Connect with us

Business

A free trip to Mars, free burgers for life, and $1 million: what a perfect March Madness bracket could win you as Warren Buffett and Elon Musk chip in

Published

on



  • Billionaires including Elon Musk and Warren Buffett are offering millions of dollars in prizes for the lucky basketball fan who can select a perfect March Madness bracket.

If you want to be one of the first people to step foot on Mars for free, now’s your chance: you just have to be unworldly at predicting basketball games.

Elon Musk’s X Bracket Challenge is offering basketball fans a free trip to the Red Planet on SpaceX’s Starship vehicle if you can correctly pick a perfect March Madness bracket. But don’t get your hopes up. The coin flip odds are about 1 in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 (that’s 9.22 quintillion), according to the NCAA. If you know ball, the odds are brought down to 1 in 120.2 billion. 

This improbability isn’t expected to stop any of the millions of Americans of all generations who plan to fill out an NCAA Divison I basketball tournament bracket this year. In fact, the stakes are higher than ever, with Musk joining Warren Buffett and sports outlets to offer prizes worth millions of dollars to any luck bracket guessers.

Billionaires’ bracket promises

Because humans aren’t expected to get to Mars for years, SpaceX has standby prizes. Musk’s company will provide the perfect bracket winner $250,000, one year of free Starlink service, and a chance to send a personal item to space on a Falcon 9 launch. If there’s no perfect bracket, the best bracket will win $100,000. This venture into sports is likely part of Musk’s goal to make X an “everything app.”

Warren Buffett keeps his prizes simple: cold hard cash. He once offered $1 billion to anyone if they could pick a perfect bracket in 2014. But he’s since lowered the award to $1 million and limited the competition to his Berkshire Hathaway employees.

As he approaches 95 years old, he’s eager to give away money for a sport he loves. This year, he’s lowered the stakes by promising to award $1 million to someone who wins at least 30 of the game’s 32 first-round games

“I hope it’s this year,” he told The Wall Street Journal. “We made it easier this year than ever.” 

Musk alluded last month that AI, like his own Grok, could be the secret to creating a perfect March Madness bracket and winning challenges, such as Buffett’s.

Everything you can win with a perfect—or pretty good—bracket

Submitting March Madness brackets can feel like a full-time job if you want to maximize your possibilities of winning. Many outlets, including ESPN, CBS Sports, NCAA, and USA Today, have online portals for fans to submit their picks for the men’s and women’s tournaments, and each has its winning possibilities:

  • USA Today: Win $1 million with a perfect bracket in either tournament. The best bracket can win $25,000.
  • ESPN: Upwards of $135,000 in prizes are up for grabs for brackets for both tournaments.
  • CBS Sports: Entered to win a Nissan Armada by submitting both brackets. If your bracket is among the top 10% of point scorers, CBS Sports will put you in a contest to win a trip to next year’s men’s or women’s Final Four competition.
  • NCAA: If the men’s or women’s bracket is within the top 1%, you are entered into a contest to win a trip to one of next year’s Final Four competitions.

If that wasn’t enough, you could win free food for life at some local and regional restaurants across the country. For example, Jesse’s Burgers & Shakes in Texas is offering free burgers for life for a perfect bracket. The best bracket entered in Currito’s, found in Florida, Maryland, and Illinois, competition can win one free meal per week for a year. 

Prediction markets are getting in on basketball, too. Robinhood is launching a dedicated hub offering contracts related to March Madness games. 

With four newcomer teams to the men’s tournament this year—Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, University of Nebraska Omaha, High Point University, and University of California San Diego—this year’s March Madness results may be even more unpredictable—and possibly more exciting than ever before.

But considering many games are played during the workday, bosses may not be happy. One study found that workers will spend six paid work hours focused on sports-related activities during the tournament, such as monitoring the games, checking on their brackets, or yapping with co-workers.

March Madness begins this week with the first four games on Tuesday and Wednesday evening and first-round games on Friday. The championship game will be played on Monday, April 7.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com



Source link

Continue Reading

Business

Trump-backed World Liberty Financial raises $550 million in WLFI token sales

Published

on

World Liberty Financial, the decentralized finance platform backed by President Donald Trump, announced this week that it has raised a total of $550 million in a series of token sales.

“This milestone proves that those who truly understand crypto and finance recognize what we’re building—and that WLFI is on track to supercharge DeFi as it transforms global finance in the coming years,” Zach Witkoff, cofounder of World Liberty Financial, said in a statement earlier this week. 

The company sold $300 and $250 million worth of Ethereum, Bitcoin, Tron, Ondo, Sui, and other cryptocurrencies. The purchases are part of its strategic token reserve which “helps strengthen leading cryptocurrency projects while providing stability to its treasury through diversification before ultimate disposition,” the company said in a statement. 

World Liberty Financial also says it has “established key relationships” with major players in the crypto space including other decentralized finance platforms like ONDO Finance, Sui, and Aave. Justin Sun, the founder of Tron blockchain, has invested $75 million in World Liberty Financial since Trump’s election in November. 

“The token sales are just the beginning,” Witkoff said in a statement this week. “We’re gearing up to launch a wave of disruptive technology that will redefine the boundaries of what’s possible with digital assets.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com



Source link

Continue Reading

Business

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang called GTC a Super Bowl where there are no losers — then he tackled concerns about China’s DeepSeek

Published

on



  • Jensen Huang reaffirmed Nvidia’s starring role in the AI industry during a keynote address at Nvidia’s annual GTC conference on Tuesday. Through its new open-source software, Huang showed how Nvidia can ramp up DeepSeek R1’s efficiency 30-fold. Yet, while he spoke, Nvidia’s stock price dropped more than 3%—after the company announced its GPU timelines.

Clad in his signature black leather, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang took center stage at Nvidia GTC on Tuesday, defending the chip maker’s dominance in the industry and touting the impact it could have on DeepSeek. 

The event drew more than 25,000 people to the SAP Center’s National Hockey League arena, and Huang opened the keynote by launching t-shirts into the crowd and coronating this year’s GTC the “Super Bowl of AI.”

“The only difference is everybody wins at this Super Bowl, everybody’s a winner,” he joked. And like the Super Bowl, there were GTC watch parties and packed crowds to get a glimpse of Huang on stage. 

With his address, Huang sought to dispel any uneasiness around AI investment, and said discussion about lower spending does not concern Nvidia. In January, apprehension engulfed the chip maker after it lost $589 billion in market cap in a single day after Chinese AI reasoning model Deepseek R1 claimed to operate at a fraction of the cost. 

While large language models offer foundational knowledge, reasoning models offer more complex, analytical responses. Using the company’s new open source software Nvidia Dynamo, Huang said the tech giant’s Blackwell chips will be able to make DeepSeek R1 30 times faster. He then played a video demonstrating for the crowd how it could be done.

“Dynamo can capture that benefit and deliver 30 times more performance in the same number of GPUs in the same architecture for reasoning models like DeepSeek,” said Ian Buck, vice president and general manager of Nvidia’s hyperscale and HPC computing business.

From there, Huang’s keynote covered everything from the chip maker’s plans to roll out its newest chips— Blackwell Ultra later this year, Vera Rubin in 2026, and Feynman in 2027.

“We have an annual rhythm of roadmaps that has been laid out for you,” Huang said.

While Nvidia’s announced its strategic runway for years to come, that wasn’t enough to stop the stock’s slide. The chip maker’s share price tumbled 3.4% Tuesday.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com



Source link

Continue Reading

Business

Cathie Wood says most memecoins will end up ‘worthless’

Published

on

Most of the so-called memecoins that are flooding the $2.6 trillion cryptocurrency space will probably end up “worthless,” according to Cathie Wood. 

The combination of blockchain technology and artificial intelligence is creating “millions” of meme cryptocurrencies that “are not going to be worth very much,” the ARK Investment Managment LLC founder and CEO told Bloomberg Television on Tuesday, adding that her private funds are not putting money into these coins. 

Memecoins are a type of digital asset often inspired by jokes, current events or trends in popular culture. In February, the US Securities and Exchange Commission said memecoins are not considered securities so they will remain unregulated.

“If I have one message for those listening who are buying memecoins: buyer beware,” said Wood. “There’s nothing like losing money for people to learn, and they’ll learn that the SEC and regulators are not taking responsibility for these memecoins.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com



Source link

Continue Reading

Trending

Copyright © Miami Select.