Warren Buffett’s $1bn prize and your chances of winning
Berkshire Hathaway – Warren Buffett's multinational conglomerate – is backing a $1bn prize for the contestant who correctly predicts the winner of every game in the US' National Collegiate Athletics Association’s men’s basketball tournament.
The prize, offered by Quicken Loans (the firm founded by mortgage magnate Dan Gilbert), will be paid in 40 annual instalments of $25 million and split among multiple winners if there is more than one.
The winner (or winners) also have the option to take (or split) an immediate $500m payment.
Jay Farner, president and chief marketing officer of Quicken Loans said:
It is our mission to create amazing experiences for our clients. This contest, with the possibility of creating a billionaire, definitely fits that bill.
We've seen a lot of contests offering a million dollars for putting together a good bracket, which got us thinking, what is the perfect bracket worth? We decided a billion dollars seems right for such an impressive feat.
But there's a big fat catch – the chance you've got of actually winning.
Unfortunately, the odds of guessing each winner correctly are a bewildering 1 in 9.2 quintillion – the number of possible ways the 63 game results on your bracket could be filled out.
That’s a 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 chance if you’re not rounding – it's two to the power 63.
As USA Today points out, it’d only take you a few billion years to hit on some cash.
According to Forbes, there are 1,342 billionaires in the world today. That's roughly one for every 5.3m people. So whether it's insane odds or the right appetite for risk, the chances of joining the likes of Buffett aren't looking overly high for any of us.