The Powerball numbers drawn Saturday night in Tallahassee, Florida, turned four ticket holders into newly minted millionaires, but did not produce a winner of the $70 million jackpot . That means, add another $10 million to the pile — Wednesday’s drawing is worth $80 million to whoever matches all six numbers.
Meanwhile, if you’ve ever wondered what you would do if you hit the Powerball jackpot, look only to Joseph Saxer as an example . The retired Air Force man claimed a $60 million prize this week, after winning the Powerball jackpot in the March 1 drawing. Saxer bought his ticket at Tooley Oil in McClellan, California.
The business received a $300,000 payout from the lottery as a reward for selling the winning ticket. But what was Saxer’s reward, other than the $60 million?
“I took my wife to Carl’s Jr. and we got a buy one get one free of the, what they call the ‘Philly Cheese,’ and we shared a Coke then went back home,” he said.
Okay, so Mr. Saxer isn’t the most exciting guy in the world. But there is another, much bigger winner in California who still has not emerged. On February 19, one Powerball player at a gas station in Milpitas won the sixth-largest lottery jackpot in U.S. history. But whoever that person is, he or she has made no attempt to contact the lottery commission almost a month later.
You can buy a lot of Carl’s Jr. burgers for $425.3 million, so maybe that person is just taking time to figure out what to do with all that cash.
Saturday night’s Powerball drawing was good for $1 million to ticket buyers in Florida, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania — while one player in West Virginia activated the Power Play option and matched the first five numbers for a $2 million prize.
Out of the 15,271,188 tickets sold , there were 485,620 that produced some level of winner. Find out if you were one of them by checking your Powerball ticket against these numbers:
2 — 5 — 34 — 51 — 58 Powerball 9
There were 22 tickets that matched four of the first five numbers plus the Powerball. Of those, 13 can claim a $10,000 prize, while five Power Play winners will take home $40,000. In California, under that state’s pari-mutuel payout system, four “4+1” Powerball tickets turned out to be worth only $5,616 each.
