Get ready for some serious March Madness. The king of Berkshire Hathaway Empire, Warren Buffett, announced his ridiculously large summed bet this week for all the company’s employees. “If they can get to the Sweet 16, if there’s only one of them, whoever it is, he or she gets a million dollars a year for the rest of their life,” Warren Buffett said on Monday.
Seems too good to be true, isn’t it? But it is and the lucky person might just be working right now at the organisation which has held this competition since 2014. Buffett is himself a big basketball fan and when he first started with the big basketball bets, he offered $1 billion to the winner who correctly guessed all the teams. That year, the competition was open to the public and was held in partnership with Quicken Loans and Yahoo (YHOO, Tech30). The odds for such a guess are nearly 1 in 9.2 quintillion
But Warren Buffett claims that this can be done. “Last year, we had two fellows that tied — one of them knew a lot about basketball, the other didn’t know anything about basketball — but they each got $50,000 out of it,” Buffett said. So this year’s winner has to just guess the NCAA’s men’s basketball teams which will be playing in the round 16 (or Sweet 16.) If nobody can guess it correctly then the person(s) who come the closest will win $100,000.
The tournament starts on March 14th and concludes on April 3rd. The contest in 2016 saw entries to the number of 85,000 and this year it is only to get bigger – over 100,000 entries if we go by Buffet’s guess. The company overall has 367,700 employees. Talk about employee motivation move! Warren Buffett has certainly got it right!
