When the real estate market collapsed in 2008, Tim Sweeney, the CEO of Epic Games (the developers of Fortnite), began buying up land in his company's home state of North Carolina. It wasn't a business move for Sweeney. He saw the bubble burst as his best chance to protect large parcels of ecologically important land from being broken up and developed.
To date, Sweeney has purchased over 40,000 acres of land, including the Box Creek Wilderness, a highly biologically diverse area in the foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains. In 2016, when an eminent domain-based lawsuit threatened to bisect Box Creek Wilderness with a power line, Sweeney successfully fought to place all 7,000 acres under conservation easement.
If you've ever set foot in Wailing Woods, you know Sweeney can make dope virtual worlds. Now you know he's keeping the real world dope, too.
