Patrick M. Byrne

Patrick Michael Byrne (born November 29, 1962) is an American businessman and conspiracy theorist.

Byrne was born on November 29, 1962, in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

He grew up in Woodstock, Vermont and Hanover, New Hampshire.

He is the son of John J. Byrne, former chairman of Berkshire Hathaway's GEICO insurance subsidiary and White Mountains Insurance Group.

Byrne holds a certificate from Beijing Normal University, has a Bachelor of Arts degree in Chinese studies from Dartmouth College, a master's degree from King's College, Cambridge as a Marshall Scholar, and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Stanford University.

He said that the conspirators were part of a "Miscreants Ball," headed by a "Sith Lord," whom he refused to identify but said "he's one of the master criminals from the 1980s."

Byrne said the conspiracy included hedge funds, journalists, investigators, trial lawyers, the SEC, and Eliot Spitzer.

Fortune writer Bethany McLean said that Byrne had become a "hero to those who believe that short-sellers are the operators of Wall Street's ultimate black box, predators who destroy companies through innuendo, bullying, political connections—and sometimes through an illegal practice known as 'naked shorting.'" Byrne financed and largely wrote a full-page advertisement in The Washington Post which said "Naked short selling ... is literally stealing money from the widows, retirees, and other small investors."

Byrne was a teaching fellow at Stanford University from 1989 to 1991 and was manager of Blackhawk Investment Co. and Elissar, Inc. He served as chairman, president and CEO of Centricut, LLC, a manufacturer of industrial torches, then held the same three positions at Fechheimer Brothers, Inc., a Berkshire Hathaway company that manufactured uniforms for the police, firefighters, and the military.

His father was a friend of Warren Buffett, the leader of Berkshire Hathaway.

In 1999, Byrne launched Overstock.com after leading two smaller companies.

Byrne led Overstock as chief executive officer for two decades, from 1999 to 2019.

In 1999, after leading two smaller companies, Byrne was approached by the founder of D2-Discounts Direct with a request for operating capital.

The company had generated slightly more than $500,000 in revenue the previous year by liquidating excess furniture inventory online.

Byrne found the idea of online closeouts intriguing, and invested $7 million for a 60 percent equity stake in the company in the spring of 1999.

In September the same year he took over as CEO, and the following month the company was renamed Overstock.com.

In 2002, Byrne took Overstock public.

Early in his tenure he attracted public attention for a long-running legal battle against short sellers and "naked short selling."

Byrne initiated an IPO of Overstock.com in 2002, becoming one of the first companies to go public under the "Dutch auction" method, a system advanced by WR Hambrecht + Co to retain a greater share of capital within the company rather than going to the investment bank underwriters used in conventional public offerings.

Byrne has said that competing banks reacted against this, attempting to obstruct the success of the offering through negative reports and by shorting the company's stock.

When Google later in 2004 went public via a Dutch auction IPO, Byrne commented that Wall Street firms similarly pushed negative stories, but did not keep it from going forward successfully.

Four years after the OpenIPO, one official of Hambrecht, its now former co-CEO Clay Corbus was added to Overstock's board of directors.

As a part of his role, Byrne advocated for the use of blockchain technology, including cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin.

In 2004, Overstock spent several million dollars to establish an online auction platform to compete with eBay, but the project was not successful and shut down in 2011.

The company also launched, and then later closed, projects in real estate, travel booking, and auto sales.

Overstock employees, as well as Byrne's father, believed that Byrne's long-running campaign against short sellers, which began in 2005, distracted him from Overstock's core business.

The company had losses in some years, and modest profits in others.

Byrne's tenure was marked by a series of initiatives that were rolled out with much enthusiasm, but that were later abandoned or had disappointing outcomes.

In a conference call with analysts in August 2005, Byrne said that "there's been a plan since we were in our teens to destroy our stock, drive it down to $6–$10 ... and even a plan for how the company would then get whacked up."

In the late 2010s, Overstock built a new $100 million headquarters at the base of Utah's Wasatch Mountains, although several rounds of layoffs had left part of the complex empty.

In 2013, Byrne began to invest in cryptocurrency and blockchain, and Overstock became the first major retailer to accept Bitcoin as a form of payment.

He took an indefinite leave of absence from Overstock.com in April 2016 because of Hepatitis C complications, and he returned in July 2016 as CEO after his recovery.

Byrne shifted some of Overstock's balance sheet to support Tzero, a new digital stock exchange billed as a "blockchain version of Nasdaq; Tzero's initial coin offering in 2018 was largely unsuccessful. As Byrne's focus on the technology intensified in 2017 and 2018, Overstock incurred significant losses—$316 million over two years, more than twice the profits ever made by the company.

He eventually resigned as CEO in August 2019, following revelations that he had been in an intimate relationship with Russian agent (and later politician) Maria Butina.

Byrne then emerged as a leading figure in promoting conspiracy theories, including the "Deep State" conspiracy theory.

The company increasingly lost ground to other e-commerce retailers, especially Amazon and Wayfair; by the time of his resignation in 2019, Byrne had largely given up trying to compete with these larger rivals; he led, beginning in 2017, unsuccessful attempts to find a buyer for Overstock's retail business.

In 2020 and 2021, he repeatedly promoted unevidenced claims that Donald Trump had won the 2020 U.S. presidential election due to voter fraud.

He has also toured the United States in order to provide anti-vaccination stump speeches for COVID-19 conspiracy theorists.

He became notable for distributing and selling misinformation on various subject matters via websites, social media, books, and film.

He has also been noted for his conservative views on public education.