Steven Branscombe-Imagn Images
Warren Buffett has given Berkshire Hathaway employees plenty of incentive to nail their March Madness bracket over the years thanks to the massive cash prizes he’s never actually had to cough up. However, that’s no longer the case after he decided to make it a bit easier for those workers to get their hands on what is known as “The Prize” ahead of this year’s NCAA Tournament.
Everyone who takes the time to put together a March Madness bracket knows they’re mostly signing up for an exercise in futility when you consider it’s virtually impossible to predict every single game; in a vacuum, the odds of doing so are 1 in 9.2 quintillion.
They get a bit lower when you factor in the levels of talent boasted by the teams you’re picking from, but there’s never been a single verified “perfect” bracket that managed to make it through the entirety of the NCAA Tournament unscathed (a neuropsychologist named Gregg Nigl holds the record for the longest-lasting bracket when he correctly picked 49 games before it was busted when Purdue beat Tennessee to punch its ticket to the Elite Eight in 2019).
Warren Buffett was comfortable enough with those odds to offer $1 billion of his own money to any Berkshire Hathaway employee who was able to put together a perfect bracket in 2014—a prize that ultimately went unclaimed.
In 2016, he promised to give anyone who was able to correctly predict all 48 games leading up to the Sweet 16 $1 million a year for the rest of their life, but no one was able to do so over the course of the next nine years.
The 94-year-old with an estimated net worth of $163 billion decided to switch things up yet again before the NCAA Tournament kicked off in 2025, as the approximately 395,000 Berkshire Hathaway employees who got the chance to partake in this year’s bracket contest only needed to correctly guess 30 of the 32 games that transpired in the first round to take home $1 million.
According to The Wall Street Journal, someone employed by the Berkshire Hathaway subsidiary FlightSafety International became the very first person to claim the $1 million after correctly guessing 31 of the 32 games in the first round and staying perfect for longer than the other 11 people who each got $100,000 for only getting one contest wrong but saw their bracket get busted sooner.
Must be nice.