An unnamed individual purchased the winning ticket at a Kroger grocery in Novi, a 60,000-people city 30 miles to the northwest of Detroit, Michigan. The Mega Millions winning numbers drawn on Friday night, January 22, 2021, were 4, 26, 42, 50, 60, and the Mega Ball 24. The lucky combination brought someone a whopping $1 billion pot, which is the third-biggest prize in the entire U.S. history.

According to the statement made by lottery officials, the winner will remain unidentified until he or she contacts their office and provides the winning ticket to claim the prize. Laws of Michigan demand that, for multi-state lotteries like Powerball or Mega Millions, the identity of winners be revealed and made publicly known.

How Much Will the Winner Receive?

As for receiving the prize money, the winner will have two payout options available to them. They can choose to be paid in cash once and receive an estimated $530 million, which is what will be left of the $1 billion pot once all taxes have been withheld. Alternatively, the winner can agree to be given an initial payment and have the rest of their winnings dished out to them in annual installments over the following 29 years. In this case, the amount paid by the lottery will be $739 million (after tax).

The annual payout scenario implies that the winner will immediately collect the initial take-home payment of $11.3 million and then continue getting allowances for another 29 years with the amount increasing by 5% yearly. This means that the very last payment made should amount to around $46.7 million, exclusive of tax, the lottery officials report.

How Possible Is It to Hit Jackpot in a Lottery Like Mega Millions?

According to the statistics provided by Mega Millions, the odds of correctly picking all six numbers drawn in the lottery on Friday, Jan. 22 were 1 in 302,575,350. The lucky Mega Millions numbers were matched just 48 hours after another insane pot of $731.1 million had been scooped in the Powerball lottery game by someone in Lonaconing, MD.

As with Mega Millions, the winning Powerball ticket was purchased in a local grocery store in Lonaconing – a former mining town with just 1,200 residents, a quarter of whom live below the poverty line. The place is also rather ill-reputed for having one of the highest rates of new Covid-19 patients per capita around the state.

How Will Novi Benefit from Someone Winning the Jackpot?

Both the Kroger reps and Novi officials have already expressed their congratulations to the lucky winner, with the mayor Bob Gatt adding that the timing could not be better as the news came shortly after the city was nominated the “second most innovative in the country” by Entrepreneur Magazine.

Mr. Gatt then went on describing Novi as a fast-developing, modern city, which is now a powerful car-manufacturing hub much favored by the country’s biggest tech companies, such as Google.

Mega Millions Jackpot History

The $1 billion jackpot was the second-largest prize offering in the history of the Mega Millions lottery game. Back in 2018, a person in South Carolina who later opted to stay anonymous bought a Mega Millions ticket that won them a staggering pot of $1.537 billion. To this day, that prize remains the biggest won on a single ticket in the worldwide history of lotteries.

The largest pot ever won in the U.S. Powerball lottery equaled $1.586 billion. In 2016, it was split between three lucky winners from the states of Florida, Tennessee, and California, as reported by Associated Press.

As experience shows, U.S. lottery winners sometimes choose to fight to protect their right to stay anonymous. Thus, in her 2018 lawsuit, a New Hampshire woman moved to keep her name from being revealed to the public after winning a Powerball lottery jackpot of $560 million. The judge on the case ruled to allow the woman who called herself Jane Doe to remain nameless.

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