Warren Buffett Pays One Lucky Employee $1 Million: Here's How Sports Knowledge May Have Paid Off

Billionaire Warren Buffett is known for being frugal with his money. So, it’s interesting to find out that The Oracle of Omaha is paying $1 million to one lucky Berkshire Hathaway Inc BRKBRK employee.

The employee isn't being rewarded for their work ethic or performance, but rather for a knowledge of college basketball and a little bit of March Madness luck.

What Happened: The round of 64 and round of 32 games were completed over the weekend leaving 16 teams competing for the NCAA Men's National Basketball Championship.

As Benzinga previously reported, Buffett has hosted an annual bracket challenge for employees of his conglomerate, often with the requirement that someone has a perfect bracket to get a huge payout.

With near impossible odds of 1 in 9.2 quintillion to have a perfect bracket, Buffett decided to shake things up this year and offer a $1 million prize to any employee who could correctly predict 30 of the first 32 games.

"I want to give away a million dollars to somebody while I'm still around as chairman," Buffett said of the contest rule this year to The Wall Street Journal.

This year, someone finally won the $1 million prize.

"We have our first ever confirmed award of The Prize," a memo to employees said, as seen by FrontOfficeSports.

Berkshire Hathaway confirmed to the Wall Street Journal that one person won the $1 million prize picking 31 of the first 32 games correctly. The contestant, who works at FlightSafety International, had a perfect bracket through 29 games before missing a game.

Another 11 employees will also take home $100,000 each for correctly predicting 31 of the first 32 games correctly, but having a miss earlier than the champion.

"I feel good that we sort of hit the sweet spot on this one," Buffett told The Wall Street Journal.

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Why It's Important: Berkshire Hathaway has around 395,000 employees and Buffett's contest usually has around 70,000 entries with huge prizes typically off the table as the number of perfect brackets decline in the early days of the tournament.

This year's early March Madness games featured fewer big upsets than past years, which may have led to more perfect brackets longer than normal.

This marks the first time the Sweet 16 has not had a seed over a 10-seed in years. This is also the first tournament without a 13-seed, 14-seed, 15-seed or 16-seed winning in the first round since 2017.

On ESPN, where over 25 million brackets were submitted, a perfect bracket made it through the first three days of the tournament all the way to game 43 of 48 in the first weekend. The last perfect bracket incorrectly predicted that six-seeded Illinois would beat three-seeded Kentucky according to the NCAA.

Employees will have to wait until next year to see if Buffett keeps this rule in place or if he returns to making things harder to pay out $1 million or more.

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Photo: Dan Thornberg via Shutterstock