CEO Dan Price who slashed his own salary to pay workers $70k is forced to resign

Dan Price, the CEO who slashed his own salary to ensure all of his employees were decently paid, has resigned from Gravity Payments in order to focus on his legal battles.

According to the Seattle Times, Mr Price resigned on Wednesday.

"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," he said in a resignation post he shared to Twitter. "I also need to step aside from these duties to focus full time on fighting false accusations made against me. I'm not going anywhere."

Mr Price has been accused of trying to forcibly kiss a woman and was indirectly accused of being abusive toward an ex-wife. He has denied both of those allegations. Prosecutors charged him with misdemeanour assault and reckless driving, and the case is ongoing.

The CEO made international headlines when he slashed his own roughly $1m salary to $70,000, a move he said would allow the rest of his employees to reach the same salary level in three years time.

According to CBS News, around 70 employees at the company were given raises, and 30 of those saw their salaries doubled.

The fact that Mr Price fairly compensated his employees made him a target in the right-wing media, where he was labelled a socialist and his business written off as doomed to fail. However, the business has continued to grow since then, and now pays its employees a minimum wage of $80,000 per year, according to Mr Price.

"I'm so happy how people's lives are changing, because they deserve it, and they deserve every penny of it," Mr Price said in 2016. "For me to make the sacrifice in the short term, I'd rather this than a vacation home in Palm Springs or the Hamptons. I guarantee that this will pay off."

But the success has not come without some difficulties. In 2015, Mr Price's brother Lucas sued him, claiming the CEO had been overpaying himself and mismanaging the company. Ultimately a judge ruled that Lucas Price's rights as a minority shareholder had not been violated.

His ex-wife, Kristie Colon, also indirectly accused him of beating and waterboarding her during a 2015TEDx talk. She did not name Mr Price during that speech. Mr Price told Bloomberg, which originally reported the claims, that the events Ms Colon described "never happened."

Mr Price will be replaced by the company's COO, Tammi Kroll.