Warren Buffett has been running a March Madness bracket challenge for Berkshire Hathaway employees for nearly a decade, but nobody has ever won his $1 million prize — until now.
The famed investor’s company revealed in a press release on Monday that an employee of its FlightSafety International subsidiary won its 2025 Bracket Contest after correctly picking the winners of 31 of the 32 first-round games in the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, played last week.
A total of 12 workers across Buffett’s business empire accurately predicted that many games, but the winner called the first 29 games correctly before dropping the ball on game 30, in which the University of Illinois beat Xavier University 86-73.
Berkshire said the 11 runners-up would receive $100,000 each. The conglomerate added that its big winner called 13 games in a row in the tournament’s second round, for a total of 44 out of the first 45 games. The chances of doing that are roughly one in 780 billion if every game is treated as a coin flip.
“I feel good that we sort of hit the sweet spot on this one,” Buffett told The Wall Street Journal, nodding to his decision to make the competition easier by no longer requiring a perfect first-round bracket.
“I’m getting older,” the 94-year-old told the newspaper in an earlier interview. “I want to give away a million dollars to somebody while I’m still around as chairman.”
The billionaire said a reward of that size would spark excitement “all over the place.”
Berkshire originally insured a $1 billion public challenge in 2014 to correctly predict all 63 tournament games. It launched its own internal contest in 2016, offering up to $1 million a year for life to any Berkshire employee who could pick a perfect bracket for all 48 games prior to the Sweet 16. It has run the contest almost every year since without a grand prize winner.
Buffett told the Journal he doesn’t know the name of this year’s winner, and had been informed the person doesn’t want to be publicly identified.
FlightSafety, which provides professional aviation training services and flight simulation products, employed fewer than 5,000 of Berkshire’s 392,000 employees at the end of December, per the company’s latest annual report.
Berkshire and FlightSafety didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
The post Warren Buffett is giving $1 million to a worker who called 44 of the first 45 games in March Madness appeared first on Business Insider.
