Clad in a plain white shirt, Jim Goodnight, billionaire cofounder and CEO of analytics firm SAS, eases into a leather rolling chair in a Cary, North Carolina, meeting room that looks less like a corner office than a geology exhibit. Behind him are glistening gemstones. A clump of pyrite. Purple amethysts. A fossilized dinosaur egg—a 69-million-year-old Hadrosaurus found in the Gobi Desert. A meteorite. “It’s not something you want to get hit in the head by,” he deadpans.SAS is 50. Its CEO is 83....