Soooooo…Nobody won the Mega Millions, and the jackpot is currently 1.55 BILLION bucks.
Just saying that, if I win, I will be buying this place, lock, stock and barrel.
Let the sucking up begin!
I’ve been tossing in $10 once or twice a week for a month now, first Powerball, now MM.
Heading to upstate NY for the weekend, I’m planning on buying the winning ticket.
I’ve said this before and will say it again. Winning that much money will destroy your life. A million or two could improve it, if wisely applied. A billion will destroy it. You will have no friends, no family – only vultures around you.
So no, I haven’t bought a ticket. If the winning ticket were in my hand right now, I would burn it.
Not only am I going to buy a few tickets, I’m already putting a few items in my Temu basket in anticipation of winning. I’ve been needing a new nose-hair trimmer and socks for a while now.
Just keep a couple mill for yourself, give a couple mill to each of your friends and family members and split the rest amongst your favorite charities and institutions. Oh, and a few mill for me of course—I promise to be your devoted friend.
Tell ya what. If you come across the winning ticket, I’ll buy it from you for a very reasonable, life-improving-but-not-life-destroying $5m.
Don’t do that-you could hurt yourself!
If you find yourself holding a winning ticket, just mail it to me, and I will post a somewhat blurry video of me carefully setting afire a small piece of paper roughly the size of that ticket.
Because I care.
It’s a deal. 
Nah. None of my friends are vultures. That’s why they are friends. I would set them up for life anyway.
I’ll buy new ones.
But it would be replaced by the life of someone keeping himself busy with shooting down the vultures from his supervillain lair while kitted in the finest style.
Remember that in order to give a prize of a billion, entrants have to lose about two billion.
I’d move to Texas for a week and collect my winnings anonymously. Then tell everyone that I won just enough to explain my upgrades. Sorry. Just enough left over to set up college trusts for the grands and a general emergency account under the control of an independent accountant.
I don’t know the US lottery system at all, so I am just wondering: how many different winning-number combinations are possible, how much would it cost to buy them all? What would it take to convince a bank to lend you that money? How much work would it be to fill in all those combinations (multiple ticket combos possible or only individual bets allowed?) and to sort out the winning tickets?
Lotteries are run by the States (or similar like Puerto Rico) and there are zillions of different games (drawings and scratch-off instant) across the US. However, there are two big multistate (all but a handful participate) games which make the news now and then: Powerball and Mega Millions. Wikipedia links with game details:
As I understand it, it all revolves around where you buy the ticket. So you’d have to buy it in a state without income tax (presumably why you chose Texas), not just collect there.
Thanks! I think the OP talks about Mega Millions, where according to your link the odds of winning the jackpot are
302,575,350 to 1
and a single tikeck costs 2 US$.
So right now I believe that it would be a good strategy to buy all the possible combinations.
I think the trick would be to figure out how to receive your winnings anonymously, and then not go absolutely nuts with it.
I mean, if you could set up a trust or something like that named the “Anus P. Hippofelcher Memorial Trust” (or something equally obscene and unprintable/unbroadcastable) and have your trust’s attorneys accept the winnings in its stead, you might go a long way toward anonymity.
From there, I would think the whole thing would be to not go completely berserk. Like no gold plated Rolls Royces, or giant mansions, or whatever. Maybe move to a house slightly better than what you could otherwise afford, get a car moderately better than what you can afford, and so forth. Only the people closest to you will be able to figure out that you’re living above what your means used to be- everyone else will assume you’re sacrificing somewhere else, or that you make more money than they thought you did, and so forth.
I would think the ultimate point of such a huge payout would be to instantly set up generational wealth for your family and/or substantially fund your causes/schools/etc…, not to literally live that large for a short period.
It’s up to you but I wouldn’t.
*The promoted jackpot value assumes annual payments over decades and the cash payout is far less.
*A lot of the win will go to taxes.
*Jackpots are frequently split.
*You sure you don’t have a better way to spend the $600M+ it would take, just for the ticket purchase?
It’s just an hypothetical, but I would borrow the money from the bank, with the tickets as collateral. If it does not work out, I’d pull a tanTrump and declare insolvency. 
Now if were an asshole billionaire who engage in all kind of pissing contests (several come to mind) I would do it to piss off the real winners who played by the rules and got their jackpot cut in half because of me, because I could.
Bear also in mind that I would not only win the jackpot, but also all the other, lesser prices, which also add up. When the jackpot alone is twice the sum of all ticket costs the strategy should work.