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Matthew Browning Prince (born ) is an American billionaire businessman and executive. He is the co-founder, executive chairman, and chief executive officer of the technology company Cloudflare. With a net worth of billion Prince is the wealthiest person in Utah.
Born in Salt Lake City, Utah, and raised in Park City, Prince expressed an interest in computer science from an early age and graduated from Trinity College in 1996, the University of Chicago Law School in 2000, and Harvard Business School in 2009. Prince began teaching at University of Illinois Chicago School of Law when the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 passed, inspiring him to found Unspam and Project Honey Pot, an open source data collection software. In 2009, he created Cloudflare with Harvard Business School alumnus Michelle Zatlyn and Project Honey Pot co-founder Lee Holloway.
In 1996, Prince graduated from Trinity College with a Bachelor of Arts, majoring in English literature and minoring in computer science. There, he was the editor-in-chief of The Trinity Tripod. As a freshman, he co-created the online-only magazine The Trincoll Journal with Peter Adams and Paul Tesco. He then was graduated from the University of Chicago Law School in 2000 with a Juris Doctor degree and from Harvard Business School in 2009 with a Master of Business Administration as a George F. Baker Scholar.
Prince's personal information was leaked in 2012 and used by the hacker group UGNazi to facilitate a DNS hijacking attack against 4chan. UGNazi were able to forward Prince's AT&T phone number to a Google Voice number using a Social Security number the group purchased for several dollars. The transfer allowed the group to receive a two-factor authentication code for Prince's personal Gmail account, which he used as a backup for his corporate account, and were able to redirect 4chan to UGNazi's Twitter account. According to group member Eric Taylor, Prince was warned of the attack a day before it occurred through an AT&T relay; Prince confirmed that he received several calls from an AT&T relay. Within a day, Cloudflare had identified three members of the group, who were also customers of Cloudflare. In 2014, Prince's house was searched by a SWAT team after a spoofed number called 9-1-1 claiming that someone had a gun in his house.
Cloudflare received significant attention for providing service to the Chechnya news site Kavkaz Center. The Kernel journalist James Cook contacted Cloudflare about the site, sharing the email with editor-in-chief Milo Yiannopoulos, to which Prince responded by writing a blog post rebuking the email's content and writing, "A website is speech. It is not a bomb." He spoke out against National Security Agency gag orders in September 2013. Despite maintaining a free speech stance, Prince personally suspended service for the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer. An internal email by Prince and obtained by Gizmodo said that he felt compelled to act after users of The Daily Stormer began boasting that Cloudflare was "one of them". In a blog post, he later stated that suspending service opens sites open to distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. According to a 2019 article by The Atlantic, the suspension happened because the site published an article celebrating the murder of Heather Heyer. Prince defended suspending Kiwi Farms' service in September 2022 after the site engaged in a harassment campaign against Twitch streamer Clara Sorrenti in August of that year.
In October 2022, Prince's representatives had asked Park City planners for permission to tear down a main house and guest house Prince owned on King Road and build a mansion, guest house, pool, and parking garage in their place. The blueprints would approach Treasure Hill, a million open space purchased by taxpayers in 2019. The matter came before the planning commission. On the same day language was added to a Utah Senate bill that would allow Prince to tear down the houses without involvement from the committee, Prince hired lobbyist Lincoln Shurtz. The legislation failed in the House of Representatives.
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