Since Tuesday night’s Mega Millions lottery did not result in any winners, the new jackpot has ballooned to an estimated $476 million, an all-time record high, for a drawing to be held on Friday.
While lottery officials say the odds of winning the Mega Millions jackpot are about 1 in 176 million, the allure of a half-billion dollar jackpot is creating unprecedented excitement around the unprecedented jackpot. As citizens around the U.S. daydream about all of the ways they could spend almost half a billion dollars, here is an exhaustive list of 50 great things you could do with the jackpot winnings if you are in fact Friday’s lucky winner.
Let’s practice, shall we? Ahem…
“Congratulations, you’ve just won $476 million from Mega Millions! What will you do next?!”
1. Quit your job.
2. Sell the money on eBay for more money.
3. Play “If I Had A Million Dollars” by Barenaked Ladies 476 consecutive times.
4. Post bail for Anna Gristina, Manhattan’s “madam.”
5. Buy 952,000 new iPads.
6. Donate $475,999,999 to Planned Parenthood, and $1 to Susan G. Komen.
7. Pay Bioware to create a new ending for Mass Effect 3. Then buy Bioware.
8. Buy 197 Bugatti Veyron Super Sports cars, the most expensive street legal car on the market.
9. Buy a yacht, then burn it down and buy a new one.
10. Buy a house in every U.S. state.
11. Buy an island!
12. Save the money… pff, who are you kidding?
17. Pay actors to re-enact the Civil War on your front lawn.
14. Take 286,746 round-trip flights on Singapore Air, one of the finest luxury airlines.
15. Build a library in your name, or if you don’t read books, build a movie theatre.
16. Show off on Reddit.
17. Buy the Mega Millions company and show ’em who’s boss.
18. Bury it.
19. Give hundred dollar bills to random people on the street.
20. Make every surface into your home into Tempur-Pedic.
21. Take a trip to space.
22. Buy two Siberian tigers and name them after two famous singers. (Ex: “Simon” and “Garfunkel”)
23. Take a trip to a new country each week.
24. Buy every copy of Titanic and have a good cry by yourself (for many reasons).
25. Buy 476,000 “Golden Opulence Sundaes” from NYC’s Serendipity 3.
26. Have kids, support them, send them to college, all that boring responsible stuff.
27. Buy Boardwalk and Park Place.
28. Buy a bunch of old dinosaur bones, and then throw them away because there’s nowhere to put them.
29. Buy a lot of tuxedos, and never wear anything else.
30. Get yourself covered in diamonds permanently.
31. Purchase every restaurant you go to.
32. Buy hundreds of cars to perform stunts in, and then pay off police when things go awry.
33. Move to Las Vegas and start a casino in your name.
34. Buy a hockey or a soccer team, and then pay people to watch those sports.
35. Travel to the bottom of the Mariana Trench with James Cameron.
36. Go skydiving with The Pussycat Dolls.
37. Pay Justin Bieber to stop singing, performing, and making appearances.
38. Pay Morgan Freeman to narrate your life.
39. Buy a house and fill it with chutes and ladders.
40. Buy “promoted tweets” for everything you tweet.
41. Visit a DNA Research Center and get some gills.
42. Have Beyonce clean your house every Tuesday.
43. Buy a California Condor and teach it to swoop down and scare your neighbors.
44. Import your groceries: Cheese from France, chocolate from Belgium, lobster from Maine, and freedom fries from Alabama.
45. Buy a house made of Legos.
46. Have Meryl Streep read you a bedtime story every night.
47. Buy Mark Zuckerberg’s friendship.
48. Have an artist carve out a marble fountain in your likeness, with you in your favorite pose.
49. Buy a golden carriage and two giraffes, and have your giraffes pull the carriage.
50. Pay back your parents for, well, everything.
Mega Millions drawings are held Tuesdays and Fridays at 11 p.m. The largest Mega Millions jackpot ever won was $390 million in March 2007.
