Someone finally won Warren Buffett's $1 million March Madness contest

Warren Buffett's March Madness bracket challenge finally has a winner of its $1 million prize.
A Berkshire Hathaway employee called 31 out of 32 first-round games, including the first 29.
Eleven runners-up would receive $100,000 each, Berkshire said.

Warren Buffett has been running a March Madness bracket challenge for Berkshire Hathaway employees for nearly a decade, but nobody had ever won his $1 million prize — until now.

The famed investor's company said in a press release Monday that an employee of its FlightSafety International subsidiary won its 2025 bracket contest after correctly picking the winners of 31 of the 32 first-round games in the men's NCAA Tournament, played last week.

Twelve workers across Buffett's business empire accurately predicted that many games, but the winner called the first 29 games correctly before dropping the ball on game 30, in which Illinois beat Xavier, 86-73.

Berkshire said the 11 runners-up would receive $100,000 each. The conglomerate added that its big winner called 13 games in a row in the tournament's second round, for a total of 44 out of 45 games in the first and second rounds. The chances of doing that are roughly one in 780 billion if every game is treated as a coin flip.

"I feel good that we sort of hit the sweet spot on this one," Buffett told The Wall Street Journal, nodding to his decision to make the competition easier by no longer requiring a perfect first-round bracket.

"I'm getting older," the 94-year-old told the newspaper in an earlier interview. "I want to give away a million dollars to somebody while I'm still around as chairman."

The billionaire said a reward of that size would spark excitement "all over the place."

Berkshire originally insured a $1 billion public challenge in 2014 to correctly predict all 63 tournament games (not counting the First Four play-in round). It launched its own internal contest in 2016, offering up to $1 million a year for life to any Berkshire employee who could pick a perfect bracket for the 48 games prior to the Sweet 16. It has run the contest almost every year since without a grand prize winner.

The exact rules of this year's internal contest were unclear, though the Journal reported before the tournament that the winner would need to correctly guess at least 30 of the first-round games, which began Thursday. Berkshire and FlightSafety didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.

Buffett told the Journal he didn't know the name of this year's winner and had been told the person didn't want to be publicly identified.

FlightSafety, which provides professional aviation training services and flight simulation products, employed fewer than 5,000 of Berkshire's 392,000 employees at the end of December, per the company's latest annual report.

Read the original article on Business Insider

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