by ButterflyEffect

It’s a poignant story, one that I almost wrote. Until I realized Price knew more than he was letting on. 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.