I don't think it has ever been unusual for the first draw or two to be underfunded, but they need to offer some minimum amount or even the addicts might stop playing. MM is gambling that $50 million is the minimum advertised jackpot that will get enough people playing, while posing a minimum risk of paying a jackpot before it's fully funded. The most recent example I see is when MM was hit on the first drawing a couple of years ago. Total sales of $19,255,000 only funded $13,759,894 of the starting jackpot. That left them with $6,240,106 worth of annuity to fund at a cost of about $3.29 million. Of course the winner almost certainly took the cash, which was advertised at $10.5 million and about $3 million more than the had. I'm not going to check, but the higher pre-covid starting jackpots probably have a bunch where somebody hit on the first drawing, but usually probability works its magic and very few jackpots are hit while they're underfunded. What's absolutely certain is that the lotteries make a lot of money n the long run, even if it's a hair under their 50% target.
As for what a winner actually gets, they have to pay the advertised amount, while they're only making the minimum increases. The lotteries get away with stuff a private company never would but I don't think they can claim that was only an estimate, because they know that it's very unlikely, or impossible with MM's current format, to sell enough tickets to fund it. Even if they wouldn't get in legal trouble, I can't imagine they'd want the publicity of advertising a cash value of $22.4 million and then offering less than $6 million. For the current run they only had enough to fund $13,133,202 of the starting $50 million advertised annuity, or just a hair over 26%. The annuity is funded with the cash value, so the cash that was funded by sales was about $5.884 million.
Once they get past the minimum increases the advertised prizes are based on estimates of actual sales, so it's pretty reasonable to give them some wiggle room if the estimates are reasonable. Most of the time they are, but back in October 2023 MM got overly optimistic and advertised a jump from $1 billion to $1.6 billion. The $1 billion one was initially advertised at $868 million and then got bumped to $900 and finally $970 before the final accounting put it at an even billion. When PB passed a billion for th first time it did increase by a hair over $600 million, so maybe MM's estimate was reasonable, but I think the intervening 2 1/2 years should have made it obvious that sales were slower and they definitely weren't being conservative with their estimate. At any rate, the final tally came up a whopping $63 million short.
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