Overstock Has Had a Wild Week
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Also, at this rate, we might as well have a bot that automatically submits Matt Levine's column to HN!
Which means I think I need to work on my own attention span.
However while an intern there I heard a story that Patrick Byrne locked a team of engineers in a room and didn't let them out until they implemented bitcoin payments into Overstock. Do you happen to know if this story is true? I remember at the time that made Overstock one of the first bigger mainstream websites to support Bitcoin.
He loved talking about "throwing a bunch of engineers in a room for a couple days and shoving pizza under the door periodically" for that implementation, and they basically did do that, but it was nothing more intense than a normal crunch time overnighter or like a hackathon, and of course they could've gone home if they wanted to. I knew them and most of them were pretty stoked on the project so they kinda wanted to do that anyway, and got a hell of a bonus for it too (and promotions, lots of them).
Everyone was drinking and laughing or whatever, I think he estimated a handful people were there, and suddenly Patrick gets a notification on his phone and starts freaking out, saying someone was coming onto the property, specifically one of the "men in black" Feds you hear him refer to. Apparently he had people watching cameras around his property for any "suspicious activity," and there were reasons for him to fear for his life over it.
He pushes a button and his house shuts down like one of those movies where metal sheets go over all the windows, code red alarm, and literally a gun room opens up. He grabs a bunch of "Halo-style guns" (source's words) and passes them around to the other people in the room, whispering about hiding and waiting it out or they'll have to fight.
Hours went by without more incident other than everyone freaking out for a while and I think they started partying again or passing out.
People didn't used to believe me when I told them he was like this!
(found via his pinned profile tweet)
> The crypto is stored in the place where all crypto is stored: in mathematical mist, behind long keys held only in the memory of someone who is quite good at storing such things in memory (with paper backups in the hands of a priest I met 35 years ago who never sets foot in the West).
That could be pretty bad news for the priest, whose identity and whereabouts could surely be ascertained by a sufficiently motivated criminal actor, and it sounds like there are tens of millions of motivational units in play.
But unless he's been getting seriously technical, that's unlikely.
How soon until Overstock throws Byrnes under the bus too? They made the decision to make the dividend tradable day 1, after Byrnes left, as more sane leadership took control.
Also, Adam Neumann took out a ton of private loans using private We stock as collateral. What happens if the IPO busts?
His language and mannerisms remind me of a high functioning paranoid.
He also just doesn't strike me as a criminal operator, more of a lunatic.
I wonder what impact the mental capacity has on SEC charges?
I think a fair number of CEOs would love to see this work.
He's giving away way too much information here. Maybe it's all false, in which case that's sort of ok, but he really needs to learn how to just STFU.
Now, does the share price going down hurt a company? Somewhat, in that it's equity is less attractive so hiring people with options etc is going to be more expensive (people will value cash more) as will fundraising. Things like acquisitions become harder and more expensive too. But it honestly doesn't affect the company to the extent that would justify the obsessive attention that some CEOs seem to give it.
That all being said the classical view is that short sellers facilitate liquidity in a stock for when people want to buy and overall this should reduce volatility.
All of the above is assuming no market manipulation by the short seller (eg spreading malicious falsehoods about a company in an attempt to drive the share price down). This is something that is often alleged, but when you look at CEOs who say this, they frequently have the opposite tendency to positively spin things in order to send the stock price up.
"Really! Warren Buffett is somehow involved! Byrne blogged about it, on his blog, which is called DeepCapture.com."
(Quoted from his own blog post:) "The proximate cause of his decision to sell, however, came when we heard over the weekend that starting last Friday, the Deep State’s pets at the SEC began leaking something to their clients JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman (and here as citizens I bet you thought we were their clients, right? lol). They leaked that they were going to Bazoomba our digital dividend. Once that started getting back to me, I realized this: Whenever I have had any question about whether the SEC would or would not do something totally outrageous in order to hurt our company to benefit their clients on Wall Street, they never let me down: they always did the evil thing. So Pettway decided it was time to eject., especially because he knows I need the ammo to go to war against the Deep State."
I hope he gets the mental help he needs to get better.
It does sound weird, but on what basis can you or I claim to be better informed about that situation than he is?
Overall peculiar and fascinating.
"Under the dividend plan revealed July 30, a crypto-payment will be awarded to Overstock shareholders of record as of Sept. 23 on tZero, a blockchain-based trading platform operated by an affiliate of Overstock. The dividends, accessible only through a Dinosaur Financial Group brokerage account, aren’t payable until Nov. 15 and cannot be traded for six months afterward — or May 15, at the earliest."
Dinosaur Financial Group:
"Dinosaur Financial Group is a company of global capital markets experts who operate on the assumption that what you want to do can be done."
You can also read the tZero site, but it reads like every other weirdo ICO token company.