Sweeney is the founder and chief executive officer of Epic Games, the developer behind Fortnite, the online multi-player, free-to-play video game released in 2017. Epic also owns group chat app Houseparty and game-development platform Unreal Engine. The Cary, North Carolina-based company had revenue of $6 billion in 2022.
The majority of Sweeney's fortune stems from his stake in Epic Games, the video game developer he founded in 1991. The company is valued based on the January 2024 valuation of Epic indicated in the quarterly report of investor Fidelity Blue Chip Growth Fund.
Sweeney's stake in the business is calculated at 28% following prior investments by Sony, KKR, Tencent and others over the past decade. He remains the controlling shareholder, according to the company. This analysis assumes that term refers to voting control and not his equity stake.
Sweeney's cash holdings are based on Epic shares he's estimated to have sold in a 2018 transaction whereby a consortium of investors led by KKR paid $1.25 billion for a stake that valued the whole company at almost $15 billion.
Nick Chester, a spokesperson for Epic Games, said the billionaire declined to comment on his net worth.
Tim Sweeney was born in Maryland in 1970. Interested in computers from an early age, he began teaching himself to program on his family's Apple machine at the age of 11.
After graduating with a mechanical engineering degree from the University of Maryland, he started a one-man computer consulting business out of his parents basement. His early business evolved into a developer of video games, which Sweeney would create then mail out to customers on floppy disks.
Sweeney moved the business to North Carolina in 1999 and changed the name to Epic Games. Best known as the creator of mega-hit, Fortnite, Epic was also behind the influential best-seller, Gears of War. Epic also owns Unreal Engine, one of two widely used operating systems developers rely on for building games. Sweeney and his partners sold a 40 percent stake in Epic Games to Chinese internet company, Tencent, at an $825 million valuation in 2012.
Fortnite -- which Epic released as a paid game in 2017 before making it free -- became a global phenomenon shortly after its launch, with hundreds of millions of players around the world. Rapper Drake and the Los Angeles Lakers' Josh Hart are among its celebrity fans. Despite being free, the game generated more than $9 billion in revenue in 2018 and 2019 combined from users purchasing V-bucks, a virtual currency can be exchanged during play for outfits, called skins, celebratory dances or special missions.
Sweeney lives near the company's Cary, North Carolina-based headquarters. He spearheaded Epic's 2021 lawsuit against Apple over the tech company's App Store payment policies. The judge made a split decision ruling, affirming the App Store's structure as legal but banning it from requiring buyers to use its own payment system.
An active conservationist, Sweeney has helped preserve more than 56,000 acres of the state's mountains and forestland.