Another one of my Favorite Business and Financial Blogs blog maverick by Mark Cuban has an article Wall Street - Fact is stranger than fiction about Overstock.com and Patrick Byrne.
Quoting Cuban below...
Never before in the history of Wall Street has a single conference call mentioned the following topics:
Miscreants, an unnamed Sith Lord he hopes the feds will bury under a prison, gay bath houses, whether he is gay, does cocaine, both or neither, and an obligatory, not that there is anything wrong with that, phone taps, phone lines misdirected to Mexico, arrested reporters, payoffs, conspiracies, crooks, egomaniacs, fools, paranoia, which newspapers are shills and for who, payoffs, money laundering, his Irish temper, false identities, threats, intimidation, and private investigators. All in 61 minutes.
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In the interest of disclosure, I am short 10k shares of OSTK. I want to be short more, however the stock is impossible to borrow, the puts are expensive and it's hard to get any volume off and I don't know how to Naked Short a stock. If you or anyone you know has naked shorted a stock, or knows how or where I can,I would be curious to find out how it's done, so please feel free to add it as a comment below.
I am not sure that there is much to add. But it is certainly entertaining drama.
Update:
On Sunday, 14 August, Roddy Boyd of the New York Post wrote an article Byrne Flames Out (free registration required).
A spokesman for Overstock said that Byrne was committed to standing up for the company and "righting wrongs where he sees them." The presentations, the spokesman said, was not part of the long-range public relations strategy of the company. He said that Byrne, to his knowledge, is not currently under any psychiatric care and that he was sober when he gave the presentation.
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