Patrick Byrne's Latest Passion

Overstock.com chief executive/conspiracy theorist/journalist-taunter/short-and-analyst-suer/"miscreant"-blamer Patrick Byrne has a new passion! See if you can guess what it is. Here are your choices:

1. Overstock.com
2. World hunger
3. Wikipedia

"Overstock.com" is what they call in testing the "distractor" -- the obviously wrong answer to snare the unwary. No, Byrne's latest passion, while his money-losing company sinks deeper in the red and its stock tanks, is Wikipedia!

A loyal reader brings to my attention that that Bryne has begun devoting his obviously ample spare time to a website called Wikipedia Review, which takes potshots at the online encyclopedia.

Byrne's contributions to that worthy endeavor can be found here. Note the first post, with its lengthy rumination on Michael Steinhardt. A possible candidate for the long-missing Sith Lord, perhaps?

The last post was Oct. 4. He could have been doing a lot of things since then. The Internet is a big place, after all.

What we do know is that running Overstock is clearly too boring for a man of his wide-ranging interests. My theory is that he simply can't figure out a way to turn the company around, and has given up.

Hey, he's not in the running for Worst CEO of the Year for nothing!

UPDATE: For more on the Baloney Brigade's assault on Wikipedia, led by our favorite CEO-demagogue, click here.

© 2006 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

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