For nearly a decade now, Warren Buffett has been trying to lose $1 million. This year, he finally succeeded. The Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A) head will be doling out a seven-figure paycheck to one lucky employee who managed to predict the outcomes of 31 of the 32 initial NCAA tournament games.
The award is part of Berkshire Hathaway’s annual March Madness bracket contest, which is open to the nearly 400,000 employees working at the conglomerate and its subsidiary companies like Geico and See’s Candies. Officially running since 2016, the contest’s grand prize—a lifetime payout of $1 million per year to any participant able to predict the winners of the tournament’s first 48 games—has never been claimed. Tired of waiting for a winner, however, Buffett earlier this month decided to tweak the rules.
For the first time ever, participants this year were also eligible for a one-time $1 million payment if they submitted brackets correctly calling the outcomes of at least 30 of the 32 first-round games played on March 20 and March 21. The amendment was inspired by the fact that, at age 94, Buffett isn’t getting any younger. “I want to give a million dollars to somebody while I’m still around as chairman,” the billionaire investor told the Wall Street Journal earlier this month.
An employee of FlightSafety International, an aviation training company acquired by Berkshire Hathaway in 1996, is making Buffett’s dreams come true, announced the holding company today (March 24). The staffer will be taking home $1 million after correctly predicting all of the NCAA’s first-round games barring one match between the Xavier Musketeers and Illinois Fighting Illini.
While the employee was one of a dozen Berkshire Hathaway workers who filled out brackets correctly calling 31 of the first-round games, the winner secured the prize because they had the largest number of predictions right in a row after calling the initial 29 games. Don’t feel too bad for the remaining 11 contestants—they’ll all be receiving a runner-up award of $100,000 each. The FlightSafety staffer’s “credentials were further burnished” over the weekend with an additional 13 wins, said Berkshire Hathaway, bringing their record to 44 correct predictions out of the 45 games played so far.
As has been the case for the past nine years, Buffett’s original grand prize of $1 million annually for the rest of a participant’s life will go unclaimed. But that shouldn’t come as a surprise, given that only one person has ever predicted the outcomes of the tournament’s first 48 games in the history of brackets tracked by the NCAA. Ever the Omaha loyalist, Buffett has long promised to double this pot if the Creighton Bluejays or Omaha Mavericks—both of which hail from his Nebraska hometown— make it to the final round.
Buffett’s initial foray into NCAA brackets made it even more difficult for Berkshire Hathaway workers. In 2014, his company partnered up with mortgage lender Quicken Loans and promised to give a staggering $1 billion to whomever submitted a perfect bracket predicting the winners of the entire tournament. This task is nearly impossible, with the NCAA estimating that the odds of a perfect bracket could be as low as 1 in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 (9.2 quintillion).
Over the years, winners of Berkshire Hathaway’s March Madness prizes have spanned the holding company’s roster of more than 60 subsidiaries. In 2018, for example, a group of eight contestants splitting Berkshire Hathaway’s $100,000 consolation pot included workers from insurance company General Reinsurance, railroad operator BNSF Railway and home furnishing store Nebraska Furniture mart. “We like doing it because we often act as separate companies and this brings us all together,” Buffett told ESPN the year prior.
