Dan Price, CEO of Gravity Payments, may have only decided to raise his employees salaries after being served a lawsuit claiming his own salary was excessive.
According to Bloomberg Businessweek, Dan Price, CEO of Gravity Payments, may have only decided to raise his employees' salaries after being served a lawsuit claiming his own salary was excessive. P. Chinnapong/Shutterstock

Dan Price, the 31-year-old CEO of Seattle-based credit card processing company Gravity Payments, has been in the news a lot lately. His decision to pay his employees a $70,000 minimum wage has won coverage everywhere from Esquire to the Daily Show. Price was also recently sued by his cofounder older brother, Lucas Price, who alleges that the younger Price paid himself an excessive executive salary.

The lawsuit has largely been framed as an event that followed the employee raises—and maybe, even, came in response to them. But Bloomberg Businessweek just published a story that reveals that Price may in fact have decided to pay his employees a $70,000 minimum wage only after he was served the lawsuit claiming he violated his brother's shareholder rights, in part by making his own salary too big. The same piece also quotes Price's ex-wife—via a journal entry she's shared publicly—claiming that her former husband beat her.

Karen Weise, Bloomberg Businessweek's Seattle-based reporter, writes:

The lawsuit couldn’t have been prompted by the pay raise—if anything, it may have been the other way around. And his salary before the big announcement was unusually high. As I read through the court record and media reports, I began to see how Price was writing his own origin myth one interview at a time. With what he says is a $500,000 book deal, he’s solidifying his place as the next do-gooder businessman, joining the CEOs of bigger companies, such as Zappos’s Tony Hsieh and Whole Foods Market’s John Mackey. In the process, he’s surely become the only credit card processing executive to be feted by Esquire, courted by literary agents, and swooned at by women on social media who declared him “yum.” But how it all happened is a little more complicated.

Here's what happened when Weise pressed Price on the timeline of the decision to give his employees raises:

In a follow-up interview in mid-November, I pressed Price about the inconsistency. How could what he told me about being served two weeks after announcing the raise be true when the court records indicated otherwise?

“Umm, I’m not, I have to look,” he said.

The court document, I said, definitely says March 16.

“I am only aware of the suit being initiated after the raise,” he replied.

“The court record shows you being served on March 16 ... at 1:25 p.m.,” I said. “And actually, your answer to it was dated April 3,” also before the pay hike.

“I am only aware of the suit being initiated after the raise,” he repeated.

I asked again how that could be, saying the declaration of service shows Price was served with the complaint, the summons, and other documents, “that you are a male, who is white, age 30, 5-feet-8-inches, medium height, dark hair.”

He paused for 20 seconds. “Are you there?” he asked, then twice repeated his statement that he was only aware of the suit being initiated in late April. “I’d be happy to answer any other questions you may have,” he added.

And Weise revealed even more jarring information. Last month, Price's ex-wife gave a TEDx talk at the University of Kentucky in which she claimed she was beaten by her then-husband in 2006:

Colón stood on stage wearing cerulean blue and, without naming Price, read from a journal entry she says she wrote in May 2006 about her then-husband. “He got mad at me for ignoring him and grabbed me and shook me again,” she read. “He also threw me to the ground and got on top of me. He started punching me in the stomach and slapped me across the face. I was shaking so bad.” Later in the talk, Colón recalled once locking herself in her car, “afraid he was going to body-slam me into the ground again or waterboard me in our upstairs bathroom like he had done before.”

When Bloomberg Businessweek shared this account with Price, he responded: "The events that you described never happened.” Read the full story here.