The exclusive inside story of the fall of Overstock’s mad king, Patrick Byrne:
, a University of Michigan-trained mathematician and renowned insurance executive credited with turning around Geico in the mid-1970s and persuading Warren Buffett to invest in the auto insurer. Geico would eventually become one of the biggest contributors to Berkshire Hathaway’s bottom line, and Buffett once described Byrne’s father as “the Babe Ruth of insurance.” When Byrne was in middle school, he gravitated toward his father’s friends.
Nothing kept Byrne’s attention very long. In 1994, he led an investment into Centricut, a New Hampshire-based industrial torch-part manufacturer, and served briefly as CEO when the current management fell ill. In 1997, he left to run Berkshire Hathaway’s Fechheimer Brothers, which made uniforms for police, firemen and military.
Backed by top-tier venture capitalists, Wayfair has eclipsed Overstock.com in all respects, including losses incurred. Byrne began chasing crypto in late 2013 when he asked dozens of staffers to work over the holiday break to fast-track a bitcoin payment feature. The price of bitcoin had skyrocketed that year from about $13 to more than $1,000, and in January 2014, Overstock became the first major retailer to accept bitcoin as payment.
Byrne was also developing a securities lending platform as part of Tzero, which would connect asset-rich institutional investors like pension funds directly with short-sellers . Both parties stand to benefit from lower fees, plus would receive a blockchain-enabled digital locate receipt that proves the shares have actually changed hands. The service takes dead aim at banks like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, which currently sit in the middle of these transactions.
Overstock began exploring a sale of its retailing business in 2017, but to date no buyers have materialized. There was also Tzero’s troubled “initial coin offering,” which set out to raise $250 million but, ultimately as crypto prices were dropping, generated $105 million in August 2018 at an expense of $21.5 million to corporate parent Overstock. The offering is now being investigated by the SEC as part of a broader ICO crackdown.
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