For nearly a decade, Warren Buffett has held a March Madness bracket contest for employees of Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A) and its subsidiaries, offering $1 million—annually—to anyone who successfully predicts the winners of the first 48 games in the NCAA tournament. The contest has yet to yield a big winner. And at 94 years old, Buffett is getting impatient. “I’m getting older,” he told the Wall Street Journal. “I want to give a million dollars to somebody while I’m still around as chairman.”
That’s why this year, the Berkshire Hathaway head is bending the rules. A one-time $1 million payout will be doled out to whomever correctly predicts the outcomes of at least 30 of the 32 first-round games, which are scheduled for March 20 and March 21. If no one takes home the nine-figure prize, Buffett will offer his typical consolation pot—which has increased from $100,000 to $250,000—to the employee that selects the most winners correctly.
The more than 400,000 employees of Berkshire Hathaway companies like Geico and See’s Candies will also still have the opportunity to win Buffett’s original grand prize of $1 million every year (for the rest of their lives) if they pick the right teams up until the tournament’s “Sweet 16” round. No one has won the price since the contest started in 2016. As always, this reward will be doubled if Buffett’s hometown teams from Creighton University or the University of Nebraska Omaha make it to the final round.
Buffett, a longtime basketball fan, first got his employees involved in March Madness betting in 2014 when Berkshire Hathaway partnered with the mortgage lender Quicken Loans and promised to give $1 billion to anyone who submitted a perfect bracket. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that these terms were subsequently loosened, as the task is nearly impossible. The odds of picking a perfect bracket are 1 in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 (9.2 quintillion), according to the NCAA.
Elon Musk, however, has previously suggested that A.I. tools like xAI’s Grok chatbot might one day be up to the task. “Buffett wasn’t counting on this,” said the entrepreneur last month while unveiling the research capabilities of Grok-3, the newest model from xAI.
Musk is also getting involved in the March Madness fun this year. His social media platform X is partnering with UberEats to launch its own contest that offers a trip to Mars via SpaceX’s Starship vehicle for anyone who submits a perfect bracket. Alternative prize choices include $250,000, a year of free residential Starlink service or a VIP viewing of a Starship launch, with runner-ups taking home $100,000 if no perfect bracket is picked.
What are the odds of winning Berkshire Hathaway’s March Madness contest?
Predicting the first 48 games of the tournament, too, remains far from likely and has only been achieved once by a non-Berkshire Hathaway worker in the history of brackets tracked by the NCAA. But Buffett’s staffers will likely have a better shot this year with the investor’s new amendments. In 2017, for example, at least five participants managed to correctly guess the outcomes of the initial 31 games.
Buffett, who told the Wall Street Journal that he might ask his executive assistant to fill out his own bracket, is hoping the odds are finally stacked in his employees’ favors. “We made it easier this year than ever,” he said. “Just think of the excitement it would create all over the place if somebody gets a million instead.”
