James Goodnight

James "Jim" Goodnight (b. January 6, 1943) is the CEO of SAS Institute and is generally recognized as the wealthiest man in the state of North Carolina and one of the wealthiest in the world. 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. 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...