Hell must've frozen over, because I'm complimenting a billionaire for his massive land grabs in Appalachia

The Unreal Engine in my brain is breaking, because this post has positive things to say about a rich man buying land. I'm just as shocked as you are.

As a general rule, I think billionaires and extreme poverty co-existing is a sign that our economic systems are failing. There are 801 billionaires currently residing in the United States that hold $6.22 trillion in wealth. At the same time, 11.1% of the total U.S. population lives in poverty. This should really make us question the inequality in our society and how to fix it. While I may tackle that difficult question some day, I don’t plan on doing so today.

My views on billionaires as a principle won’t change based on this post. However, dear reader, we find ourselves in quite the interesting situation this week as we meander our way into Western North Carolina. I think that when an insanely rich person does something — on it’s face — good, it merits scrutiny. And if that scrutiny holds up, strong encouragement to continue!

First off, I owe you an apology for my brief hiatus. Life has a habit of getting in the way of things I do for pleasure, like spout off my nonsense in this very reputable “No Elegy Needed” rag. But thank you for sticking with me.

Now, anyway. Back to the wildly unorthodox shit we will be talking about today.

Tim Sweeney: complicated billionaire nerd who might just save Appalachia’s forests

Imagine my shock, dear reader, my utter surprise, as I came across a Raleigh News-Observer article about Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney and his penchant for buying land in North Carolina - he is one of the largest private landowners in the state and has been gifting/selling much of it to conservation organizations in order to protect the land from development. Yes, this is the crux of the post, and we will be diving in, but let’s pump the brakes.

Unreal Engine? Fortnite? Appalachia? What the fuck are we talking about?

We have some people who read this Substack that are — to put it kindly — less cultured than others when it comes to the context of Epic Games, mainly Fortnite. ¹ Tim Sweeney’s company, Epic Games², has published and/or developed several notable video games, but Fortnite is by far one of their most successful. Fortnite is an online game where players compete to be the last one standing by collecting weapons, building structures, and eliminating other players. As of 2024, it had over 500 million players worldwide and made over $24 billion.

Every single Fortnite-themed YouTube thumbnail is proof that we are living in hell.

Tim Sweeney context unrelated to North Carolina land buying

Anyway, Epic Games is how Tim made his money. He has been a polarizing figure who has been involved in numerous lawsuits and controversies that contribute to his “complicated” label. I don’t plan on getting into all of them, but I’ll summarize a few below. Obviously, people are complicated. However, billionaires are billionaires and thus will billionaire from time-to-time. Here is a partial list, some of which were actually good things.

• Massive lawsuit with Apple. In 2020, Epic Games sued Apple after it removed Fortnite from the App Store. This was prompted by Fortnite adding a direct payment option, thus bypassing Apple’s 30% commission on in-app purchases.³ This was a long, drawn out court battle that Sweeney himself admitted cost Epic Games over $1 billion. At one point, though, he compared it to the civil rights movement. Which is a bit bizarre, and misguided, to put it charitably.⁴

• Said tech leaders were pretending to be Republicans to gain favor with trump, skirt antitrust laws, and rip off consumers. I fucking love a good antitrust law, you know me!⁵ I appreciate his candidness here because this is 100% true. Tech companies enjoyed a honeymoon period from the Clinton years through the Obama years, where Democrats treated them with kid gloves and tech executives responded accordingly. In fairness, he was getting the raw end of the deal with many tech companies (as seen with Apple and Google), so he had plenty to be salty about.

• Got kinda weird and defensive about the whole buying a blue checkmark thing on Twitter when Elon Musk bought it. I’ll just link to the article. I don’t know, man. You’re a billionaire. I don’t think you get to complain about elites.

• Epic Games had to pay the largest penalty ever collected by the FTC for violating a rule it enforced. Epic agreed to pay $520 million in both fines and refunds under an agreement reached with the FTC over violating the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (COPPA). This was the FTC under the leadership of Lina Khan (aka Bae <333333)

There are plenty of other things I could go through in his lengthy career with Epic games, but that’s really not what I’m here to talk about.

Fortnite billionaire, real land deals

Tim Sweeney has lived in North Carolina since 1999. In that time, he has bought a shitload of land there. Maybe even a metric fuckton, depending on how you quantify each.

Conservation Corridors

Sweeney is an advocate for conservation of natural environments, and his focus is preserving three big conservation corridors⁶ in North Carolina: the Roan Highlands, the Foothills of McDowell County, and an area near the Rocky River in Chatham County.

In 2021, he owned at least 56,000 acres of land in just North Carolina alone, according to land records pulled by the Raleigh News-Observer.

He has bought tens of thousands of acres of land from the Blue Ridge Mountains all the way to the coast, carrying out what he promises are efforts to conserve large swaths of land before they are developed.

He started buying land back around the time of the Great Recession, when real estate prices cratered. But he has remained active. In mid-September (2021), Sweeney was finalizing a purchase of nearly 270 acres of land in rural Chatham County — “part of a nature conservation project focused on the Rocky River and Bennett Flatwoods of Chatham County,” Sweeney told The News & Observer in an email. (Article link)

You can see the breakdown of his ownership in WNC below:

I wrote out the acreage and parcel breakdown of what Sweeney owns in WNC

I don’t believe this counts the amount of land that he has gifted or sold for conservation purposes. This is a small list of some of his acquisitions and donations:

• November 2008

  • Bought 1,500 acre parcel of wilderness known as Stonehill Pines that was being eyed by developers for a mixed-use golf resort community. When the recession happened, the plans were dropped, and he bought the land and plans to hold it until he finds a permanent nature conservation home for it.

• August 2016

  • Funded a purchase of over 2,000 acres of land that more than doubled the size of Mount Mitchell State Park in Yancey County.

• November 2016

  • Bought 7,000 acres of land known as the Box Creek Wilderness in McDowell County, which is “home to more than 130 rare and vulnerable plant and wildlife species.” Prior to buying the land, he fought efforts by the local electric co-op to run power lines through the area. The land was eventually placed under a land conservation easement with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.

• April 2021

  • Donated 7,500 acres in Avery and Mitchell Counties to the Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy, a land trust that will manage it as a nature preserve. At the time, it was the largest single gift in SAHC’s history.

  • Funded the purchase of roughly 1,300 acres of Hutaff Island — a 2-mile stretch of barrier island — which is held by the Coastal Land Trust while Audubon of North Carolina works to protect bird colonies and sea turtle nests.

• April 2022

  • Finalized sale of a three-phase acquisition totaling over 6,000 acres to the Foothills Conservancy of NC and the NC Division of Parks and Recreation in McDowell County to be used for Bobs Creek State Natural Area.

Putting the skeptics hat on, we took it to the people

I saw all of this and, on its face, it looks great. But with any rich person buying up a bunch of land in Appalachia and in the South, I have to remain skeptical. People do that for a variety of reasons: tax avoidance, nefarious business deals, money laundering, lying about the way they plan on using it then going around the people’s backs and building some god-awful monstrosity of capitalistic despair. It’s not unheard of.

So I tried to at least take it to the people — aka our followers from North Carolina — to see what they had to say. To my surprise, it was nearly universal praise and very little skepticism or criticism.

Now I’m not saying the people that replied to my posts are the official spokespeople of Western North Carolina, or North Carolina generally, but let’s just say they also aren’t the type of people predisposed to be sympathetic toward billionaires — that’s not exactly the community I’ve cultivated the past nearly 6 years.

Keep it up, Tim

From what I’ve seen, he seems to be genuinely interested in real land conservation. In some instances, even selling land at reasonable prices to people who are local to the area or that have local ties to the area — which is far and away better than letting greedy companies or private equity vulchers gobble it up to build some hellscape on it.

I hope he will consider pivoting some into how this type of land acquisition can accomplish these conservation goals while also helping solve the housing affordability crisis. For now though, I wish that other billionaires would at least take a page from Tim Sweeney’s book and do something good with their money like this.

Nature, unfortunately, cannot protect itself when there are money-hungry rich people out there willing to make a buck at the expense of an ecosystem. Perhaps that makes Sweeney’s money and how he uses it that much more important?

If you have a different opinion or different experience in North Carolina, PLEASE let me know. I’m not trying to glaze a billionaire here, but simply trying to show how money can be used for good things. I did some due dilligence with listening to people locally, but I want to know if I missed any perspectives!

Sorry, I don’t have a weekly music rec this week. However, if you appreciate my writing, it would mean the world to me if you upgraded to become a paid subscriber to No Elegy Needed.

After 5 1/2 years of pouring thousands of hours into building Appodlachia as a platform to advocate for Appalachia and spout off opinions, I want to make the time I dedicate to it count financially. I know that sounds slightly selfish, but it is the truth. Regardless, thank you so much for being a loyal reader and follower of my work. It means the world to me.

1. I have seen comments on my posts ranging from “who the fuck listens to podcasts” to “who the fuck watches streamers”, and everything in between.

2. Which is headquartered in Cary, North Carolina!

3. I’m not exactly defending Epic here, but c’mon that is a goddam shakedown

4. Fucking dumb. It was fucking dumb.

5. The play with Sweeney is that Google (android) and Apple (iPhone) are screwing him over by making him pay fees and/or using their payment processing systems to host his games on their app stores, as they are effectively monopolies in the smartphone game.

6. From the News-Observer: Conservation corridors are long connections of land that haven’t been crossed by roads or had homes developed on them. These undeveloped land bridges allow rare species and plants to move freely about, something Sweeney has said is critical as rising temperatures force vulnerable animals and plants to migrate.