According to an 8-K recently filed with the SEC, Overstock.com (NASDAQ: OSTK) CEO Patrick Byrne will be taking home what looks like a pretty small pay package: A bonus of $0 for his work in 2007, and a salary of $0 for 2008. He will receive a restricted stock grant of 15,000 shares, but that's pretty reasonable.
But at a cost of nothing, Patrick Byrne is still a very, very expensive CEO for the company's shareholders. His postings on message boards and stalking of the company's critics may be creating very serious liabilities for the company, and he and Overstock are currently the subject of an SEC investigation.
And that's to say nothing of the fact that, operationally, Overstock.com has been nothing short of an abject failure. The company has lost enormous sums of money since its inception. The company's sales growth has stopped, and as Sam Antar has written on his blog, Byrne has established a track record of failing to deliver on his projections.
So Byrne might seem like a bargain at $0 per year, but it's a bargain in the same way that buying lead-tainted toys for 50% off is. Your children's safety and the well-being of a public company are too important to cut corners. In the past couple months, Overstock has lost hundreds of millions of dollars in market value.
The cost of having Patrick Byrne as your CEO isn't $0 after all.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
1-24-2008 @ 4:06PM
MessageFan said...
Pretty interesting OSTK observations - there are many outraged people blasting him on boards. Look at boardcentral.com - they scan major financial message boards out there and build stock popularity indexes, informative and useful. Some even say profitable information! Seems there is an entire subculture of message boards addicts!
1-17-2008 @ 10:55AM
Zoo said...
Isn't Sam Antar a convicted felon?
1-17-2008 @ 5:47PM
Dave said...
Zac, I have no problem with you speaking your personal opinions but to add credibility to Sam Antar's is just plain wrong. This blog accuses Byrne of "stalking" his critics and yet by Sam's own web site he has stalked Overstock.com for some time now and his allegations have yet to be proven anywhere but within his own web site.
I would also like to point out that sam is not as transparent as he claims either. In court documents recently obtained Sam has been financing Convicted Felon Barry Minkow to "stalk" Usana Health Sciences. The SEC just closed out an investigation making claims that Barry is WRONG in his assessments. Those documents can be found here:
http://investigatethesec.com/drupal-5.5/files/USANA.pdf
So...You may or may not like what Byrne is doing but they by far are not all that crazy Sam makes them out to be.