The winning ticket for a $ 1 billion jackpot, the third largest lottery prize in the history of the United States, was sold in a Michigan supermarket, according to state lottery officials.
The winning numbers, drawn on Friday night, were chosen by a customer at a Kroger grocery store in Novi, a city of about 60,000 that is 30 miles northwest of Detroit.
State lottery officials said the winner’s identity will not be known until the person contacts him. Michigan law requires that winners of games played in several states, such as Mega Millions and Powerball, be publicly identified, said Jake Harris, spokesman for the state lottery.
The winner can choose to receive the prize through an initial payment and then annual payments for 29 years, or receive a one-time cash payment of approximately $ 739 million. In that case, the winner would receive about $ 530 million, net of taxes, state lottery officials said.
If the winner chooses an annual payment, the initial payment will be approximately $ 11.3 million after tax, with payments increasing by 5% each year. The final payment would be about $ 46.7 million after tax, Harris said.
The chances of winning the jackpot were 1 in 302,575,350, according to Mega Millions. The winning numbers in the Mega Millions lottery were 4, 26, 42, 50 and 60, with a Mega Ball number of 24.
The numbers were chosen two days after the numbers were selected for a winning ticket on a $ 731 million Powerball jackpot, which was sold in Lonaconing, Maryland, an unfortunate old mining town in the northwest corner of the state. The winning ticket was sold at Coney Market, a convenience store that sells sandwiches and pizza in Lonaconing, a city of about 1,200 in Allegany County, which has the largest number of Covid-19 boxes per capita in the state. About a quarter of Lonaconing’s population lives below the poverty line, according to census data.
A Kroger spokeswoman congratulated the Michigan winner and Novi Mayor Bob Gatt said the news came a month after the city was voted “the second most innovative city in the country” by Entrepreneur magazine.
He described Novi as a fast-growing city that had once been a rural Detroit outpost, but was now an automobile manufacturing center that was attracting tech companies like Google.
Mr. Gatt said he was “ecstatic” for the winner. “I would be better off if I had the winning ticket,” he said.
The jackpot was the second biggest prize in the history of Mega Millions.
In 2018, a person who chose to remain anonymous won $ 1.537 billion in South Carolina. This prize remains the largest lottery prize in the world ever awarded on a single ticket, according to Mega Millions.
The largest lottery prize ever awarded in the United States was a $ 1.586 billion Powerball jackpot in 2016, according to The Associated Press. It was split between three ticket winners in California, Florida and Tennessee.
Persistent mythology states that big jackpot winners are cursed after their lucky strokes. There are numerous reports of winners who, unprepared to manage their newly acquired wealth, struggle with drugs or alcohol, ruined relationships and insolvency.
While an influential study in 1978 found that lottery winners were no happier than their neighbors or more optimistic about the future, other studies have contested the notion of the so-called lottery curse.
Studies suggest that the overall psychological well-being of the winners returns over time.
In 2018, a woman from New Hampshire filed a lawsuit to prevent her name from being made public after she won $ 560 million in the Powerball lottery.
Lawyers for the woman, who called herself Jane Doe in the lawsuit, said she wished to use a portion of her winnings for charity “away from the brilliance and disgrace that often fell on other lottery ‘winners’.”
A judge allowed her to remain anonymous.