The fortune of a lifetime is waiting for a lucky winner in the Mega Millions lottery, which has ballooned to $1.55 billion. And if it seems like there are more record-setting jackpots occurring these days, it’s not your imagination.
The huge winnings aren’t occurring by chance, College of the Holy Cross economics professor Victor Matheson told CBS News earlier this year. The Multi-State Lottery Association (MUSL), a not-for-profit that coordinates the Mega Millions, has engineered the game to generate even large sums, he noted.
Including Tuesday’s upcoming drawing, there have been about half a dozen jackpots that have exceeded $1 billion during the past five years, according to Matheson.
Mega Millions’ next drawing
The next drawing — slated for 11 p.m. Eastern Tuesday — is one of a growing number of massive lottery jackpots in recent years.
A Powerball player in California won a $2 billion jackpot in November, while two anonymous Mega Millions players in suburban Chicago won a $1.3 billion prize last fall.
The largest Mega Millions payout ever won so far happened in October 2018 to a South Carolina resident who won $1.5 billion, lottery officials said.
Mega millions numbers
Hitting the jackpot would give someone a series of annuity payments for across 30 years, or the winner could opt for a one-time cash option of $757.2 million.
The winner would take home the largest prize in Mega Millions history.
The jackpot rose to its current figure because no one picked the winning numbers — 11, 30, 45, 52 and 56, and Mega Ball 20 — on Friday, August 4.
Why are the jackpots getting bigger?
In the past decade, MUSL transformed Mega Millions into a national game, making it more difficult to win the jackpot. Among those changes was a doubling of the ticket price, from $1 to $2.
As the Washington Post reported in 2018, the new rules also gave Mega Millions participants more numbers to choose from, making it tougher to guess the combination needed to win the jackpot. Mega Millions is played in 45 states along with Washington, D.C., and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
With the lower odds of picking winning numbers plus higher ticket prices, the jackpot is more likely to grow faster from week to week, Matheson said.
The massive winnings also induce more people to buy tickets, adding to the jackpot. Americans are 15 times more likely to buy a ticket when the lottery’s winnings climb toward $1 billion versus when the prize winnings are just $20 million, he said.
Even though it’s tempting to buy a ticket — and to dream of what you’d do with the jackpot — participants have a better chance of being struck by lightning than winning the Mega Millions. The odds of winning Tuesday’s drawing is about one in 302.5 million.
“To put it into perspective, the typical person who is a golfer would have about a 1-in-15,000 chance in making a hole-in-one on a particular hole,” Matheson said. “So winning the Powerball or the Mega Millions is like getting two hole-in-ones in a row when playing golf.”