Dan Price

Daniel Joseph Price (born May 13, 1984) is an American entrepreneur and social media personality.

He is the co-founder and the former chief executive officer of credit card processing company Gravity Payments.

He is the sole shareholder and board member of the company.

Daniel Joseph Price was born on May 13, 1984, in Lansing, Michigan.

His father, Ron Price, worked as a business consultant and public speaker.

He is the fourth of six children and was raised in an Evangelical Christian household.

When he was young, his family moved to Nampa, Idaho, where he was homeschooled until the age of 12.

He attended and graduated from Nampa Christian High, a private school.

While in high school, he joined a Christian punk rock band called Straightforword, playing bass guitar.

After the owner of a coffee shop where the band regularly performed complained of high credit card processing fees, Price said he was able to negotiate the fees down for the owner.

His father was working in the credit card industry at the time and Price began to assist him.

Price then focused on launching a credit card processing business instead of pursuing music.

Price moved to Seattle to attend Seattle Pacific University (SPU), a private Christian university.

In 2004, while a student at Seattle Pacific University, Dan Price, 19, started Price & Price as a merchant-services company along with his older brother, Lucas Price, 24.

Lucas provided the seed money for the venture and was the original majority owner of the company.

Dan became CEO in 2006.

He graduated from SPU in 2008.

The brothers renegotiated their ownership stake in 2008 and renamed the company Gravity Payments.

Price was accused of freezing Lucas out of major business decisions for their company in violation of their 2008 agreement to have two-person board meetings.

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.

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.

Dan Price later admitted that some of the statements he made to the press about how he funded the wage raise at Gravity Payments were not true.

Price has been accused of several physical and sexual assaults between 2013 and 2022.

After pleading not guilty in May 2022 to misdemeanor charges of assault and reckless driving, he resigned as CEO of Gravity Payments on August 17, 2022.

A city court dismissed these charges against Price without prejudice on April 19, 2023.

He won GeekWire's Young Entrepreneur of the Year award in 2013.

Entrepreneur magazine named him Entrepreneur of 2014.

He gained recognition in 2015 after he raised the minimum salary for employees of his company to $70,000 and lowered his own wage to $70,000 from $1.1 million.

Price has been active on social media, especially Twitter, where his posts have been widely shared.

On March 16, 2015, Price was served at his house with a lawsuit initiated by his brother Lucas.

The lawsuit alleged that Dan Price was overpaying himself and engaging in minority shareholder oppression.

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 the company's minimum salary to $70,000 and reducing his own compensation from $1.1 million to $70,000.

The story quickly went viral.

In July 2016, the lawsuit filed by Lucas Price was concluded when King County Superior Court Judge Theresa B. Doyle ruled in favor of Dan Price on all counts.

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.

Writing for Esquire magazine, Natasha Zarinsky called him "a folk hero for the age of inequality."

The company said that employees contributed to buy a Tesla for Price as a show of gratitude, but two experienced employees in Gravity's marketing department later said that Price himself came up with the Tesla gift idea, and no Gravity employees saw a reduction in their wages to pay for Price's car.

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."

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.

An Upworthy article in November 2021 began, "Dan Price is the go-to example for business done right."