Dan Price

Price was born on May 13, 1984,[3] in Lansing, Michigan.[4] His father is Ron Price.[4] He was one of six children. When he was young, his family moved to Nampa, Idaho, where he was homeschooled until the age of 12. In high school, he joined a Christian punk rock band called Straightforword, playing bass guitar. At one of the venues where they frequently performed, the owner complained of high credit card processing fees. Price was able to negotiate the fees down for the owner, and soon he left behind music to start focusing on launching his own credit card processing business.[5]

Price started Gravity Payments along with his older brother Lucas at 20, in 2004, while a student at Seattle Pacific University.[6][7] In 2010, Price was honored as the National SBA Young Entrepreneur of the Year and was invited to the White House to meet President Barack Obama.[8] He won GeekWire's Young Entrepreneur of the Year award in 2013.[9] Entrepreneur magazine named him Entrepreneur of 2014.[10]

On April 13, 2015, with reporters from The New York Times and NBC News in attendance, Price told Gravity Payments staff that he was raising his company's minimum salary to $70,000 and reducing his own compensation from $1.1 million to $70,000.[11][12] He extended the same minimum wage to all employees of ChargeItPro, a company Gravity Payments acquired in 2019.[13] Price cited "High income improves evaluation of life but not emotional well-being," a 2010 paper by Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton of Princeton University, as motivation for his choice of the $70,000 minimum.[14]

On April 24, 2015, a lawsuit was filed against Dan Price by his brother Lucas.[15] The lawsuit claimed that Dan Price was overpaying himself and depriving shareholders of profits.[15] Dan Price admitted that some of the statements he made about Gravity Payments since raising the minimum wage were not true.[16][17] In July 2016, King County Superior Court Judge Theresa B. Doyle ruled in favor of Dan Price on all counts.[18]

After the pay raise announcement, Price became a celebrity, making numerous television and magazine cover appearances, and reportedly earning at least $10,000 per public speaking appearance. Esquire magazine named him as one of its 2015 breakouts, calling him "a folk hero for the age of inequality."[19] Most Gravity Payments employees contributed to buy Price a Tesla car, his “dream car,” as a show of gratitude.[20] Bernie Sanders appeared with Price on MSNBC and later tweeted, "At a time of massive wealth and income inequality in our country, Mr. Price set an example others should learn from."[21] Robert Reich, the former United States Secretary of Labor, called Price "the one moral CEO in America" in a speech about the immorality of capitalism.[22] An Upworthy article in November 2021 began, "Dan Price is the go-to example for business done right."[23] The salary move also triggered a backlash, including from Rush Limbaugh and from some Gravity Payments clients who accused Price of communist or socialist motives. Two Gravity Payments employees resigned in protest.[24]

Price told Inc. in an interview for a November 2015 cover story that he sold all his stocks, emptied his retirement accounts, and mortgaged two properties he owned, obtaining $3 million, which he put into Gravity Payments.[25] "I wanted a larger margin for error," Price told CNN, explaining that the additional funding was related to his promised minimum wage increase.[26] Property records searches showed that Price had not mortgaged his homes at that time, and he acknowledged this in a February 2016 court filing. Price later mortgaged one of his properties in March 2016.[27] Price told The New York Times in July 2015, "I'm renting out my house right now to make ends meet for myself."[24] In August 2016, he told the Today show that he only rents his home during the summer and that his decision was not made solely out of financial necessity.[17]

In March 2020, Price said that the pay raise has worked well for his company in particular, but hesitated to call it a full success because income inequality in the broader world has continued to grow.[28]

In 2015, Price accepted a $500,000 book deal to be published via Viking Press. He planned to write about the establishment of Gravity Payments and about socially conscious business.[11] The book deal later fell apart.[21] His first book, Worth It, was self-published in April 2020.[29]

Price makes frequent use of social media to post liberal-leaning critiques about socioeconomic issues. Some of his posts have been shared widely as Internet memes.

In September 2020, Price tweeted, "52% of young adults now live with their parents, the highest rate ever, surpassing even the Great Depression. The most educated (and most in debt) generation in history did everything they were supposed to and got this. The system. Does. Not. Work." The post went viral a year later; one instance of it was shared over 15,000 times. USA Today fact-checked the tweet and found it to be accurate as of its original posting date, although out of context; the COVID-19 pandemic was responsible for the sudden spike in this figure.[30] One of Price's tweets, about Dick's Drive-In's high wages and low prices, was shared over 70,000 times.[31] Facebook flagged one of Price's tweets in March 2022, a screen shot of which had gone viral on its platform, as part of its efforts to combat misinformation. PolitiFact wrote that Price's tweet, about a rise in oil company profits during the 2021–2022 global energy crisis, was "mostly true," stating that "while it was correct in its assertion that oil companies have recorded record profits, it ignored that those gains followed pandemic-era losses."[32]

In July 2021, Price posted on LinkedIn in favor of work from home, saying that introverts benefit from it, garnering nearly 28,000 reactions and more than 1,000 comments in response.[33]

Price accused Twitter of "shadow muting" his account in June 2021, noting an over 90% decrease in tweet impressions and profile views, month over month.[34]

Price resides in the Magnolia neighborhood of Seattle, Washington.[27][14] He was married to Kristie Colón (née Lewellyn)[35] from 2005 until their divorce in 2012.[7][24][36][37] The Netline reported that the couple married "after Dan's Christian parents demanded that they marry or end their relationship."[5]

In 2013, Price entered an Irish pub in Seattle, sat at a table of people he did not know, and was asked to leave. After the bar's manager physically escorted him out, Price assaulted the manager.[37] Price was arrested and charged. The charges were later dismissed.[21]

In October 2015, Price's ex-wife Kristie Colón recorded a TEDx talk at the University of Kentucky in which she alleged that Price threw, punched, slapped, body-slammed and waterboarded her while they were married. Price's representatives notified the university that they considered Colón's remarks to be defamatory. The university later deleted its video footage of Colón's talk, which it had been planning to publish in December, and deleted information about her from the TEDx event's web site.[37] Price denied her claims of abuse, said the events Colón described never happened, and said that his wife never filed a police report.[38] In January 2016, Colón published a blog post standing by her accusations.[39] During Dan's legal battle with his brother Lucas, Dan refused to answer when Lucas's lawyer asked whether Dan had ever hit his wife. Dan denied Colón's allegations to an Esquire reporter, adding, "The honest truth of it is, there's only two people on earth that know. You could spend ten years with me and you still wouldn't know."[21]

In February 2022, Price was charged with fourth-degree assault with sexual motivation, fourth-degree assault, and reckless driving after a 26-year-old woman accused Price of forcibly attempting to kiss her. The woman also told police that Price was driving while intoxicated. Price's attorney issued a statement denying the woman's claims.[40][22]

• Price, Dan. Worth It: How a Million-Dollar Pay Cut and a $70,000 Minimum Wage Revealed a Better Way of Doing Business (2020) ISBN 978-1734157215

• Dan Price on Instagram
• Dan Price on Twitter