Erik Prince, born in 1969 in Holland, Michigan, is the founder and owner of the military support contractor Blackwater USA. A millionaire and former US Navy SEAL, after high school he briefly enrolled in the Naval Academy before attending and graduating from Hillsdale College. After college, he earned a commission in the Navy and served as a Navy SEAL officer on deployments to Haiti, the Middle East and the Mediterranean, including Bosnia. When his father Edgar Prince unexpectedly died in 1995, he ended his Navy service prematurely. He sold his family's automobile parts company, Prince Corporation, for $1.4 billion and later moved to Virginia Beach and personally financed the formation of Blackwater USA.
Prince is the brother of Betsy DeVos, a former chairman of the Republican Party of Michigan and wife of former Alticor (Amway) president and governor candidate Dick DeVos. Prince's first wife died of cancer in 2003, and he has since remarried and has six children. He now runs Prince Group, Blackwater?s parent company, from an office in McLean, Virginia and also serves as a board member of Christian Freedom International, a nonprofit group with a mission of helping "Christians who are persecuted for their faith in Jesus Christ".