Family
Prince's father, Edgar D. Prince, began Prince Machine Corporation, an automobile supply company, in 1965. The business "exploded" and Prince began to invest some of the profits, through the Prince Group, into shopping malls and other types of car parts, creating a network of companies and real estate worth a billion dollars. In the early 1970s, Edgar Prince's company patented a sun visor that could light up and sold 5,000 to General Motors. When the company was sold in the 90s, the company produced 20,000 a day.
In 1995 after the death of his father, Erik assumed control of daily operations, which was eventually sold for $1.35 billion in 1996. Prince is the brother of Betsy DeVos, a former chairwoman of the Michigan Republican Party and wife of former Alticor (Amway) president and Gubernatorial candidate Dick DeVos.
Prince has seven children. His wife, Joan, died of cancer in June 2003. His youngest, Charles Donovan, was named after William "Wild Bill" Donovan.
Read more about this topic: Erik Prince
Famous quotes containing the word family:
“For every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, there was an Irish or a German girl scrubbing floors in that home, a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making “ladies” dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase.”
—Stephanie Coontz (20th century)
“The same dreadful set,
the same family of orange and pink faces
carved and dressed up like puppets
who wait for their jaws to open and shut.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“My Friend is not of some other race or family of men, but flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone. He is my real brother.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)