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Image with bad Powerball math goes viral on social media

Published  January 12, 2016 8:38am CST
Good Day Chicago
FOX 32 Chicago

CHICAGO (FOX 32 News) - An image is making its way around Facebook - in fact, it's been shared nearly 1.3 million times!

The image shows a billboard that states that with a $1.3 billion jackpot, each person in America could receive $4.33 million and potentially solve poverty.

But here’s the problem -- that's not right at all.

If the math were done correctly, you would realize that each person in the U.S would only receive $4.33, not quite enough to solve poverty.

Additionally, with $1.4 billion on the line, everyone is talking about what you could buy with it.

With that money, you could buy:

  •                 156,867,470 cups of Starbucks coffee.
  •                 1,643,939 one-day trips to Disneyland.
  •                 76 private islands.

The odds of winning the Powerball are about one in 292 million, but that's a hard thing to wrap your brain around.

So the good folks at the LA Times have created a Powerball simulator which allows you to put in how much you'd like to spend on tickets and then keep playing until you either win the jackpot or run out of money.

The numbers eventually show that it doesn't really matter how many tickets you buy -- you're really probably not going to win.