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Thursday, December 3, 2015

Remember This Feel-Good Story

About the CEO who gave every employee a raise to $70,000/year by eliminating his salary?  Bloomberg Business discovered that it isn't the progressive boss with a heart of gold:
In late summer, the New York Times ran a longer piece on Price, now 31, showing that raising wages wasn’t so simple. Job applicants had overwhelmed his company, and two employees quit, saying the increase wasn’t fair to higher earners. “Potentially the worst blow of all,” the Times wrote, was that about two weeks after the announcement, Price was sued by his older brother Lucas, who owns about 30 percent of Gravity, alleging Price paid himself too much in the first place. Price insinuated that his brother may have sued in reaction to the generous pay increase. “I know the decision to pay everyone a living wage is controversial,” he told the Seattle Times, which first reported the lawsuit. “I deeply regret the rift this has caused in my relationship with my brother.”
It turns out the suit was filed before the pay change, because the brother who owns 30% of the company was suing because Price had given himself an exorbitant salary: $1,100,000.  Eliminating his salary and giving everyone a raise was just an attempt to defeat the suit.  And Price received a $500,000 advance for a book about the pay change and the adulation that all progressives love.  And Price appears to have some other secrets:
Price’s life may get more complicated the week of Dec. 7, when TEDx plans to post online a public talk by his former wife, who changed her last name to Colón. She spoke on Oct. 28 at the University of Kentucky about the power of writing to overcome trauma. 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 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.”

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