Jim Goodnight
James (Jim) Goodnight is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of SAS Institute Inc., the largest privately-owned software company in the nation. He is the wealthiest person in North Carolina and one of the wealthiest men in the world, with a net worth of $7 billion. The son of a hardware store owner, he moonlighted as a computer programmer while at North Carolina State University. Goodnight "fell in love with computers" in the one computer course he took at NC State in his sophomore year. The following summer he got a job writing programs for the agricultural economics department. A few years later, while working on his master's degree, 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. He went on to earn his doctorate in statistics at NC State, where he was a member of the faculty from 19