Who are North Carolina’s richest people? These billionaires swapped the top spot.

SAS Institute founder and CEO Jim Goodnight is back to being the richest person in North Carolina, jumping ahead of fellow Cary-based entrepreneur Tim Sweeney in the latest annual rankings of the world’s wealthiest people by Forbes magazine.

In the past year, Goodnight’s net worth rose from $6.7 billion to $7.4 billion according to Forbes, which released its 2023 rankings on Tuesday. This makes Goodnight the 305th richest person in the world.

The 80-year-old Goodnight founded SAS Institute in 1976 along with John Sall, whom he met while studying at North Carolina State University. Sall, 75, retained his own spot on the Forbes list with a net worth of $3.7 billion and serves as an executive vice president at the company. SAS remains private, though its leaders have declared plans to take it public by 2024.

As of September, SAS employed 12,000 people worldwide and had more than 4,000 workers at its Cary headquarters.

This year’s rankings represent a comeback for Goodnight, who last year lost his claim as North Carolina’s wealthiest resident to Sweeney, the CEO and founder of Epic Games.

Sweeney nabbed the state’s top spot in 2022 with a reported net worth of $7.4 billion. Headquartered in Cary, Epic Games is best known for creating the wildly popular video game Fortnite (400 million players worldwide) and the game development platform Unreal Engine.

While he remains among the 600 richest people in the world, Sweeney, 52, saw his net worth drop by $2.7 billion in the past year, according to Forbes. He still has a net worth of $4.7 billion.

To calculate personal wealth, Forbes says it accounts for all assets, including salaries, equity in public and private companies, real estate, and tangible items like planes, jewelry and art.

Over the past decade, Sweeney has become one of the largest private landowners in North Carolina, having purchased tens of thousands of acres from the western mountains to the coast. An avowed conservationist, he has donated thousands of acres to land preservation groups like the Conservation Fund of North Carolina and Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy.

In December, the Federal Trade Commission levied a record-setting $520 million fine against Epic Games over complaints the company violated children’s privacy law and induced unintended purchases through deceptive designs. The video game creator has also continued its anti-trust fight with Apple over its App Store.

Among the 2,540 billionaires on the Forbes list were the owners of the two major Charlotte sports teams — David Tepper (Panthers, $18.5 billion) and Michael Jordan (Hornets, $2 billion) — though both are Florida residents. Dennis Gillings, who founded the tech services company Quintiles Transnational (now IQVIA) in Durham, made the list with a net worth of $2.1 billion. He lives in the United Kingdom.

This story was produced with financial support from a coalition of partners led by Innovate Raleigh as part of an independent journalism fellowship program. The N&O maintains full editorial control of the work.

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