
Overstock Has Had a Wild Week - kgwgk
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-09-19/overstock-has-had-a-wild-week
======
airstrike
What an amazing read... this is absolutely wild. The whole South America angle
reminds me of the John McAfee saga...

Also, at this rate, we might as well have a bot that automatically submits
Matt Levine's column to HN!

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ImprovedSilence
I subscribe to the email versions of his articles. I highly recommend them,
entertaining, informative, and I feel he remains fairly neutral, which is a
welcome relief in this day and age.

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davidw
I like his writing, but there's something about it that's just too time
consuming, day to day. Maybe it's my own short attention span.

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ImprovedSilence
I’ve tried to cut out all the small nonsense (except HN of course...). And
that really leaves time for a small few longer reads a day, and I find it to
be much richer consumption overall. But then I’ve got 30+ tabs open that I’ll
probs never get to

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davidw
I could definitely see reading a weekly highlights, just that it's too much
for me every day. There's something about the writing style too that feels a
bit breezy at times.

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elliotec
I used to work at Overstock as an engineer. It was a wild ride. This guy is
explaining this situation better than any combination of people in that
company could ever muster up. Also, AMA, there are plenty of stories.

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52358
I did a software engineering internship at Overstock circa 2013-2014, and have
a couple interesting stories myself.

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.

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elliotec
It's not precisely true but that story comes from him and it's not too far
off.

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).

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csar
Matt Levine is a national treasure and he's at his best here. The WeWork post
below is hilarious too but my favorites are when he picks really obscure
topics and makes them both understandable and funny while adding some subtle
insights.

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toomuchtodo
Matt Levine is the only reason I have a subscription to Bloomberg. He does
great work.

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cpwright
You can get Money Stuff emailed to you for free. If they stop that, I will
have to break down and get Bloomberg news.

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mceachen
[http://link.mail.bloombergbusiness.com/join/4wm/moneystuff-s...](http://link.mail.bloombergbusiness.com/join/4wm/moneystuff-
signup?source=)

(found via his pinned profile tweet)

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Apofis
Awesome, thanks!

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biztos
Awesome! However:

> 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.

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cstejerean
I’m pretty sure this priest does not exist.

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reaperducer
Perhaps he means "priest" figuratively. Like how The Keepers of Lists were
visually portrayed as monks.

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raintrees
Byrne calls Buffet his Rabbi... Therefore someone else referred to as a Priest
seems less far-fetched, to me.

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nacs
Outline / readable: [https://outline.com/kr9djp](https://outline.com/kr9djp)

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reascenda
Just a heads up that you can get the column free if you subscribe to it as an
email newsletter.

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bduerst
Basically, Byrnes is looking like a duck, quacking like a duck, and swimming
like a duck. I can't see the SEC sitting this one out.

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?

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mrguyorama
I don't get how the author claims that removing the trade restriction on these
digital shares removes the market manipulation angle. The short squeeze
already happened! The market was already manipulated!

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bduerst
Right? That's precisely why I think the SEC is hiding in the duck blind,
watching Byrnes unravel and waiting for the right moment to pull the trigger.

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ivl
> I will say that the strategy of declaring a dividend in nontransferable
> magic beans to hose short sellers is, on its face, too easy. If this works,
> and if you can do it with the pure goal of messing with short sellers, then
> lots of companies would do it.

I think a fair number of CEOs would love to see this work.

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SkyMarshal
_> It may give you some comfort to know what I am doing with the capital
generated by the sale of my stock: after paying tens of millions in taxes
(after all, “We didn’t build that,” right?) by Friday the rest will be in
investments that are counter-cyclical to the economy: Gold, silver, and two
flavors of crypto. The gold and silver are stored outside of the United
States, in Switzerland, and within two weeks, will be scattered in other
locations that are even more outside of the reach of the Deep State, but are
places that are safe for me. 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 sits foot
in the West)._

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.

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legohead
Can someone explain why short sellers would bother a CEO? Is it an ego thing,
or does it actually hurt the company?

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seanhunter
Very frequently top executives get substantial portions of discretionary
compensation in the form of shares, restricted stock or options. So things
which depress the stock price affect them personally. This is said to help
create alignment between management and shareholders because management are
shareholders. Short sellers have a vested interest in the price going down
(they've backed that view with their cash by selling short after all) so their
incentives are diametrically opposed to this.

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.

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legohead
Thanks for the explanation!

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kick
"Also—totally separate from all of this—Byrne left Overstock unexpectedly last
month because he had dated and betrayed a Russian spy and wanted to make sure
everybody knew about it."

"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.

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ColanR
> 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?

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paul7986
His story is so strange yet look at his success is he really crazy, all that
is staged or its real?

Overall peculiar and fascinating.

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Animats
New York Post:

 _" 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.

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reviel
wow this was hilarious, great writer

