntje]

Overstock's press page is linking to an article in the April issue of Connect magazine on Patrick Byrne. 

Byrne’s War
Overstock.com’s Patrick Byrne is On a Self-imposed Mission to Save Main Street from Wall Street

Recently he’s been misunderstood, maligned and generally mistreated on Wall Street and in the financial press, but that’s business as usual for Salt Lake City-based Overstock.com President Patrick Byrne, Ph.D. He’s faced criticism ever since using a renegade method to take his company public in 2002. Although the heat is turning up even higher for this maverick 43-year-old executive, he couldn't care less what anyone thinks — and this time, the gloves are on.

Plenty of people think Byrne is crazy because he is convinced there are criminals on Wall Street who are exploiting a loophole to gain great profits, but leaving gutted companies and depleted retirement accounts of everyday Americans in their wake...

full article: http://connect-utah.com/article.asp?r=1688&iid=43&sid=3

[Kristijntje]

Overstock's CEO added more to his library of accumulated posts on May 31st: Patrick's thoughts  on the Motley Fool, Business Week, "the Miscreant's Ball", and more.  A lot of reading material...

http://forums.auctions.overstock.com/viewtopic.php?t=12583&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0

[Kristijntje]

Video interview with Patrick Byrne:

Overstock.com's CEO Patrick Byrne, who shared his insight on the industry.

Bryne said he hears from sellers that one of the compelling aspects of the Overstock.com Auctions platform is that there are still margins there. Byrne also addressed his battle with Wall Street and why he felt he could not back down from the fight.

video: http://auctionbytes.tv/cgi-bin/video-manager/frame.pl?features&06202006a

[amy]

Patrick tells a story on the O boards.  I do have to give him credit for being very unMegWhitman-like

My Favorite Zen Story

Dear Honored Guest,

    In a remote village in Japan there lived a Zen master named Hakuin. He was known for his devotion to the pure and simple life of a monk.

    One day, a beautiful, unmarried girl in the village fish market was found to be with child. As it was a conservative village, the family was furious. The girl refused to say who the father was, but after much pressure, she finally admitted that the father was the master Hakuin...

full story: http://forums.auctions.overstock.com/vie...hp?t=13788

[Kristijntje]

Online slide show "The Dark Side of the Looking Glass" by Overstock's Patrick Byrne:

http://www.businessjive.com/nss/darkside.html

Press release with audio announcing slide show:

As a key tactic in his battle against illegal stock market manipulators, in January of 2006, Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne wrote and narrated an educational online presentation. Recently that presentation was downloaded for the 250,000th time.

full press release:: http://www.prweb.com/releases/businessji...418915.htm

Patrick Byrne tells a story on the Overstock forums on August 1st:

hannibal
Report
Joined: 24 Sep 2004
Posts: 9


PostPosted: Tue Aug 01, 2006 10:03 am
Post subject: Something Hinky This Way Comes

Dear Esteemed Guest,

      You may know of my battle with Wall Street. I decided to write you about it.

      For five years whispers of an urban myth have held that certain hedge funds use an illegal trading technique to loot the stock market. If true, it means that the savings Americans put in the market are secretly being stolen (while Wall Street hires actors to go on TV to say how safe it is to put more of your money there), while some American firms are being destroyed. Target companies are thought to be small financial, high-tech, or biotech firms researching cures for cancer, diabetes, and other diseases.

      It sounds like a Hollywood thriller, but two years ago strangers across the USA who had been wiped out financially began contacting me to ask that I get involved in this issue. I did, and became convinced something hinky was indeed going on. How bad is it? Economist and Former Undersecretary of Commerce Dr. Robert Shapiro calculates that a thousand firms have been destroyed and hundreds of billions of dollars (and perhaps a trillion) looted. If so, this "urban myth" is the financial crime of the century...

full post: http://forums.auctions.overstock.com/vie...hp?t=14196

[mandy]

No one has fought a more bitter campaign against hedge funds and stock market speculators than Overstock.com’s embattled founder and chief executive, Patrick Byrne.
    Now he tells the Herald that he is willing to consider yanking his company from the stock market altogether through a management buyout.

    Potential deal size: well over half a billion dollars.
    “Management is certainly reviewing all such options open to us,” he said. “If the right . . . fund or buyout firm came along and wanted to be our partner, it is something we would look at.”

    Byrne, family and friends already own two-thirds of the shares.

full article: http://business.bostonherald.com/busines...eid=155918

[mandy]

Dear Reader,

You may know of my efforts to expose a crime that I believe is taking place on an enormous scale against millions of American workers, retirees, and savers, a crime from which a tiny segment within the hedge fund community is benefiting, and that is taking place in under the noses of our financial media. At the heart of the scandal is an obscure but in some ways mammoth corporation called, "DTCC."

The Party Line response has been to spin my efforts as just those of a CEO mad about his stock (though I started this while the stock was going up). Yet since I began my efforts a tremendous amount of data has come to light, and numerous economists, financial experts, and whistleblowers have come forward, confirming many of my claims. The story is cracking into the mainstream. Last April a Bloomberg expose by Bob Drummond detailed how counterfeit shares flooding our financial system have made a hoax out of corporate elections. In September Drummond/Bloomberg followed up describing the effects of these manipulations on hundreds of companies. Now, the current (February 12) issue of Forbes has two stories (by Liz Moyer and Nathan Vardi) that confirm claims which two years ago sounded absurd: that there is a mechanism in place to destroy companies for profit, that hundreds have been taken down, and that Organized Crime is involved...

the entire thing is too long to post 
http://forums.auctions.overstock.com/vie...hp?t=16669

Patrick's answer to a Bloomberg reporter's question:

Q: BLOOMBERG: 1.At what point did it become a corporate strategy to attack company attackers aggressively?

A: PATRICK BYRNE: What I am doing is not “attacking," it is “exposing," but in any case, what should one do with "company attackers” (your term) and if they are “company attackers” why should they be uniquely permitted to atttack? 

[mandy]

Byrne is back with 3 new lengthy posts/essays:

The Empire Whines Back
http://forums.auctions.overstock.com/vie...hp?t=17669

A thing called, "the 1st Amendment"
http://forums.auctions.overstock.com/vie...hp?t=17642

Crazy Sam writes the most ironic email in history

Hey folks.

There is a fellow named Sam who, as he proudly points out, is a convicted felon (he is less proudly open about the fact that he ratted out some family members in order to save his own skin). He is not in prison now, and makes a "hobby" out of clogging message boards with deposition-style questions for and non sequitors about me, posted round-the-clock (see example below). The miscreants are running low on new cronies willing to join their group (the sane journalists have woken up to what is going on, and even let me know that they see it), so Sam is being promoted to the rarified ranks of Crony-in-Training (Herb had Sam on a few nights ago - now we see Herb quoting Sam in his stories, Sam quoting Herb, etc. etc.) Sam has been blasting me, our board, our lawyers etc. with more of the same, and, as he makes clear, government officials as well. He asked (at the bottom of the enclosed letter) that the following not be made public, but I think that his letter tonight, exhibiting as it does the highest ratio of claims to evidence, the purest falsehoods, and the least supported assumptions, that I can recall being packed into one of his missives, is too sweet to be kept private...

http://forums.auctions.overstock.com/vie...hp?t=17620

Topic related to Patrick's "Empire" and "1st Amendment" posts:
Whole Foods Sock Puppet Sows Wild Oats
http://community.tuliptools.com/index.ph...323.0.html