(Photo by Daniel Zuchnik/WireImage)2017 DANIEL ZUCHNIK
Famed investor Warren Buffett ranks as the world’s third-richest person, with a net worth of $83.5 billion. The Oracle of Omaha has already given away $35 billion and has promised to donate more than 99% of his fortune when he dies.
But at 88, Buffett is still alive and well, and last month on CNBC, he announced another kind of giveaway. His annual March Madness bracket contest tips off next week with the men’s NCAA basketball tournament. First prize is $1 million a year for life for the person who can pick a perfect Sweet 16 in the tourney. One catch to enter the contest: You must be an employee at Berkshire Hathaway, where Buffett is CEO.
Berkshire is a sprawling conglomerate with nearly 400,000 employees across more than 60 companies. It ranked second in the U.S. and fourth in the world last year in the Forbes Global 2000, which combines the size ranks on market value, sales, profits and assets of the largest publicly traded companies. BNSF Railway (45,000 employees) and Geico (40,000 employees) are the largest Berkshire entities by head count; Berkshire’s headquarters has only 26 employees. Other top Berkshire brands include Clayton Homes, Duracell, Dairy Queen and NetJets.
The odds are extremely stacked against anyone getting the final 16 teams right. A string of upsets last year meant none of the 17.3 million ESPN brackets had a perfect Sweet 16. The previous year was better, with 18 out of 18 million ESPN brackets picking the Sweet 16 correctly, but that still made for a one-in-a-million longshot. Roughly 100,000 Berkshire employees completed brackets in past years.
With that in mind, Buffett added a “consolation” prize last year: The best performance over the first two rounds wins $100,000.
Last year, no Berkshire employees made it out of the first round alive. The final eight employee brackets were eliminated when No. 4 seed Wichita State lost to No. 13 Marshall, according to the Omaha World-Herald. Those eight employees split the $100,000 prize. Buffett says one employee picked 31 of the 32 first-round games correctly the previous year.
Buffett did his first March Madness challenge in 2014, in conjunction with mortgage company Quicken Loans. The contest was open to anyone and offered $1 billion for a perfect bracket, with the number of entries capped at 15 million. It was great marketing for Quicken Loans, thanks to more than a billion social media and news impressions for the brand. It was also a safe bet: The odds of picking a perfect bracket run as high as 1 in 9.2 quintillion (that’s 18 zeroes). The last three brackets in the contest were eliminated after 25 first-round games.
Berkshire employees need to get their 2019 brackets in before the first games begin on March 20. As for the rest of us, Warren is hiring.
No hay comentarios.:
Publicar un comentario