Warren Buffett’s annual March Madness bracket challenge at Berkshire Hathaway ended this week without a million-dollar winner, though it was an exciting showdown. The competition was launched in 2016. It offers a huge jackpot prize to workers who manage to make perfect or almost perfect brackets for the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament. This year, one of Berkshire’s subsidiaries had an employee that really stepped into the spotlight – FlightSafety International. The group that won went the distance, winning victory by correctly predicting all 32 first-round games.
Over the years, this Oracle of Omaha, as Buffett is sometimes called, changed the rules of the game repeatedly on the competition. At first this was the challenge, to have participants guess the Sweet Sixteen winners exactly, which no one did. In reaction, the regulations changed. This year, participants had to correctly guess the winners of all 32 first-round games to be able to claim the $1 million prize. Nonetheless, with all of these changes, the jackpot continued to be elusive.
Given the level of participation, it was pretty good to have 12 Berkshire employees successfully predict all 31 of those 32 games. The sharpest predictor took home the prize for choosing winners in 29 straight games before suffering an L. Though no one won the million-dollar grand prize, the best performers didn’t walk away without a prize. The other eleven competitors were rewarded with $100,000 for their outstanding achievements.
Buffett’s challenge is what continues to engage everyone at Berkshire Hathaway. It provides employees an exciting opportunity to participate in “March Madness” each year. As one of the most famous and dedicated Creighton basketball fans, Buffett philanthropy injects a personal aspect into the competition by giving participants unique benefits. In addition, contestants will be able to forfeit the results of up to eight games between No.1 and No.2 seeds.
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