Employees at Gravity Payments were stunned to learn on Monday that everyone at the company would begin earning $70,000 regardless of their position while their CEO is taking a huge pay cut.

Dan Price, the CEO of the Seattle-based credit card processing company, announced that he is cutting his nearly $1 million a year salary to $70,000 in order to level the playing field with all of his 120 of employees, who will start working for the same amount.

The 30-year-old boss said that he is not worried about how the drastic measure will affect his lifestyle or his company. Instead, he criticized the fact that chief executives earn nearly 300 times what the average worker makes. That gap has increased by more than 50 percent in the last six years, according to a 2014 Associated Press/Equilar pay study, reports the Los Angeles Times.

"I think CEO pay is way out of whack," he told ABC News. "I may have to scale back a little bit, but nothing I'm not willing to do. I'm single. I just have a dog."

Price said that all of his staffs' salaries will gradually increase to at least $70,000 by 2017. As a result, 30 workers will see their yearly income double while 70 will get a significant raise. For now, anyone earning less than $50,000, which is more than half of the company's employees, immediately jumped to at least $50,000.

A company spokesman also confirmed that Price's pay has immediately dropped to $50,000 and will reach $70,000 by the end of 2017, as well.

"For some of these people, that meant a $14,000 or $15,000 raise," said Ryan Pirkle, Gravity Payments' marketing manager.

According to ABC News, Price settled on the $70,000 salary after reading a 2010 Princeton study that found that most people feel happy when earning that amount.

Price said he is optimistic that his decision will help raise morale and worker productivity at the company, which he founded in 2004 at the age of 19.

"I want everybody here to afford a house or car," Price said, according to Pirkle. "Living in Seattle is expensive. ... What I want to do is I want to self-impose a minimum wage" rather than wait for a government mandate to increase pay.