Matthew Prince

Matthew Browning Prince[1] (born November 13, 1974)[2] 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 US$5.5 billion as of February 2025, 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.

Early life and education

Business career

Early career

While pursuing a degree from the University of Chicago, Prince worked at Latham & Watkins, and upon graduating, he worked for the online insurance company GroupWorks.[13] In 2003, Prince began teaching cyberlaw at the University of Illinois Chicago School of Law. He co-wrote a paper on the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 following its passage in the UIC John Marshall Journal of Information Technology & Privacy Law. The creation of the National Do Not Call Registry through the CAN-SPAM Act inspired Prince to create Unspam, a spam-prevention software for email. Prince co-founded Unspam Technologies, which supported the development of Project Honey Pot, an open source data collection software created by Prince and Lee Holloway designed to gather information on IP addresses used by email-address harvesting services.[8]

Cloudflare

In 2008, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) contacted Unspam Technologies, asking, "Do you have any idea how valuable the data you have is?" The DHS' email served as the impetus for Cloudflare, a technology company Prince co-founded with Holloway and fellow Harvard Business School graduate Michelle Zatlyn the following year.[10] Cloudflare's team won the Dubilier Prize from Harvard Business School, receiving a total of US$50000 in cash.[14]

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.[15] Within a day, Cloudflare had identified three members of the group, who were also customers of Cloudflare.[16] 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.[17]

Cloudflare received significant attention for providing service to the Chechen 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."[18] He spoke out against National Security Agency gag orders in September 2013.[19] 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.[20] According to a 2019 article by The Atlantic, the suspension happened because the site published an article celebrating the murder of Heather Heyer.[21] Prince defended suspending

The Park Record

In March 2023, Prince and his wife Tatiana acquired the newspaper The Park Record from Ogden Newspapers[23] and now provides digital articles for free.[24] The Princes intend on converting the newspaper into a non-profit or public benefit corporation and adding Spanish-language coverage.[4][24]

birth name	Matthew Browning Prince
birth date	November 13, 1974
birth place	Salt Lake City, Utah, U.S.
education	Trinity College, Connecticut (BA) University of Chicago (JD) Harvard University (MBA)
occupation	Businessperson
title	Co-founder, co-chair and CEO of Cloudflare
spouse	Tatiana Lingos-Webb
children	1
relatives	John Browning (great-great grandfather)