Warren Buffett is such a big college basketball fan that he has his own March Madness Bracket Challenge for employees working under his Berkshire Hathaway company. The prize money for a perfect bracket? A cool $1 million for life.
According to the NCAA’s website, there have been 20-25 million brackets per year since 2016, and no one has correctly predicted the outcome of all 67 March Madness games. The odds of doing so are astronomically low — 1 in 2⁶⁷, or roughly 147 quintillion.
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In 2025, Buffett modified his company’s March Madness Bracket Challenge as he was retiring at the end of the year and wanted to witness one of his employees claim victory before stepping down.
“I’m getting older,” he told The Wall Street Journal last year. “I want to give away a million dollars to somebody while I’m still around as chairman.”
Buffett made his challenge easier
Under his new rules, the $1 million cash prize will be awarded to the employee who correctly picks the winners of at least 30 out of the 30 first-round games. The person with the most correct games would get the money. In case of a tie, there was a tie-breaker rule. If that were the case, the runners-up would have received $100,000 each.
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If no one correctly predicted 30 or more first-round winners, a $250,000 consolation prize would be awarded to the employee with the most winners. However, he still hoped that someone would win the $1 million prize.
“Just think of the excitement it would create all over the place if somebody got a million instead,” he added. “I hope it’s this year. We made it easier this year than ever.”
According to Sportico, the rule change resulted in the first-ever $1 million winner at the Berkshire Hathaway. The unnamed lucky employee came from the company’s subsidiary FlightSafety International.
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There were a total of 12 people who predicted at least 30 first-round winners. However, the winner went the furthest by picking 29 consecutive winners before getting busted. The other 11 received $100,00 each.
The last recorded bracket made it to the 44th game
Despite Buffett stepping down at the end of 2025 after 60 years at the helm of his corporation, the challenge persisted this year under the tweaked rules. There’s no info yet if Berkshire Hathaway has another $1 million winner this year. Outside of Buffett’s internal contest, the search for the perfect bracket will continue next year.
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Per the NCAA, out of the 36 million brackets submitted in the major online games nationwide — Men’s Bracket Challenge Game, ESPN, CBS, Yahoo!, USA Today, Sports illustrated and Kalshi — only 224 remained perfect after the first round, and the last bracket, via ESPN, was busted after 44 games following No.6 Tennessee’s upset win over No.3 Virginia the round two.
Curiously, Buffett’s first Perfect Bracket Challenge was for $1 billion in 2014. It wasn’t exclusive to employees; anyone with a Yahoo Mail account could join. He changed it two years later to become an employees-only challenge, and the prize was changed to $1 million per year for life in 2016, before it was amended last year.
This story was originally published by Basketball Network on Apr 4, 2026, where it first appeared in the Off The Court section. Add Basketball Network as a Preferred Source by clicking here.