The Lottery vs. Investing
The odds of winning the Powerball jackpot with one ticket are 1 in 292,201,338. Since the April 2025 redesign, the Mega Millions jackpot odds are 1 in 290,472,336. For comparison, the U.S. National Weather Service puts the odds of being struck by lightning in an 80-year lifetime at about 1 in 15,300. Because lotteries keep a share of every dollar for the state and for costs, the expected value of a ticket is below its price. The lottery odds calculator compares a ticket habit with investing the same money.
How Billionaires Actually Got Rich
The largest fortunes on the Forbes and Bloomberg lists come overwhelmingly from owning a large stake in a fast-growing company — Amazon, Tesla, Microsoft, Meta, Alphabet, Oracle, Nvidia, Berkshire Hathaway — and holding it through steep drawdowns. Amazon's stock, for example, fell more than 90% after the dot-com bubble burst. Few people can replicate that, but the principles scale down: own productive assets, hold them through volatility, and give compounding time. Warren Buffett is the classic example of time: as Morgan Housel notes in The Psychology of Money (2020), the vast majority of Buffett's net worth was accumulated after his 50th birthday. See the billionaire wealth timeline.
"If I Had Invested..."
Looking back, a few assets — Bitcoin, Nvidia, Apple, Amazon, Tesla — turned small sums into fortunes. The hard part is that nobody knew in advance which ones would, and each of them suffered drawdowns of 50% to over 80% along the way. Bitcoin has fallen more than 70% several times. Explore the numbers in the if you invested calculator, then compare them with steady index investing in the S&P 500 calculator.
The Real Lessons
- Probability: a 1-in-292-million chance is, for planning purposes, zero.
- Ownership: great fortunes come from owning equity. An index fund gives everyone a small slice of hundreds of companies.
- Time: the same monthly contribution given 40 years instead of 10 ends up many times larger.