Powerball just made one person insanely rich.
A winning ticket for Wednesday’s $758.7 million grand prize was sold at the Handy Variety convenience store in Chicopee, Massachusetts. (Lottery officials initially reported that the winning ticket was sold in Watertown, Massachusetts.)
It’s the largest jackpot with a single winner in North American history.
The winning numbers were 6, 7, 16, 23, 26 and the Powerball was 4.
It wasn’t immediately clear who bought the lucky ticket. And whoever it is won’t get their hands on the full jackpot — lottery winnings are taxed like income.
The IRS taxes the top income bracket 39.6%. And the government will withhold 25% of that before the money ever gets to the winner. The rest has to be paid at tax time.
Chances of picking all six winning numbers currently stand at about one in 292 million.
That means you are actually more likely to be killed by an asteroid (1 in 700,000), be struck by lightning while drowning (1 in 183 million) or give birth to quadruplets (1 in 729,000).
And there’s been two other Powerball jackpots that have passed the $400 million mark so far in 2017. A $448 million prize was claimed in June, and a $435 million jackpot was won in February.
The only prize that’s ever topped the $1 billion mark was claimed in 2016.
It was a $1.6 billion Powerball jackpot that grew for months before. Then, three winning tickets — one each sold in Tennessee, California and Florida — all lined up for the numbers drawn on Jan. 13, 2016.
The odds have always been long for landing a Powerball jackpot. But it became even more difficult recently — thanks to a rule change in October 2015 that tweaked the odds.
