$134 billion-worth Warren Buffett once offered $1 billion in prize money for making a perfect March Madness bracket

March Madness is set to kick off with the Final Four on Tuesday. The Howard Bison will face the Wagner Seahawks, while the Virginia Cavaliers will take on the Colorado State Rams. The first round is set to begin on Thursday. Fans will spend the next few days filling out brackets, hoping to predict a perfect bracket.

Previously, doing so resulted in a $1 billion prize, courtesy of Warren Buffett. The Berkshire Hathaway CEO partnered with Quicken Loans, beginning in 2014, to offer any fan of the sport who could predict a perfect bracket the opportunity to become a billionaire.

The following year, however, after legal issues with Yahoo! surrounding the promotion, it was scrapped and only available to employees at Berkshire Hathaway or any of its subsidiaries.

Buffett's contest was later adjusted to offer $1 million every year for life to any employee who could correctly predict how the March Madness bracket would play out through the Sweet Sixteen.

Additionally, the employee with the bracket that is closest to perfect takes home a $100,000 prize. There has never been any announced winner to take home the grand prize, and there has been no announcement that the challenge will take place in 2024.

While it is expected to take place, it is unclear if Buffett will double the prize if the winner is a team from his home state of Nebraska, as he has done in the past.

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Has there ever been a perfect March Madness bracket?

There has never been a verified perfect March Madness bracket, and the odds of correctly predicting each game are just one in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808.

In fact, the longest that a bracket has remained perfect came in 2019 as Gregg Nigl, a neuropsychologist from Columbus, Ohio, correctly predicted the first 49 games of the NCAA Tournament. His streak was eventually snapped in the Sweet Sixteen as the Purdue Boilermakers defeated the Tennessee Volunteers 99-94 in overtime.

Prior to Nigl, the longest a bracket stayed alive was 39 games in 2017. Ironically, the Boilermakers also spoiled that bracket in the second round as they defeated the Iowa State Cyclones by a score of 80-76.

In the three NCAA Tournaments since Nigl's bracket remained perfect until the Sweet Sixteen, there has not been a single bracket to survive the opening round. College basketball fans around the world will hope to change that over the next few weeks.