Monday night, someone theoretically could have won $905 million. The odds were 1 in 292,201,338. Nobody has won since May. The numbers were 6, 37, 54, 55, 64, Powerball 10 — and as of the drawing, it was not immediately clear whether any ticket matched them, which is lottery-speak for "probably not."
How We Got Here: Three Months of Beautiful Futility
The last time anyone won the Powerball jackpot was May 2, when two tickets in Florida and Texas split a relatively modest $20 million prize. That was it. Since then, drawing after drawing, America has collectively hurled billions of $2 bills into the void and received nothing back except the specific kind of disappointment that feels like your own fault.
As CBS News reports, the jackpot has now ballooned to $905 million, the eighth largest in Powerball history and the 16th largest lottery jackpot in U.S. history when you fold in Mega Millions. The cash lump-sum option sits at $391.9 million, according to the Multi-State Lottery Association, which is still an amount of money so large it would break your brain to spend it.
Four tickets on Saturday did match all five white balls and took home $1 million each, so somebody out there is having a genuinely good week. But the big prize? Still unclaimed. Still sitting there. Still beckoning.
The Lottery Industrial Complex Is Very Excited About This
Stephen Durrell, Powerball Product Group chair and Kansas Lottery executive director, released a statement that was not even trying to hide its excitement. "Entering the top 10 largest Powerball jackpots is when we historically see a lot of players join in the game," Durrell said, per CBS News.
Translation: the jackpot getting obscenely large is good for business, because humans are wired to ignore 1-in-292-million odds the moment a number gets nine figures long. This is not a criticism, exactly. It is just the thing that is happening. The lottery has always been, at its core, a voluntary tax on hope, and at $905 million, hope is having a very good sales quarter.
For context on just how bad those odds are: you are roughly 250 times more likely to be struck by lightning this year than to win tonight's jackpot. You are more likely to be canonized as a Catholic saint. You are more likely to become President of the United States. These are not exaggerations. Look them up.
Now Accepting British Losers Too
Here is a development that somehow did not make bigger news: as of last month, Powerball tickets are now being sold in the United Kingdom. CBS News reports that U.K. players can buy in, but their tickets only count toward the jackpot itself, and the lower-tier prize structure works differently over there.
So the special American tradition of losing the lottery is now an international export. We sent the world democracy, rock and roll, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Now we are sending them the Powerball. Truly there is no culture more generous with its worst ideas.
The next drawings are Wednesday and Saturday. If nobody wins Monday's jackpot, the number goes up again. And again. The largest Powerball jackpot ever won was a $2.04 billion ticket sold in California in November 2022, per CBS News, which means this thing theoretically has room to run. God help us.
What Happens to the Winner, Hypothetically Speaking
Let's say someone matched 6, 37, 54, 55, 64, and Powerball 10. What now? They take the $391.9 million lump sum, the federal government immediately takes 37% of it, and then their state takes its cut on top of that. By the time the dust settles, a $905 million jackpot winner is walking away with somewhere in the neighborhood of $230 to $250 million after taxes, depending on where they live.
Still an incomprehensible amount of money. Still enough to solve essentially every problem a normal human being will ever have. But it is worth understanding that the headline number and the actual check you receive are separated by a substantial gap that the lottery does not put in its advertising.
Wednesday's drawing is next. The jackpot will be bigger if tonight's drawing produced no winner. The cycle continues. America feeds the machine.
The Dingo Take
You are supposed to look at a 1-in-292-million probability and feel rationally discouraged. And yet here we are, $905 million deep into a national collective delusion, and the only honest thing to say is that it's working exactly as designed. The lottery does not exist to make you rich. It exists to make you feel, for $2 and about 48 hours, like you might be. That feeling is the product. The jackpot is just the billboard.
None of this is secret information. Everyone knows the odds. Statisticians have written about this until they're blue in the face. And still, when the number crosses $500 million, $700 million, $900 million, something in the human brain short-circuits and the rational objections go quiet. "But someone has to win" is the most seductive sentence in American consumer culture, and the Multi-State Lottery Association has built an empire on it.
So buy your ticket if you want. The $2 is not going to change your life either way, and the 48 hours of technically-possible-billionaire fantasy is arguably worth something. Just don't kid yourself about what you're paying for. And if those numbers do match up somewhere out there tonight, congratulations. You've beaten odds that make getting eaten by a shark look like a reasonable weekly commute risk.
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