Rob Monster

Monster was born in 1966 or 1967 to a Dutch American family, and he grew up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He holds Dutch and American citizenship. Monster's father, Arie Willem Monster, was a Fulbright Program scholar and taught computer science at Temple University. Monster's paternal grandfather, also named Arie Willem Monster, was a reserve medical officer for the Netherlands Army during the Nazi German occupation of the country in World War II. Monster's maternal grandfather also resisted German occupation by providing shelter and food for Allied paratroopers.

Monster attended Germantown Friends School in Philadelphia. As a child, he was often sent to the Netherlands during the summer to work on his maternal grandparents' farm. Monster's grandfather paid him to do the work, resulting in Monster developing an interest in money and trading on the stock market at the age of 12. He earned his bachelor's degree and MBA at Cornell University.

In 2007, Monster became a Christian. In 2013, he said:

There are people that humanity has discarded. We actually will talk to people that others might discard, but part of the reason why we talk to them is because we believe there's an opportunity to appeal to their higher selves.

Monster is married to Jill Monster, a naturopath. They have five children, and live in Sammamish, Washington.

Monster has a Twitter account on which he makes posts alluding to God and prayer.

Marketing (1991–2007)

Monster began working for Procter & Gamble in 1991, and spent years working in Japan and Germany in this role. In his last year, he was the global product development manager for Pampers, a brand of baby diapers. After eight years at the company, he left in 1999 to move to Seattle, Washington and founded Global Market Insite (GMI), an online market research company. He served as the CEO for seven years, until he was ousted by the board in 2007. This was rumoured to be because of mispreresentation of the revenue structure of the company to an acquirer of the company. Despite this, Monster remained on the company's board and profited when GMI was purchased by WPP plc. In 2005, he won the Entrepreneur of the Year award from Ernst & Young. Monster briefly retired at the age of 40 before getting involved in domain name speculation.

Technology (2009–present)

Epik

Monster founded Epik, a domain registrar and web hosting company, in 2009 in Sammamish, Washington. Rob was replaced as Epik CEO by Brian Royce in September 2022 after Epik co-mingled millions of dollars of customer Escrow funds into general company spending.

Monster has been an outspoken defender of Epik's choice to host far-right and other extremist content that other web hosts have refused to host, saying that the company is committed to protecting "lawful free speech". He learned about Gab, a far-right social network, in 2018 when the company received media attention after it was discovered that the perpetrator of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting had used the service to post extremist content. After it was dropped by its registrar, GoDaddy, he met with Gab CEO Andrew Torba and agreed to register the website. The BBC reported Monster as saying that Gab's founder Andrew Torba was "doing something that looks useful", and that Gab's removal from the internet was "digital censorship". He subsequently became an active user and defender of the network. He has received media attention for publicly defending violent neo-Nazi Gab users, maligning people who criticize the site and call for stricter moderation, and making unsubstantiated claims that racist users are fake accounts created to hurt the site's reputation. Shortly after agreeing to host Gab, Monster contacted the King County Sheriff's Office to report a suspicious vehicle in his neighborhood, saying that it could be linked to threats he was receiving from "radical leftists." He would contact the Sheriff's Office to report several more threats, including a "glitter bomb" he received in the mail and his neighbours having files about Monster being put on their property.

After the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings, Monster made a post on Gab informing users where they could find the shooter's manifesto on a peer-to-peer network he called "effectively uncensorable", and suggested his web service could also be used this way. Monster later told CNN that he did not intend to use the shooting as a marketing ploy, saying that the link to the shooter's manifesto and the promotional content "should not have been in the same post." He also condemned both the Pittsburgh and Christchurch shootings, saying that "Those shootings in holy places were evil" and "I believe life is precious, and I pray that the families impacted by such senseless violence find peace."

Monster also previously defended the idea of hosting 8chan, a far-right imageboard known for its hateful content, connections to multiple mass shootings, and hosting of child pornography. Epik briefly hosted 8chan after Cloudflare terminated services for the site, after the perpetrator of the 2019 El Paso shooting allegedly used it to post his justification for the shooting. The following day Epik was banned from their primary hardware provider Voxility because of their services to 8chan, taking 8chan, The Daily Stormer, and other Epik customers offline. Monster wrote the day after the ban from Voxility that he had changed his decision to provide services to the imageboard site due to them "propagat[ing] hate.", although Ars Technica noted in August 2019 that the company had only stopped providing 8chan with content hosting services, and had taken on providing the site's DNS services. Monster also stopped providing services to The Daily Stormer.

The Daily Telegraph described Monster in 2021 as "a key figure in the far-right's battle to stay online". Michael Edison Hayden, a researcher with the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), has said that many harmful websites would not be on the internet if it were not for Epik, and that "No one is saying that Rob Monster himself is going out there and making terroristic threats, but if he doesn't want to be associated with this brand, he can certainly step up and say, 'absolutely, I don't want anything to do with this material. But he's not doing that.'" Monster himself has joked that he is the "Lex Luthor of the Internet".