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The Mega Millions lottery has posted its biggest ever December jackpot, with $740 million up for grabs.
The total is the eighth-biggest in the game’s history, and comes as a consequence of no ticket matching all six numbers drawn last Friday night.
The next largest December jackpot for this lottery was in 2013, when it hit $648 million before it was won by multiple people in California and Georgia.
Of course, the odds of winning the current jackpot are almost comically small: one in 302,575,350, according to lottery organizers.
“Mega Millions is the only lottery game that has produced six jackpots greater than $1 billion. All were won in different states – South Carolina was the first in 2018, followed by Michigan in 2021, Illinois in 2022, Maine in early 2023, Florida last August and New Jersey in March,” said the organizers.
The overall record was reached last August, when one person from Florida won a jackpot totalling $1.6 billion.
But this amount was not the biggest American lottery win of all time. That was the record-breaking $2 billion prize won by Edwin Castro of California in February 2023.
Castro, who bought his ticket at a gas station in Altadena in the mountains above Los Angeles, beat the odds of 292,000,000-to-one to win the prize, and helped raise, by playing the lottery, a likewise record-breaking $156 million for California’s public school system.
Castro declined to attend the news conference in his honor and asked to remain private, only releasing a statement saying that he had been educated in California public schools and was happy to see them get more funding.
