Warren Buffett wants to see one of his employees win $1 million for their March Madness bracket ‘while I'm still around'
Every year, millions of basketball fans fill out brackets trying to pick the winning teams for the NCAA’s March Madness men’s basketball tournament, often competing in office-wide pools in hopes of scoring prizes ranging from bragging rights to thousands of dollars.
Berkshire Hathaway is no different. Chairman Warren Buffett has been running a March Madness bracket challenge for employees for years, and this year it’s a little easier to win.
Employees of the conglomerate can win $1 million if they correctly pick winners of 30 out of the tournament’s 32 first-round games, set to tip off on Thursday and Friday. In 2024, employees had to get through the first round’s 32 games without error to win the grand prize, though they had free passes for the eight games played by No. 1 and No. 2 seed teams since it’s rare for those teams to be eliminated in their first game.
“I’m getting older,” the 94-year old told The Wall Street Journal about this year’s challenge. “I want to give away a million dollars to somebody while I’m still around as chairman.”
Back in 2016, Buffett offered a prize of $1 million a year for the employee’s lifetime if they had a perfect bracket for the first two rounds, but no employee won the grand prize. An employee can still score that mega-payout this year by holding onto a perfect bracket for the first 48 games.
The NCAA says the most-perfect bracket ever completed had the first 49 games correctly predicted by a man in Ohio in 2019. Perhaps unsurprisingly, since the NCAA began tracking in 2014, no one has ever completed a perfect bracket.
It will still be a tough task to perfectly predict 30 correct games. But Berkshire Hathaway employees can win $250,000 just for having the most correct outcomes if the grand prize goes unclaimed, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Though Buffett’s employees won’t have to wager any of their own money to win the company’s prizes, many Americans plan to put some money on the games. March Madness fans are expected to bet $3.1 billion on this year’s tournament, the American Gambling Association projected.
And while many bettors and non-gamblers who fill out a bracket may hope — or even believe — they can predict every game’s outcome, the odds of doing that are as high as 1 in 9.2 quintillion, according to the NCAA.
It can be fun to compete against your peers and strangers online in low or no-stakes bracket challenges, but know the risks of betting actual money on sports. Even the most in-the-know sports analysts and viewers can’t predict what will happen at these games and wagering more money than you’re comfortable losing isn’t worth your financial wellbeing.
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