Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne overpaid at $0

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.