A middle-aged woman in Massachusetts is now the proud owner of the second-largest lottery jackpot in the history of the United States.
53-year-old Mavis Wanczyk was named as the latest Powerball winner, with a jackpot of $758 million that was up for grabs when the numbers were selected. Her first order of business? Call in rich to her job and telling her boss she won't be coming back ever again. “Last night, it was kind of like — I didn’t realize I had won,” she said in a press conference that was covered by The Washington Post. “I had a pipe dream, and my pipe dream finally came true,” she added. Her hope had been to retire early from the Mercy Medical Center, a place where she had worked for 32 years. Now, there won't be need for her to pull a 9-to-5 to get by.
As per a follow-up on the story from TMZ, Wanczyk stands to take home an estimated $336,350,655 after taxes. That already puts her in elite company in terms of personal wealth. She now has more money to her name than Mick Jagger ($305 million), Kanye West ($145 million), Kim Kardashian ($175 million) and Katy Perry ($280 million). She still has a long way to go in terms of competing with the richest people on the planet however. The wealthiest man on Earth, Bill Gates, recently reclaimed that title after reportedly being worth over $80 billion. It turns out that Wanczyk is also single, so she shouldn't have a shortage of suitors lining up to help her spend her new-found cash out on the town.
She only bought one ticket, purchasing it more than 80 miles from Watertown, MA, in Chicopee, where Wanczyk lives. This is the second consecutive year where the Powerball prize topped $500 during a 12-month span, with most people trying to get in on last year's record-setting $1.6 billion prize, which was eventually split three ways back in January of 2016. Powerball is currently played in 44 states as well as the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The game consists of correctly picking the winning first five white balls, which are drawn from a drum that holds 69 total balls, and one red ball, known as the "Powerball", which is drawn from a drum holding 26 balls. The odds of correctly picking all six numbers correctly are roughly 1 in 292 million.
