The Media Fawned Over This CEO for Paying His Employees $70K. He’s Now Facing Allegations Too Weird & Awful to Fit in a Headline.
Screenshot via Dan Price on Facebook.
At one time, Gravity Payments CEO Dan Price basked in the warm glow of media adoration for telling his employees he was slashing his own pay to raise theirs to a minimum of $70,000. He landed magazine covers and television appearances that fawned over his generosity and long hair.
It’s a sharp contrast to the picture painted by a New York Times article published Friday digging into the staggeringly long list of troubling and bizarre allegations against Price, many of which have been publicly known for years but he was able to bury using his celebrity and social media savvy before finally resigning this week.
“IS THIS THE BEST BOSS IN AMERICA?” blared the cover of the November 2015 issue of Inc. (pictured below), which contained within its pages a hagiographic profile of Price where he claimed he had sold his stock, mortgaged two homes, and cashed out his retirement accounts in order to fund the employee raises. His noble self-sacrifice was held up as a contrast to the greedy CEO archetype and Price soon had a gigantic social media audience of devoted fans across multiple platforms.
Price’s employees worshiped their young and charismatic boss, singing his praises in interviews and collectively buying him a bright blue Tesla as a thank you gift.
But a lot of it simply wasn’t true, or had been exaggerated — not to mention the multiple women who have accused Price of physically and sexually assaulting them.
Many of Price’s stumbles with honesty came out during a messy lawsuit filed by his older brother and company co-founder, Lucas Price. Price attempted to spin the discord with his brother as being driven by Lucas objecting to the employee pay raises as cutting into his own financial windfall, but the court proceedings shined a harsh light on Price’s own maneuvers, including misrepresentations about the financial sacrifices he had made and accusations that Price himself suggested to a junior employee that she get her colleagues to buy him the Tesla.
Esquire’s Stephen Rodrick spent significant time with Price for an Aug. 2016 article covering the trial and dug into some of Price’s odd behaviors and idiosyncrasies. The piece was headlined “The Prophet Motive: Is Dan Price a Sinner or a Saint?” and included a photo of the long-haired and bearded young CEO who had so frequently been compared to Jesus appearing to literally walk on water, wearing a slim-fitting blue suit and striding barefoot across the surface of his pool.
Price revealed his $70K pay raise plan to model-turned-talk-show-host Tyra Banks before he looped in his brother, Rodrick reported, and excused his dishonest claims as being driven by his “optimism.”
It’s much harder to spin the troubling sexual assault allegations against Price. Friday’s Times article by Karen Weise looks into the claims from his ex-wife and multiple former girlfriends, and specifically notes how Price used his social media clout to whitewash his own reputation.
Kristie Colón, Price’s ex-wife, recorded a TedX talk in Oct. 2015, hosted by the University of Kentucky, in which she accused him of physically abusing her:
“He got mad at me for ignoring him and grabbed me and shook me again,” Ms. Colón read from her old journal. “He started punching me in the stomach and slapped me across the face.” She recalled once locking herself in a 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.”
Price denied Colón’s accusations, and had his company’s marketing chief, Ryan Pirkle, contact the university. Pirkle was able to successfully convince UK not to post the video, but the Times still obtained a copy, and Weise included an excerpt in the article.
Price also denied he asked Pirkle to contact UK but Pirkle stood by his claim. “Mr. Pirkle said he deeply regretted his role in preventing the video from becoming public,” Weise wrote. Pirkle also insisted that getting the employees to buy Price the Tesla was “completely” Price’s idea.
The lawsuit with his brother and abuse accusations from his ex-wife were publicly reported, and Price responded by engaging in a strategic effort to bury the bad press with his own social media posts. His posts, sharing a variety of platitudes about greedy CEOs and progressive politics, were widely shared; Weise identified multiple tweets that went viral.
A male president was so angry he lost that he incited a mob against the U.S. Capitol.
I never want to hear again that women would be “too emotional” to be president.
— Dan Price (@DanPriceSeattle) January 12, 2021
I’ve personally helped multiple consulting clients in the past to improve their online image and SEO (although never to distract from sexual assault allegations, to be clear!) and Price’s game plan of bombarding the internet with his own self-aggrandizing social media posts highlighted a known weakness in our societal reliance on Google results.
Google is notoriously secretive about how their search algorithms operate, but historically a few things have proven true: new content pushes down old content, linking among social media accounts can help boost their credibility in Google’s rankings, and the vast majority of people searching only look at the top results on the first page of Google.
Price’s prolific posts on his Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn accounts would have helped those accounts take up several of the prized top spots on the first page of a Google search. That meant that those 2015 and 2016 articles with damning information, as relevant and factual as they might have been, would have been pushed down to the second and third pages of Price’s Google results, where they might as well not even exist.
His online rep rehab made it easier to slide into his targets’ DMs, as Weise reported happened with several attractive young women who ended up dating Price only to end up accusing him of abusing them.
“He has used his celebrity to pursue women online who say he hurt them, both physically and emotionally,” wrote Weise of the “more than a dozen women who spoke to The New York Times about predatory encounters with Mr. Price.” (Another weird twist: the ghostwriter Price hired to help with this social media deluge was Mike Rosenberg, who resigned from the Seattle Times after sending sexually explicit messages to a female reporter).
Kacie Margis, a model and artist, was 27 when Price messaged her “Happy Valentine’s Day beautiful!” after she liked one of his Instagram posts in 2020. She told Weise that the couple were at a hotel in Palm Springs when he kicked her out of the room for four hours to make a phone call and then claimed that he had sexually assaulted her that evening:
Ms. Margis returned to Room 423, where she took a cannabis edible to counter insomnia, something she’s regularly done since being at the 2017 mass shooting at a Las Vegas music festival. Mr. Price returned and tried to initiate sex.
“No, I just took an edible and I’m going to bed,” she would tell the police she said. “We’ll talk about this in the morning.”
As she drifted to sleep, she felt him penetrate her, she told the police. She pretended to be asleep, worried he would kill her if she tried to stop him.
Margis filed a police report against Price and had a rape kit taken at the hospital.
Weise also reported on several women who accused Price of filming them during sexual encounters without their permission, and another former girlfriend with an accusation of Price having sex with her while she was unconscious:
One girlfriend, who asked that I not use her name, said Mr. Price would invite beautiful young women he met on Instagram to join them on his yacht, where she felt expected to entertain them.
“I am tired of being the head of the harem,” she wrote in her journal.
Three times he had sex with her in the middle of the night without her consent, she wrote in the journal.
Shelby Alexandra Hayne, an artist who also met Price through Instagram, accused him of forcefully attempting to kiss her, putting his hands around her throat, and taking her on a terrifying high speed car ride to a parking garage, where he “reached over to kiss her and grabbed her throat again, his hand pulsing in and out ‘for minutes,’ the police report said.”
Price might have finally reached the end of his ability to rehab his online image. He resigned as CEO on Wednesday, posting on his various accounts that his “presences had become a distraction” and he needed to “step aside from these duties to focus full time on fighting false accusations made against me.”
— Dan Price (@DanPriceSeattle) August 18, 2022
He ended the statement vowing, “I’m not going anywhere,” and while his Google search results are currently dominated by the news of his resignation and coverage of Weise’s investigatory reporting for the Times, Price’s tweet also had numerous replies from his steadfast fans. “I don’t know what happened but I love your tweets,” tweeted one supporter. Another fan called him “a good, brave and highly admirable man.”
