Although Gary Weiss has been on to him months, Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne admitted to “pulling a Mackey” last night, writing on the Overstock website that, like Whole Foods CEO John “Rahodeb” Mackey, he posted on company-related message boards pseudonymously.
Byrne’s admission comes in response to this New York Times article, where he told reporters that unlike Mackey, “he never hides his true identity and always signs his name when he posts under his online handle, ‘Hannibal.’” But it appears that Byrne has occasionally let the sobriquet stand alone. Last night, Byrne wrote in an open letter to Times reporter Brad Stone,
Please provide a citation for this claim: “Mr. Byrne said that he never hides his true identity and always signs his name when he posts under his online handle, ‘Hannibal’”. Is it your claim that I used the words “always” and “never” in some message board post (and if so, please cite that post), or is it your claim that I stated this in our interview? I know for a fact that the claim is false as regards our interview, and believe it to be false with regard to any online posting, but I stand ready to be corrected.
Just how prevalent is this anonymous executive posting phenomena? If you frequent these boards, please share every suspicious nom de plum you come across. Be particularly wary of anagrammed names of an executive’s mother, sister, wife or daughter, famous military commanders and Republican presidents.
Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne Admits He Posted Under Pseudonyms [Gary Weiss]
Take 5 With Patrick [Overstock.com]
DealBreaker readers probably need no introduction to Overstock.com and the shenanigans of its officers. Frankly, we’ve left off talking about the faltering company because it had almost succeeded in making mockery impossible. What do you do when a CEO is complaining about “Sith Lords” and a company is bleeding board members like a European royal with a paper cut. It’s such a joke that there aren’t any more jokes to make.
In a recent open letter– seriously– to Eliot Spitzer and Andrew Cuomo, Gary Weiss goes to bat for Dick Grasso, claiming he deserved (and deserves) “every penny” of his compensation package, and that Cuomo should drop what Spitzer started. (Weiss also brags about how he “used to slam [Grasso]…in Business Week” before it was fashionable to do so and calls him a “bald little man,” which we think is kind of uncalled for and somewhat counterintuitive but won’t pass judgment on at this time). Weiss would also, apparently, like Cuomo to focus his attention on the securities arbitration system, pump and dump fraud, hedge funds, and naked short-selling conspiracy theorist CEOs. When he finally has him where he wants him, Weiss takes Cuomo to task for using the phrase “different time” twice–twice!– in a recent interview. Then he signs his name in letters cut out of magazines and newspapers, and encloses a picture of Cuomo’s bulldog Maude, who, suspiciously, has recently gone missing.*
