It is commonly understood that the record jackpot is $363 million set in May of 2000 in the Big Game lottery. Well guess what, the record was recently broken in the US with a $448 million jackpot.
There were a couple of catches though.
First, the cost of a ticket was $2.
Second, and more importantly, the odds of winning the $448 million jackpot were astronomical. In fact the odds were something like 1 in 25,669,770,000,000,000.
With those crazy odds, I calculated how much one would have to spend to bring the odds closer to say the Mega Millions lottery at 1 in 175.7 million. The cost would be around $24,000. So I did not try to win the $448 million lottery.
Now for the rest of the story.
On Oct 19, 2005, one could have spent $2 to buy a Powerball ticket and a Mega Millions ticket. The total jackpot prize was $448 million ($340 million for the Oct 19 Powerball draw and $108 million for Oct 21 Mega Millions draw). This was the largest combined jackpot every offered in the US.
By the way, the $24,000 cost was made up of 13,000 Mega Millions tickets and 11,000 Powerball tickets.