Early Life and Career
Erik Prince was born in Holland, Michigan to Edgar D. Prince and Elsa Broekhuizen. Prince is the youngest of four children. Both his parents share Dutch heritage (the family name, Prins, was at some point anglicized to Prince) He graduated from Holland Christian High School.
Prince and his father toured the world together, visiting the German concentration camp Dachau, a divided Berlin, and Normandy. According to his mother, these trips "made a big impression" on the young Prince.
Prince was accepted into the United States Naval Academy and attended it for three semesters before leaving, citing that he loved the Navy but disliked the Academy. He went on to receive his B.A. in economics from Hillsdale College in 1992. During his time at Hillsdale, Prince served as a volunteer firefighter and as a cold-water diver for the Hillsdale County Sheriff's Department. Prince eventually became an emergency medical technician.
In 1990, Prince secured a low-level internship in the White House under George H. W. Bush, but soon left to intern for California Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, Reagan's former speechwriter and ex-freedom fighter against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Rohrabacher described Prince as "a bright, driven young man." At the age of 21, Prince volunteered to search for a mass grave in Nicaragua, to expose killings under president Daniel Ortega and later claimed in an interview in Men's Journal that he found "...a mass grave: bones sticking out of the ground, hands tied with wire at the wrists.".
After Hillsdale College, Prince was commissioned as an officer in the United States Navy via Officer Candidate School in 1992. He went on to become a Navy SEAL and deployed with SEAL Team 8 to Haiti, the Middle East, and the Balkans. He credits the SEALS for being an outlet for his entrepreneurial spirit.
Prince ended his Navy service prematurely in 1995 when his father died. Prince's mother sold the Prince Corporation for $1.3 billion in cash to Johnson Controls. He moved to Virginia Beach and personally financed the formation of Blackwater Worldwide in 1997. He bought 6,000 acres (24 km2) of the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina and set up a school for special operations. The name "Blackwater" comes from the peat-colored bogs in which the school is located.
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