Junkyard Billionaires.(Copart executives Willis J. Johnson and Aaron Adair)

On a vast, sprawling 97-acre lot beside railway tracks and auto-repair shops in a section of eastern Long Island that's definitely not the Hamptons, forklifts maneuver through a neatly organized salvage yard, moving everything from weathered pickup trucks to an almost-new Lotus coupe. This is no ordinary junkyard. Everything is coordinated electronically: The forklift drivers follow a meticulous schedule laid out on a tablet. Each car, be it a lightly battered BMW or a totaled Toyota, has a numerical code on the windshield so it can be digitally identified, inventoried and then moved to its corresponding spot in the sales area. In the squat, one-story building out front, customers who bought a vehicle online wait to pick up their newly purchased wreck after scanning a QR code on their phones. This well-oiled routine is mirrored at 243 Copart-owned junkyards across the US and around the world. The publicly traded Dallas TX-based firm dominates the market for processing and reselling salvage cars--vehicles damaged enough to be written off as a total loss by insurers. CEO Aaron Adair admits on taking a relatively unsophisticated business where they were selling cars over an oral auction.