- An employee from Berkshire Hathaway’s pilot training company FlightSafety International had a near flawless record guessing NCAA men’s college basketball games, with the defeat of Xavier at the hands of Illinois being the sole mistake. For 10 years, Buffett had tried to award a winner, relaxing the rules until he finally could declare one.
Closing the game out by sinking eight of his last nine shots from the field, six-foot-nine Canadian wing Will Riley led the Fighting Illini to a comfortable victory over Xavier University in the first round of the NCAA Championship.
In theory, at least it shouldn’t have come as a surprise for the sixth-seeded Illinois. And yet it was the only one out of 32 games that an employee of Berkshire Hathaway guessed wrong when predicting the outcome of the initial slate of do-or-die games that eventually crown the best U.S. college men’s team to grace the basketball court.
No matter—the unnamed individual working at FlightSafety International, a pilot training company acquired by Berkshire Hathaway, will now walk away a million dollars richer. At least before taxes.
He or she won Warren Buffett’s March Madness giveaway, beating out 11 runners-up who astonishingly were almost but not quite as prescient. They, too, had gotten 31 games right, only their string didn’t last as long as the first 29.
It didn’t stop there either, as the FlightSafety worker later put the icing on the cake with a continued demonstration of their oracular abilities in the field of college football.
“The winner’s credentials were further burnished on Saturday and Sunday by the prediction of 13 straight winners and bringing the winner’s overall record for the first 45 games to 44 winners and one loss,” Berkshire Hathaway said in a statement on Monday, singling out the Xavier defeat as the only game to besmirch this otherwise flawless record.
The other 11 runners-up will receive a further $100,000 each.
‘I want to give away a million dollars to somebody while I’m still around’
Eleven years ago, Berkshire Hathaway started its March Madness bracket challenge, granting $1 billion to whoever predicted all 67 games correctly. Since then, Buffett has tweaked the rules in the hopes of eventually landing a winner.
This year, he made it easier still—easier in the loosest sense of the word, at least. To win, any employee of a Berkshire Hathaway company had to pick the winners of at least 30 of the first 32 games from the first round of tournament action.
“I’m getting older,” the 94-years-young Buffett told the Wall Street Journal. “I want to give away a million dollars to somebody while I’m still around as chairman.”
It’s no surprise there hasn’t been a winner. A layman without any deep understanding of the competition or its teams would not stand even the remotest of chances predicting as many correctly as the anonymous victor.
Mathematically speaking, the odds of correctly guessing a coin flip 31 times out of 32 are roughly 1 in 134 million.
