All I can say is "WOW!"
Wow indeed. Byrne is more or less following the doctrine of the best defense is a good offense. Unfortunately for him, his offensiveness has garnered too much attention, and back-fired.
There will always be people relatively easy to intimidate into silence, and others impossible to shut up. Like everything else Bryne has touched, his campaign to silence his critics is a net failure, even if some journalists are reluctant to write about him or his firm.
The Board of Directors, Overstock's "independent" auditors, and Overstock's CFO and former COO,have an awful lot of explaining to do, and "Patrick Byrne made me do it" is not going to help them at all.
Gary can you agree with Sam's comparing the 2006 Amazon 10-K to PB's claim that "At the beginning of our company history ... as far as we could tell in the industry, everybody recorded at ship date. Amazon ..."? How can the Amazon 2006 10-K contradict what PB was saying about what "everybody" was doing in 2002 (or whenever)?
Maybe PB was just making that up as he went along, but it would take a few hours of study to pull together the material to show that.
Oops. Cover blown. The 8-K of the Mullaney conversation is a classic. Gary can you comment on how having your questions published in an 8-k would influence you if you were writing for a weekly? That seems like the best way to discourage reporters from asking you questions. Am I wrong about that?
Publishing questions wouldn't discourage most reporters -- it would just make them think that the story subject had given away any scoops that may have been in the answers. After that they just wouldn't ask their questions in writing, at least not to that interview subject. But they'd still ask.
In Mullaney's case, one guesses he would have like to break the news of how unhinged Byrne's answers seemed, which was the scoop everyone in the media took from the matter when it broke. Beyond not getting that, Tim wouldn't have much reason to care.
It was only the PR guys and journalism professors who fell for the idea that Byrne was somehow effectively "fighting back" (against what?) by picking fights with the New York Post and BusinessWeek on the same day. The result for Byrne was that the stock fell right away (13% in a month), Joe Nocera began working on a NYT column about Byrne that ran three weeks later and ended up being a Pulitzer finalist, and Nocera apparently got Floyd Norris interested in Overstock. As a PR coup for Overstock, it wasn't. Having Floyd Norris thinking you are either a crook or a schnook is a bad thing for a public company. Not to mention Herb Greenberg, Jim Cramer, etc.
So no, if it were me, this wouldn't intimidate me at all. All Pat's tactics did was make the story more competitive and higher profile. The result is that the stock is down from about $27 to $10 since, with the benchmark index up 13% and well-run e-tailers like Amazon and Blue Nile up 40-65%.
In other words, Pat invited a brawl in the marketplace of ideas, and he lost. I mean, come on. The guy's reputation is in shreds, in a way even the Sith Lord call didn't accomplish.
Finally, the journalists have little reason to be intimidated by Pat because having him try to pick fights with you hasn't hurt anybody. Nocera nearly won a Pulitzer. Roddy Boyd moved to Fortune, a big step up from the New York Post. Jesse Eisinger took a big financial bump when he went to Portfolio. Bethany McLean is a big star. Usually, all that a spat like this does, if you are right, is make you more visible and mark you as the guy who got an important story right, first. I think Bethany gets that prize in this case.
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