A lucky person who bought a ticket in Arkansas will take home a whopping $1.817 billion Powerball jackpot, which has a cash option of $834.9 million.
The Christmas Eve prize is the second-largest U.S. lottery jackpot ever won and the largest Powerball prize this year, according to a news release from the Multi-State Lottery Association.
Old money vs new money. You can read about that more in books like The Great Gatsby.
High net worth individuals don’t have the same income on paper (because that would be taxable at a very high rate), so most of their wealth is tied in assets and investments that can be pulled from and taxed at a much lower rate (or even tax free in certain cases). An ordinary person with a sudden windfall doesn’t have the same treatment, and get the full amount taxed.
Also, the lottery is a tax on those who don’t understand (or are willing to learn) about statistics. Never play.
I bought a ticket this time around, and I understand statistics. I understand that my odds of winning are infinitely better with one ticket than no tickets. But the difference between one ticket and more than one ticket is inconsequential. So one ticket it is.
I also understand the odds of winning Powerball are about 1 in 300 million. So once the jackpot gets over 600m or so, the expected value is high enough to justify buying that one ticket.
So, when I see the jackpot get big, I buy a ticket, and dont get my hopes up.
You’d be better off contributing that ticket’s cost as a contribution towards an index or money market fund. Reliable returns compared to that ticket lol
There’s also the entertainment value of the ticket.
No no, I understand the improbability and don’t play, which means I’m better than everyone who does. Quit having fun. Right? Right?
Not only do you recognize the improbability but also the carelessness of throwing that $2 away instead of buying $2 worth of stock which would allow you to retire 3 minutes earlier 35 years from now.
Nah, there’s nothing wrong with having fun. It’s just that you’ll likely never experience the win in your lifetime, so I’d rather use that collective money over time to buy a couple steam games or something, ya know?
Nah that’s fair. It’s just nothing you do in a game will ever matter, so I’d rather use that extra time to daydream and talk to my friends and family about what we’d do as billionaires, ya know?
Fair enough.
The odds of $5 into an index fund turning into $700 million are in fact lower than the odds of winning the Powerball. An occasional gamble in the Powerball is not going to end my retirement plans any more than the occasional latte or avocado toast.
If you read The Rich and the Super-rich, he talks quite a bit about how they make use of foundations to keep money out of the hands of the public.
The book is pretty old now, but I doubt the game has changed all that much.
I doubt it’s any coincidence that all these new money players - Zuckerberg, Musk, Ellison, and Gates all have foundations…all of that money would likely be better managed by public initiatives (assuming we don’t have insane administration like we do right now, of course), but due to their personal arrogance and the secret mission of PRESERVING wealth, they form these foundations.
And quite a few people think that these guys are really the best people (due to Worthington’s Law) to oversee and direct money at various problems to be solved - call me skeptical, even in the case of Gates, who may actually be sincere in some things and have the aptitude for it.
It depends on how the states distribute the income from the lotto. Sometimes a neighbor and I buy a ticket and view it as a donation to the generations behind us.