Gravity CEO Defends $70,000 Minimum Salary
Aug. 20 — Dan Price, chief executive officer at Gravity Payments, talks with Betty Liu about what his business in the year since he raised his company’s minimum wage to $70,000. He speaks on “Bloomberg Markets.”
Bloomberg
Dan Price, the Seattle-based CEO who drastically cut his own pay in 2015 so that workers could earn $70,000 each, resigned Wednesday.
Price, the embattled 38-year-old CEO of credit card processing company Gravity Payments, resigned from the company he founded 18 years ago, he told his 100-plus employees before making the announcement on Twitter.
“My No. 1 priority is for our employees to work for the best company in the world, but my presence has become a distraction here,” Price wrote in a statement on Twitter.
Chief operating officer Tammi Kroll will take over as CEO, he said in the tweet.
Price stunned his workers when he told them in 2015 he was cutting his roughly $1 million salary to $70,000 and using company profits to ensure everyone there would earn at least that much within three years.
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But Price had recently come under major scrutiny. Earlier this year, Seattle prosecutors charged him with misdemeanor assault against a woman and reckless driving. Prosecutors say Price tried to forcibly kiss a woman. He pleaded not guilty in May; the case remains ongoing.
“I also need to step aside from these duties to focus full time on fighting false accusations made against me,” he wrote on Twitter. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Price has also run into other legal trouble. His brother Lucas sued him in 2015, alleging that Dan Price was overpaying himself. A King County judge ruled that Dan had not violated Lucas’ rights as a minority shareholder.
Allegations that Price had abused ex-wife Kristie Colon also surfaced that year. A Bloomberg report recounted an October 2015 TEDx talk given by Colon during which she described being beaten and waterboarded by her ex, without naming Price. Price told Bloomberg those events “never happened.”
Contributing: The Associated Press.
