'Historic' Mega Millions Win Just Happened Here

One winning $1B ticket, sold in the state of Michigan
By Jenn Gidman,  Newser Staff
Posted Jan 23, 2021 7:30 AM CST
'Historic' Mega Millions Win Just Happened Here
Blank forms for the Mega Millions lottery sit in a bin at a local grocery store on Jan. 12, 2021, in Des Moines, Iowa.   (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)

Someone in Michigan, or who's recently been there, just added a whole lot of zeros to their bank account balance. Only one ticket had the lucky numbers—4-26-42-50-60, with a Mega Ball of 24—for Friday's $1 billion Mega Millions drawing, and a Mega Millions release calls it a "historic" win: It's the second-largest jackpot ever for the lottery game, with only a $1.537 billion win in South Carolina in 2018 surpassing it, and the third-largest lottery payout ever, a lottery spokesperson tells CNN. The winner, who hasn't been IDed, will get about $740 million if they choose the lump-sum cash option. The odds of scooping up this prize were 1 in 302,575,350. A statistics expert tells USA Today that "humans are not naturally equipped to understand such big numbers," so he explains it thusly: Imagine placing 302,575,350 dollar bills down on football fields until you run out of bills—it would fill up close to 600 fields. (More Mega Millions stories.)

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