Taking Stock of Overstock

Until Overstock began its price war with Amazon in late July, the companay and its CEO Patrick M. Byrne had kept a relatively low profile in the book business. But the Stanford Ph.D. and Marshall scholar at Cambridge University has popped up in other news this year. In January, he was arrested for carrying a concealed and loaded gun in a carry-on bag at Salt Lake City airport. On July 27 he appeared in a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal, where he “congratulated” Steven A. Cohen on the indictment of several employees of his SAC Capital Advisors hedge fund by federal prosecutors. Although Byrne has likened Cohen to a Sith Lord, a villain from Star Wars, in a phone interview with Publishers Weekly he reserved his animosity for a different villain—Amazon, which he labeled “the evil empire.”