- Billionaires including Elon Musk and Warren Buffett are offering millions of dollars in prizes for the lucky basketball fan who can select a perfect March Madness bracket.
If you want to be one of the first people to step foot on Mars for free, now’s your chance: you just have to be unworldly at predicting basketball games.
Elon Musk’s X Bracket Challenge is offering basketball fans a free trip to the Red Planet on SpaceX’s Starship vehicle if you can correctly pick a perfect March Madness bracket. But don’t get your hopes up. The coin flip odds are about 1 in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 (that’s 9.22 quintillion), according to the NCAA. If you know ball, the odds are brought down to 1 in 120.2 billion.
This improbability isn’t expected to stop any of the millions of Americans of all generations who plan to fill out an NCAA Divison I basketball tournament bracket this year. In fact, the stakes are higher than ever, with Musk joining Warren Buffett and sports outlets to offer prizes worth millions of dollars to any luck bracket guessers.
Billionaires’ bracket promises
Because humans aren’t expected to get to Mars for years, SpaceX has standby prizes. Musk’s company will provide the perfect bracket winner $250,000, one year of free Starlink service, and a chance to send a personal item to space on a Falcon 9 launch. If there’s no perfect bracket, the best bracket will win $100,000. This venture into sports is likely part of Musk’s goal to make X an “everything app.”
Warren Buffett keeps his prizes simple: cold hard cash. He once offered $1 billion to anyone if they could pick a perfect bracket in 2014. But he’s since lowered the award to $1 million and limited the competition to his Berkshire Hathaway employees.
As he approaches 95 years old, he’s eager to give away money for a sport he loves. This year, he’s lowered the stakes by promising to award $1 million to someone who wins at least 30 of the game’s 32 first-round games
“I hope it’s this year,” he told The Wall Street Journal. “We made it easier this year than ever.”
Musk alluded last month that AI, like his own Grok, could be the secret to creating a perfect March Madness bracket and winning challenges, such as Buffett’s.
Everything you can win with a perfect—or pretty good—bracket
Submitting March Madness brackets can feel like a full-time job if you want to maximize your possibilities of winning. Many outlets, including ESPN, CBS Sports, NCAA, and USA Today, have online portals for fans to submit their picks for the men’s and women’s tournaments, and each has its winning possibilities:
- USA Today: Win $1 million with a perfect bracket in either tournament. The best bracket can win $25,000.
- ESPN: Upwards of $135,000 in prizes are up for grabs for brackets for both tournaments.
- CBS Sports:Entered to win a Nissan Armada by submitting both brackets. If your bracket is among the top 10% of point scorers, CBS Sports will put you in a contest to win a trip to next year’s men’s or women’s Final Four competition.
- NCAA: If the men’s or women’s bracket is within the top 1%, you are entered into a contest to win a trip to one of next year’s Final Four competitions.
If that wasn’t enough, you could win free food for life at some local and regional restaurants across the country. For example, Jesse’s Burgers & Shakes in Texas is offering free burgers for life for a perfect bracket. The best bracket entered in Currito’s, found in Florida, Maryland, and Illinois, competition can win one free meal per week for a year.
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Prediction markets are getting in on basketball, too. Robinhood is launching a dedicated hub offering contracts related to March Madness games.
With four newcomer teams to the men’s tournament this year—Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, University of Nebraska Omaha, High Point University, and University of California San Diego—this year’s March Madness results may be even more unpredictable—and possibly more exciting than ever before.
But considering many games are played during the workday, bosses may not be happy. One study found that workers will spend six paid work hours focused on sports-related activities during the tournament, such as monitoring the games, checking on their brackets, or yapping with co-workers.
March Madness begins this week with the first four games on Tuesday and Wednesday evening and first-round games on Friday. The championship game will be played on Monday, April 7.
