- Elon Musk says AI could allow someone to beat Warren Buffett’s March Madness bracket challenge.
- The xAI chief said Grok-3 model’s research skills could be helpful in filling out a perfect bracket.
- Buffett insured a $1 billion contest in 2014 but restricts his version to staff, and with a smaller prize.
Elon Musk says AI could be the key to filling out a perfect March Madness bracket and winning Warren Buffett’s challenge.
“So this is kind of a fun one,” he said during Monday’s launch for his startup xAI’s latest model, Grok-3. “If you can exactly match the entire winning tree of March Madness, you can win a billion dollars from Warren Buffett.”
Musk added it would be “pretty cool” if AI could help someone beat the monumental odds of creating a perfect bracket for the NCAA Division I men’s basketball tournament, and a “pretty good investment” if they earned a life-changing windfall.
The Tesla and SpaceX CEO later added that paying a monthly X Premium+ subscription to access Grok-3 — which could research the players and teams rapidly and in-depth — seemed appealing if “$40 might get you a billion dollars.”
Musk was likely referring to Dan Gilbert’s Quicken Loans, now called Rocket Mortgage, offering $1 billion in 2014 to anyone who could correctly predict the outcome of all 63 games — a feat with a probability of 9.2 quintillion to one. Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate insured the challenge.
It’s worth emphasizing that in 2016, Buffett brought the challenge in-house, cut the windfall to $1 million a year for life to any Berkshire employee who could pick a perfect bracket up until the Sweet 16, and promised a lump sum of $100,000 to whoever came closest.
The investor has run the contest almost every year since, and nobody has ever won the grand prize.
Even if Grok-3 could help someone build a flawless bracket, they would have to be a Berkshire employee to be eligible for Buffett’s big prize, and they’d only win $1 million a year.
Musk is personally worth almost $400 billion as of Monday’s market close, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Buffett is worth considerably less at around $150 billion, largely because he’s gifted more than half of his Berkshire stock to the Gates Foundation and four family foundations since 2006.
