Epic CEO and billionaire Tim Sweeney has been using some of his cash to buy up 50,000 acres of forest so it can't be flattened

Tim Sweeney, the CEO and co-founder of Epic Games, is not short of a quarter or two: depending on which estimate you go with, he's worth anywhere between $5 billion and $9 billion. And it turns out that Sweeney has been using some of his cash to one admirable end: buying up swathes of forest in North Carolina, purely to protect it from development.

A new report in The Times of India points out that this has ended up with Sweeney becoming one of the largest private landowners in the state, with his holdings amounting to roughly 50,000 acres of land over 15 counties. That's roughly 78 square miles of forest, the size of a small city.

Sweeney began his Captain Planet arc in 2008, spurred by some of the fallout from the global financial crash, which saw developers abandoning housing and resort projects across the board as financing disappeared. He began to purchase forests and wilderness that were at risk of development, with the end result being to preserve them as they are for wildlife and future generations to enjoy.

One of Sweeney's largest single purchases is called Box Creek Wilderness, which is a 7,000-acre forest in the Blue Ridge foothills. Sweeney reportedly paid around $15 million for the area, which contains more than 130 rare or threatened species of both animal and plant.

And Sweeney's not just sitting on it all for himself. In 2021 his strategy shifted: he told the News & Observer that, thanks to economic shifts, land was becoming too expensive to keep buying. Sweeney then began to look into turning his existing 50,000 acres into permanent conservation status.

"Most of my big conservation land purchasing breakthroughs came when the economy was in poor shape and land was prudently priced," said Sweeney. "Since 2021, the economy has been stronger, land has become more expensive, and my focus has moved to getting large blocks of contiguous conservation lands I’ve acquired since 2009 into permanent conservation."

He uses a Limited Liability Company called "130 of Chatham" to make the purchases, holds it for years, then either donates it to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, sells it at a steep discount to state parks, or hands it to land trusts. In such cases, per former Epic employee Aakash Gupta, he ensures there's a legal structure that makes development on the land impossible regardless of future ownership.

In 2021 Sweeney donated 7,500 acres in the Roan Highlands to the Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy, which marks the largest private land donation in North Carolina history."

"This extraordinary gift ensures that these remarkable mountain landscapes will remain intact forever," said Carl Silverstein of the conservancy when the land transfer was announced. The Roan Highlands are known for rare spruce-fir ecosystems and are one of the most diverse regions in the southern Appalachians.

There is of course a more cynical way to look at this, involving financial advisers doing financial advisor things. Others will point out that the money involved represents a fraction of Sweeney's total wealth. But the upshot remains the same regardless: the forests and wilderness don't get flattened and developed.

As Sweeney said in 2021: "If you can protect land permanently, it will outlast any one person." So the next time you buy a Sabrina Carpenter skin on Fortnite, rest assured a little chunk of your V-Bucks really are doing some good.

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