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John J. Byrne
John J. Byrne
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
John Byrne
Born
July 11, 1932
Paterson, New Jersey, U.S.
Died
March 7, 2013 (aged 80)
Etna, New Hampshire, U.S.
Education
Rutgers University, New Brunswick (BA)
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (MA)
John J. Byrne (July 11, 1932 – March 7, 2013) was an American longtime insurance industry executive who was CEO of GEICO, White Mountains Insurance Group and Fireman's Fund. He also served as chairman of Overstock.com.[1]
Contents
As a young man, Byrne worked for his father, who owned a small insurance agency in Wildwood, New Jersey. He attended Rutgers University, where he graduated with a mathematics degree, and then worked as an actuarial assistant for Travelers Insurance Company. He then earned a master's degree in mathematics.[2]
After serving in the U.S. Air Force, Byrne worked as a reinsurance salesman for Lincoln National Life Insurance. He then moved to Travelers and was eventually promoted to executive vice president in charge of life insurance operations.[2]
After being passed over for president at Travelers in 1975, Byrne quit to become chief executive of GEICO, then a troubled Washington, D.C., auto insurer. GEICO sold insurance directly to low-risk drivers, but had begun to lose money after underwriting riskier drivers. The company's shares had declined and regulators wanted to shut it down.[2]
Supported by Warren Buffett[3] (who was a close watcher of GEICO and had named the company "The Security I Like Best" in 1951[4]), led a turnaround of GEICO; Byrne accomplished this by firing more than 1,500 employees, reducing the staff to fewer than 6,400, and closing 23 sales offices. GEICO also stopped writing policies in several states.[5] Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway eventually acquired the company, and Buffett has called Byrne the "Babe Ruth of insurance."[2]
In 1985, Byrne was invited to run the troubled Fireman's Fund, then a subsidiary of American Express. Fireman's had incurred $356 million in pretax losses in 1983 and 1984. Byrne vastly improved Fireman's financial performance and initiated a public offering of some of Fireman's shares in 1985. The company was sold to Allianz AG in 1991.[2] Byrne retained the Fireman's holding company, which he later renamed as White Mountains Insurance Group.[2][6]
Byrne's son Patrick M. Byrne bought a 60% interest in the Internet retailer D2: Discounts Direct, changing its name to Overstock.com. The elder Byrne served as an Overstock.com director from October 1999 until October 2002, and then rejoined the board in June 2004. He was elected chairman in October 2005.[7]
In March 2006, the elder Byrne said that he was thinking of stepping down in disagreement over his son's campaign against naked short selling, which he said was distracting his son from leading the company.[8] In April 2006, John Byrne stepped down to become vice-chairman, and was replaced by Patrick Byrne. In July 2006, John Byrne resigned from Overstock's board of directors. In August 2008, Jack Byrne said that after "much initial skepticism" he believed his son was "right all along" about the battle and lawsuits with short-sellers and analysts. He was reelected to the board on May 12, 2010.[9]
Byrne died in New Hampshire on March 7, 2013, after a long struggle against cancer.[10]
^ ""Overstock Names John Byrne Chairman of the Board" Ina Steiner, AuctionBytes.com, October 26, 2005". auctionbytes.com. Retrieved 18 July 2017.
^
a b c d e f Gorham, John (July 24, 2000). "See Jack Run". Forbes. Archived from the original on June 29, 2015.
^ Chapman, Scott A. (2019). Empower your investing : adopting best practices from John Templeton, Peter Lynch, and Warren Buffett. New York: Post Hill Press. p. 255. ISBN 978-1-64293-238-6. OCLC 1112253785.
^ Chapman, Scott A. (2019). Empower your investing : adopting best practices from John Templeton, Peter Lynch, and Warren Buffett. New York: Post Hill Press. p. 252. ISBN 978-1-64293-238-6. OCLC 1112253785.
^ "GEICO Pulls Through - TIME". 2007-09-30. Archived from the original on 30 September 2007. Retrieved 2022-05-07.
^ "History of White Mountains Insurance Group, Ltd. – FundingUniverse". www.fundinguniverse.com. Retrieved 18 July 2017.
^ Steiner, Ina (October 26, 2005). "Overstock Names John Byrne Chairman of the Board". eCommerceBytes.com. Archived from the original on August 22, 2019. Retrieved January 12, 2020.
^ "Overstock.com chairman mulls stepping down". NBC News. 3 March 2006. Retrieved 18 July 2017.
^ Overstock.com, Press Release
^ "Former White Mountains' Chair, GEICO Rescuer Byrne Passes Away". insurancejournal.com. 11 March 2013. Retrieved 18 July 2017.
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2013-03-11-archive-sltrib-com-john-byrne-ceo.pdf
https://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id=55986700&itype=CMSID
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John Byrne, Geico CEO Buffett cited for 'brilliance,' dies at 80
John Byrne, Geico CEO Buffett cited for 'brilliance,' dies at 80
Obituary • He also served on the board of son Patrick's Overstock.com in Utah.
By Laurence Arnold Bloomberg News
· March 11, 2013 12:18 pm
This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2013, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
John J. Byrne, whose turnaround of auto insurer Geico Corp. led billionaire Warren Buffett to buy the company and call him "the Babe Ruth of insurance," has died. He was 80.
Byrne died March 7 at his home in Etna, N.H., according to family spokesman Robert Snyder. The cause was prostate cancer.
Byrne also served as the first chairman of the board of Internet retailer Overstock.com Inc., the Salt Lake City-based company founded by his son, Patrick. The two clashed at one point over Patrick's public campaign against short selling.
"He was a great father, a great teacher, a great man and my hero," Patrick Bryne said of his father.
Overstock.com Co-President Stormy Simon said a portion of John Byrne's legacy and mentorship lives on within Overstock.
"It isn't just the financial investment with the stock he purchased," she said. "It's the personal investment by being chairman, mentor and sharing his years of business knowledge that will continue to contribute to our success."
For his part, Buffett had praise for Byrne in a letter to Berkshire shareholders, reviewing investments in 1980. He credited Byrne's "managerial brilliance" with resuscitating Geico after his arrival in 1976.
"There aren't many Jack Byrnes in the managerial world, or Geicos in the business world," Buffett wrote. "What could be better than buying into a partnership with both of them?"
At the time of the letter, Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc. owned about one-third of Geico. Buffett bought the remaining two-thirds in 1996 for $2.3 billion and made it a unit of Berkshire. By then, Byrne had left Geico for White Mountains Insurance Group Ltd.
"Jack's performance in reviving Geico from near-bankruptcy was truly extraordinary, and his work resulted in enormous gains for Berkshire," Buffett wrote in his letter summarizing 1985, noting Byrne's departure. "We owe him a great deal for that."
Byrne's tough-love tenure at Geico entered the annals of corporate turnarounds.
He arrived in 1976 as president and chairman of Geico — an acronym for Government Employees Insurance Co. — after working as executive vice president at the Travelers Corp. Geico was near bankruptcy, having posted a net loss of $126 million in 1975, according to a 1981 article in Forbes magazine.
Byrne closed about 100 offices, cut the workforce to 4,000 from 7,000, quit the highly regulated auto insurance markets of New Jersey and Massachusetts, and raised rates by as much as 40 percent, Forbes said. He also reached a re-insurance agreement with competitors, potentially saving the industry, and sold $75 million in preferred stock to restore the company's capital, Forbes said.
By 1980, the company was back to health, with $44 million in net operating income in the first nine months.
Buffett, who had bought his first Geico shares in 1951 as a business student at Columbia University in New York, was among the buyers of the preferred stock that was part of Byrne's rescue plan.
Buffett, attracted to Geico's depressed share price, had arranged to meet Byrne soon after he took over as CEO.
"We talked to maybe 2, 3 a.m.," Byrne said of the meeting, at the home of Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham, according to Roger Lowenstein's "Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist" (1995). "He wanted to know the things I would do. What did I think of our ability to survive?"
When the business day dawned a few hours later, Buffett called his broker and bought 500,000 shares of Geico at 2 1/8 and left a standing order for shares in the "multimillions," Lowenstein wrote. At the Washington Post board meeting that drew him to town, Buffett announced, "I've just invested in something that might go under. I could lose the entire investment next week."
Instead, Geico's share price almost quadrupled within six months, to 8 1/8, and Buffett became the controlling investor over the next few years, Lowenstein wrote.
Byrne, with advice from Buffett, hired Louis Simpson as Geico's chief investment officer in 1979. Simpson rose to president and CEO of Geico's capital operations from 1993 until 2011 and was once identified by Buffett as a candidate to succeed him in an emergency to oversee all of Berkshire's investments.
John Joseph Byrne was born on July 11, 1932, in Paterson, N.J., to John J. Byrne and Winifred Mohr Byrne. As a teenager, he worked at his father's insurance agency, according to a death notice on the website of Rand-Wilson Funeral Home in Hanover, N.H.
He graduated from Rutgers University in New Jersey in 1954 and earned a graduate degree in mathematics from the University of Michigan. He began his career as an actuary at Lincoln National Life Insurance Co.
After Geico, Byrne led the Fireman's Fund Insurance Co. until its acquisition in 1991 by Allianz AG Holding of Germany, now Allianz SE. He retained control of the fund's holding company, which he renamed Fund American Enterprises Inc. Today it is White Mountains Insurance Group.
Byrne served on the Board of Overseers of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College in Hanover, which his three sons — John, Mark and Patrick — attended, according to the death notice.
Besides his sons, Byrne's survivors include his wife, Dorothy; seven grandchildren; and his brother, James Byrne, according to the funeral home.
father was an assistant manager at an insurance company , per 1940 census. renting home. probably not related to the Johseph M. Byrne family of the NY Port authority ... , who was also receiving awards with George Sagan in the 1950s ...
https://www.ancestry.com/imageviewer/collections/2442/images/m-t0627-02325-00258?pId=130029463
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