James "Jim" Goodnight (b. January 6, 1943) is the CEO of SAS Institute [1] and is generally recognized as the wealthiest man in the state of North Carolina and one of the wealthiest in the world.
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He was born in Salisbury, NC and lived in Greensboro, NC until his family moved to Wilmington, North Carolina when he was 12. As a youth, he often worked in his father's hardware store in Wilmington.[2] His parents, Albert Goodnight and Dorothy Patterson Goodnight, are deceased. Even at a young age, mathematics and chemistry were his strongest subjects—thanks in part, he says, to a “wonderful chemistry teacher” at New Hanover High School. He applied to North Carolina State University in Raleigh and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and opted for NC State in part because of his friendship with Roman Gabriel, a star football player from Wilmington who went on to an All-American career as a quarterback for the Wolfpack. While attending State, Goodnight became friends with Bruce Griffith, who, with Goodnight's insight into technology, went on to become a billionaire in the forest products and private equity industries.
Goodnight fell in love with computers in the one computer course he took at NC State in his sophomore year. “In mid-stream, a light went on, and I fell in love, making machines which do things for other people,” he says. The following summer he got a job writing programs for the agricultural economics department. The intrigue never waned. A few years later, while working on his master's, his curiosity was piqued over the prospect of man being sent to the moon. His programming skills helped him land a position with a company building electronic equipment for the ground stations that would communicate with the Apollo space capsules.[3] Goodnight met his wife, Ann, while he was a senior at NC State and she was attending Meredith College.
Goodnight also owns Prestonwood Country Club, located in Cary, North Carolina. Prestonwood is known for its restaurant the "Red Fox," as well as Vance Heafner, a professional golfer in employment at Prestonwood.
Goodnight holds a doctorate in statistics from North Carolina State University, where he was a member of the faculty from 1972 to 1976. James Goodnight is also a member of the social fraternity Tau Kappa Epsilon.[4] With contributions from other esteemed alumni in TKE, he was responsible for the building of a new fraternity house which was completed in 2002. Over the years, improving the state of education (particularly elementary and secondary) has become an area of great interest to Goodnight.[5][6] He is also the benefactor of Cary Academy, a private school near the SAS Campus.
He is still active in developing products for the company he runs. SAS Institute, which puts a quarter of its profits into research & development, develops business intelligence software. In 2004, Harvard Business School named him as one of the "20th Century’s Great American Business Leaders,".[7] He speaks internationally on leadership, education and innovation.[8]
According to the 2007 Forbes 400 list, he is worth 8.7 billion U.S. dollars.[9] According to the 2010 Forbes 400 list, he is now worth 6.9 billion U.S. dollars.[10]