Former employees describe a memory trick he likes to perform, in which he studies a deck of cards for a few minutes and then recites back the order of the cards, one by one. in philosophy from Stanford and regularly cites Friedrich Hayek, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the conservative economist Thomas Sowell in conversation. Byrne, an insurance magnate whom Warren Buffett, a family friend, once called “the Babe Ruth of insurance.” Patrick Byrne has a Ph.D. And in 2014 Overstock became the first major retailer to accept bitcoin for purchases.īyrne is the son of John J.
In 2004, a year before Amazon Prime was introduced, Byrne launched Overstock’s Club O membership program, which gave shoppers a year’s worth of shipping for a flat fee. In early 2000, years before Amazon and eBay popularized the practice known as “dropshipping,” Overstock, which sells furniture and household goods, allowed third-party venders to send items directly to customers through its Web site. Judd Bagley, a former Overstock executive who accompanied Byrne to the conference, recalled that, after the exchange, Byrne had “a little sparkle in his eye.”Īt the time, many people in the business world considered Byrne to be an almost clairvoyant entrepreneur.
Introducing herself as Maria Butina, she said that she was the president of a Russian gun-rights group. Standing a little apart from them was a young woman with thick red hair, a pale, wide face, and a Russian accent. After the talk, a line of people waited by the stage to speak to Byrne. It touched on several of his interests, including the kind of liberalism usually referred to as libertarianism, the flaws in the structure of the stock market which make it vulnerable to manipulation, and how a blockchain-based financial system could eliminate those flaws. Byrne’s talk, entitled “Turtles All the Way Down: How the Crypto-Revolution Solves Intractable Problems on Wall Street,” was a version of one he had given many times before. Other speakers included the venture capitalist Peter Thiel John Mackey, the chief executive officer of Whole Foods and the Presidential candidate Donald J. In July, 2015, Patrick Byrne, the founder of the online discount retailer Overstock, delivered a twenty-minute talk at FreedomFest, the annual libertarian conference in Las Vegas.
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