It’s won! A resident of the United States will see his life changed forever. And in proportions never reached in history. The record jackpot of 2.04 billion dollars, at stake in the American Powerball lottery, was indeed won on Tuesday, after 40 draws without dedicating the slightest winner. “The California Lottery makes its first billionaire! “, announced Tuesday afternoon the California Lottery. The winning ticket was validated at a gas station in Altadena, a town of 40,000 people north of Los Angeles.
The numbers that brought luck to the chosen one were 10, 33, 41, 47 and 56 as well as the bonus number 10 (the famous “Powerball”): the chances of finding them were only one in 292 ,2 millions. 22 other lottery participants won $1 million by matching all five numbers, but not the bonus, the organization said.
Prior to the draw, the Powerball jackpot was estimated at $1.9 billion. But faced with the influx of players wanting to try their luck against a 2 dollar bill – forcing them to postpone the draw which was originally supposed to take place on Monday – it finally exceeded the two billion dollar mark. It is therefore a world record: never has the jackpot of a lottery been so high.
The winner will have to choose between receiving the entire sum via payments spread over three decades, or being paid all at once, up to $997 million (after various taxes), according to a Powerball estimate.
A world record
Let’s try to visualize what 2.04 billion dollars represent: nearly 130,000 new Renault Twingos (sold at 15,750 euros each), nearly 3 times the price of a gigantic 18,000 m2 building on the Champs- Élysées sold last September at a record price (around 700,000 million euros) or, again, it is equivalent or even higher than the gross domestic product (GDP) of small countries like Saint-Martin or Grenada.
This $2.04 billion jackpot shatters the record money won by a single person in Powerball history ($758.7 million in 2017). But it also surpasses the all-time winnings record for a single winner, held by competitor “Mega Millions” ($1.54 billion in 2018). In 2016, the jackpot of this same Powerball had reached 1.58 billion dollars (a record until today), but there had been… three winners. They then had to divide the sum between them.
The American lottery is on other levels compared to those we know here in France. According to the Française des jeux (FDJ), the largest sum at stake in EuroMillions was 220 million euros. The jackpot was then won by a Frenchwoman, living in Tahiti, in October 2021. On the Franco-French lottery side, the biggest Loto jackpot was won in September 2021. It was then only 26 million euros… C It’s almost 80 times less than what the Californian won on Tuesday. But enough to change your life.