Erik D. Prince was born on the 6th June 1969 in Holland, Michigan USA. He is a former US Navy SEAL, but is better known as the founder of the largest private military company in the world called Academi (formerly Blackwater Worldwide). He was CEO until 2009 and served as chairman of the board until Academi was sold to a group of investors in 2010. The above mentioned company has added huge sums to the outright size of Prince’s wealth.
How much is the net worth of Erik Prince? It has been estimated by sources that the overall size of his wealth is as much as $2.4 billion, as of the data available in mid-2016.
Erik Prince Net Worth $2.4 Billion
Born into a wealthy family after matriculation from high school, he joined the US Naval Academy, but left after two semesters to mainstream in a conservative Hillsdale College, from which he graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Economics in 1992. At that time, he worked for campaign of the presidential candidacy of Pat Buchanan, and in 1990, he received an informal internship at the White House under President George H.W. Bush. Later he was an intern with the California Republican Representative Dana Rohrabacher.
Prince was commissioned into the USA Navy, and as a SEAL he served in Haiti, the Middle East, the Mediterranean Sea, and Bosnia. After the sudden death of his father in 1995, Prince left the Navy to manage the family company, but his mother sold the paternal company for $1.3 billion in cash to Johnson Controls, so Prince moved to Virginia Beach, bought 6000 hectares (24 km2) of the Great Dismal Swamp protected area in North Carolina, and founded Blackwater Worldwide in 1997. It has become one of the biggest private security firms, and for the State Department now provides nearly 1,000 guards for embassies and military bases abroad. Prince is very proud of the work of Blackwater Worldwide and underlines its success. According to him, of over 40,000 personal security missions by Blackwater Worldwide, only 200 involved guards firing their weapons. Prince stepped down as CEO of Blackwater Worldwide on the 2nd March, 2009 and chaired the Board of Directors. The company was sold to a group of investors.
In the middle of 2011, the Associated Press reported that Prince was leading a force of 2,000 Somalis to conduct anti-piracy operations in the Gulf of Aden. According to the media, the program would be funded by several Arab countries, one of them was the UAE; additionally, the program was supported by the USA. Spokesman Mark Corallo asserted that Prince did not participate in the project and refused to answer any questions about revenue. In addition to this, Prince was part of a supposedly secret operational unit hired by the CIA, created to kill terrorists. The House congressional intelligence committee disclosed its name to the mass media.
Erik Prince currently heads Frontier Resource Group – supported by Chinese interests and listed on the Hong Kong stock exchange – involved in several logistic and developmental projects mostly in the Middle East and East Africa.
Finally, in the personal life of Erik Prince, he was married to his first wife Joan until her death in 2003; they had four children. In 2004, Erik married for the second time to Joanna Houck. However, the two divorced a year later. Prince is now based in the United Arab Emirates.
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