It’s not every day that Brady gets sent packing, Manning sends potential travelers scrambling to the midwest and a Stanford grad makes news for freaking out on reporter Erin Andrews but that’s exactly what happened on Sunday. It was a play-off day to remember and had many already looking forward to the Super Bowl.
Not everybody is thinking about football.
Today, Warren Buffett had tongues wagging about basketball. The billionaire, who ranks 4th on Forbes list of top billionaires, with an estimated worth of $53 billion, wants to make you an offer: he’ll give you $1 billion for a perfect March Madness bracket.
Nope, that’s not a typo.
Buffett, together with his company, Berkshire Hathaway, are offering $1 billion to any person who can correctly pick the winners of all 63 games in this year’s NCAA men’s college basketball tournament. Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway are partnering with Quicken Loans, owned by fellow billionaire Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert, to offer the ‘Quicken Loans Billion Dollar Bracket.’ Gilbert is listed at #384 of Forbes’ list of billionaires with an estimated net worth of $3.9 billion.
It’s a pretty safe bet to say that they’re good for it.
But are you up for the challenge?
The odds of winning are said to be one in 4,294,967,296. That feels about right, considering that it’s all I can do to make it past the first round with my final four teams still intact.
Don’t worry if you don’t have the chops to pick a perfect bracket. Quicken will still award a whopping $100,000 each to the 20 most accurate “imperfect” brackets for use in buying, refinancing or remodeling a home.
It’s enough to make you start reading ESPN every day, right? I have to think they’re already salivating at the notion. The network’s tweet earlier today about the contest has been retweeted over 38,000 times:
The details are as follows: pick all of the correct winners and win. If there is more than one winner (statistically, that’s nearly unfathomable), you’ll share the $1 billion prize.
The $1 billion will be paid in 40 annual installments of $25 million. Or if you don’t want to wait around that long, you can claim a lump sum payment of just half: $500 million.
There’s nothing to it to enter. No fee. In fact, it’s so simple, joked Buffett, throwing in a reference to a Geico commercial, “To quote a commercial from one of my companies, I’d dare say it’s so easy to enter that even a caveman can do it.”
