March Madness is almost here.
Selection Sunday is in the books and 68 schools are dreaming of winning a national title.
Similarly, college basketball fans around the country are dreaming of picking the perfect March Madness bracket and correctly guessing which teams will advance and ultimately be crowned the 2025 NCAA basketball champions.
However, it’s no easy feat.
In fact, nobody has ever filled out the perfect bracket in the history of the NCAA tournament, and for good reason.
According to the NCAA, the odds of predicting all 63 games correctly are 1 in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 (or approximately 1 in 9.2 quintillion).
Or 1 in 120.2 billion (if you know a little something about basketball).
Perhaps that’s why Warren Buffett, the world’s sixth richest person according to Bloomberg, is presumably feeling pretty confident about winning his latest wager.
Buffett, one of the world’s best-known investors and philanthropists worth $160 billion, issues a March Madness bracket challenge to all employees who work at Berkshire Hathaway companies.
If you can put together a perfect bracket, Buffett will award you $1 million.
Buffet has been setting the challenge for eleven years.
Whoever correctly predicted the outcome of all 67 games, the company said that first year, would win $1 billion.
No one won and Buffett eventually changed that to a prize of $1 million for life (and a $100,000 prize to whichever employee has the best bracket).
This year, the 94-year-old is making it even easier by stipulating that all employees have to do is pick 30 out of the 32 first-round matchups correctly and the $1 million is theirs.
If no one can do that then a $250,000 prize will go to whoever picks the most winners through all 63 games in the tournament.
Furthermore, if a lucky employee can guess every pick correctly through the Sweet 16, Buffett will give them $1 million for the rest of their life.
“I’m getting older,” Buffett told the Wall Street Journal. “I want to give away a million dollars to somebody while I’m still around as chairman.”
Buffett also submits a bracket in the pool, but admits he doesn’t fill it out himself, saying he might ask his assistant to do so, since his focus is on the stock market rather than NCAA basketball.
