Former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne Was Born With a High Net Worth

On Friday, the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 siege on the U.S. Capitol will hear from Trump supporter and former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne. Patrick Byrne’s net worth has been a topic of interest among political junkies awaiting his testimony.

The committee wants to hear from Byrne, who was at the Dec. 18, 2020, meeting with former President Donald Trump, former national security advisor Michael Flynn, and pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, the New York Times reports.

Byrne was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. His father, John J. Byrne, was a friend of billionaire Warren Buffett and a former chairman of Berkshire Hathaway’s GEICO subsidiary. In 1999, Byrne was named CEO of Overstock.com after he reportedly invested $7 million for a 60 percent share in the company.

After two decades at Overstock.com, Byrne resigned from the company after revealing that he had a romantic relationship with Maria Butina, a woman accused of being a Russian spy, the New York Times reported.

At the December 18 meeting, advisors allegedly proposed that Trump issue an executive order to have the military seize voting machines in states where Trump lost the vote, the Times reports. Before that meeting, Attorney General William Barr and former White House counsel Pat Cipollone dismissed the idea of widespread voter fraud in the November 2020 election and advised Trump to concede, the Times reports.

In a five-part blog post written by Byrne in February 2021 on his website, "Deep Capture," he details how he, Flynn, and Powell got into the Oval Office uninvited on Dec. 18 and talked with Trump about how he should challenge the election’s outcome.

“Sidney and Mike began walking the President through things from our perspective. In brief: there was a quick way to resolve this national crisis because he had power to act in ways he was not understanding,” Byrne wrote in the third part of the blog post. “...all he had to do was one small thing: direct a federal force (we suggested US Marshall Service + National Guard) to go to the six counties in question (the Problematic 6), and re-count (on livestream TV) the paper ballots that were held as fail-safe back-up.”

Byrne wrote that Trump responded by saying, “So Pat, on January 20, I could walk to Marine One and climb aboard and go have a really good life…. But this? Knowing I was cheated, that they rigged this election? How can I just walk away from that?”

Byrne and Flynn were at the rally Trump held at the White House on Jan. 6 before the melee broke out, and both were disappointed by the direction the event took, Byrne, wrote in the fourth installment of his blog. Byrne spoke at the event, which he says turned into more of a “pep rally” for Trump.

In the fifth and final “chapter” of Byrne’s blog, he talks about the storming of the Capitol and what happened in the days following.

“What happened on the afternoon of January 6 is the worst thing that could have happened for the Freedom Movement. Millions of people had descended on DC to rally in support of those standing up for the truth: our national election was rigged. However, in the course of their protest, Goons stormed the Capitol,” Byrne wrote.

Although Byrne believed that there was fraud in the 2020 Presidential election, he admitted in one of his blog posts that he didn’t vote for Trump in the 2016 election. He is one of the largest donors to both the Republican and Democratic parties in his home state of Utah.