Warren Buffett Awards $1M in 2025 Employee March Madness Pool After 1st Round

Warren Buffett’s annual men’s NCAA tournament contest for employees of his Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate reportedly has its first winner.

According to Daniel Roberts of Front Office Sports, Berkshire confirmed that a participant in the March Madness pool will receive the $1 million prize after correctly picking the winner in at least 30 out of the 32 games in the first round of the NCAA tournament.

Roberts noted that an update before the final first-round game between Oregon and Liberty stated that there were “multiple brackets that have one wrong,” so it’s possible that there were multiple winners of the prize. Berkshire reportedly will reveal the identity of the winner—or winners—on Monday.

Buffett has been holding this contest for the past decade and usually garners between 60,000 and 70,000 entrants. After no one won the $1 million prize in 10 years, Buffett adjusted the parameters from perfectly predicting the Sweet 16 to correctly predicting the outcome of at least 30 first-round games.

“I’m getting older… I want to give away a million dollars to somebody while I’m still around as chairman,” the 94-year-old Buffett told Karen Langley of the Wall Street Journal of why he eased the rules.

The first round of this year’s NCAA tournament didn’t see many upsets, though No. 12 McNeese State did knock off No. 5 Clemson, and No. 12 Colorado State took down No. 5 Memphis.