2020-02-01 Forbes Asia

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A T U R E S

FEBRUARY 20 20 FORBES ASIA

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BY LAUREN DEBTER PHOTOGRAPHS BY TIM PANNELL FOR FORBES

PATRICK BYRNE, FOUNDER AND CEO OF FORMER E-TAILING

GIANT OVERSTOCK.COM, RESIGNED LAST AUGUST, SAYING

HIS INVOLVEMENT AS AN INFORMANT IN THE INVESTIGATION

OF ACCUSED RUSSIAN SPY MADE PERFORMING HIS DUTIES

IMPOSSIBLE. THAT’S NOT THE WHOLE STORY. THIS IS.

THE FALL OF

OVERSTOCK’S

MAD KING

FEATURES

t’s early May, and Patrick Byrne has just gotten off the phone with hip-hop artist

Akon and is roaming barefoot in his elegant three-room suite on the top floor of The

Jefferson hotel, a stone’s throw from Embassy Row in Washington, D.C.

He grabs a Diet Coke, a pack of gummy bears and some M&Ms from a minibar,

settles on a sofa and begins boasting about how the Senegalese-American celebrity

sought him out. “I hear he’s a musician. We share ambitions for Africa,” says Byrne, popping a gummy

bear into his mouth.

Byrne, who bought Overstock.com in 1999 and ran it for two decades, has always been a man

of many ambitions. High on his list: transforming the African continent and its 1.3 billion people

via blockchain. Like an infomercial for the nascent decentralized, distributed ledger technology that

underlies cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, he waxes poetic about a future in which corruption is wiped

out, people are freed from poverty, and developing nations can leapfrog ahead by putting government

functions like voting, property records and central banking on the blockchain. Characteristically low

on his priority list: the economic interests of the thousands of shareholders in his publicly traded

former e-tailing giant.

For the last several years, Byrne, 57, spent no fewer than 220 days a year on the road spreading

his blockchain gospel, even as Overstock was hemorrhaging cash. “Over the next five years, we can

change the world for 5 billion people,” says Byrne. “At least a billion. Maybe 5 billion.”

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