Florida Ticket Sold at a Bradenton Wawa Store Wins Massive $800 Million Mega Millions Jackpot Prize

A single ticket sold in Florida has won the $800 million Mega Millions jackpot, instantly making its holder one of the largest lottery winners in state history.

The winning numbers drawn were 34, 48, 49, 59 and 70, with a Mega Ball of 12. Florida Lottery officials confirmed the winning ticket was sold at a Wawa convenience store located at 4510 State Road 70 East in Bradenton, a city on Florida's Gulf Coast.

The winner has not yet been publicly identified. Florida Lottery rules give winners the choice between receiving their prize as an annuity paid out in installments over 29 years, or taking a reduced lump-sum cash option. In this case, the cash option is valued at more than $344 million before taxes, according to lottery officials.

Following Tuesday night's drawing, the Mega Millions jackpot will reset to its starting value of $50 million ahead of the next scheduled drawing on Friday.

The win comes as another major national lottery drawing looms. Wednesday night's Powerball drawing carries an estimated jackpot of $663 million, with a cash value of more than $290 million. The Powerball numbers will be drawn at 11 p.m.

Mega Millions and Powerball are the two largest multistate lottery games in the United States, both offering jackpots that can grow into the hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars when they go extended periods without a winner. Odds of winning either game's top prize are extremely long, generally estimated at roughly 1 in 290 million for Mega Millions and 1 in 292 million for Powerball, reflecting the astronomically low probability that any single ticket matches all the required numbers.

Florida has a long history of producing major lottery winners, in part because the state does not levy a state income tax, meaning winners there keep more of their prize money after federal taxes than winners in many other states. Florida Lottery winners are still subject to federal tax withholding on lottery winnings, which is typically applied at the time the prize is claimed, though the exact final tax liability can vary depending on the winner's overall financial situation and how the payout is structured.

Wawa, the convenience store chain where the winning ticket was sold, is a widely recognized retailer across the Mid-Atlantic and Southeastern United States, known for its combination of fuel sales, prepared food and, as in this case, lottery ticket sales. Retailers that sell winning lottery tickets typically receive a bonus commission from state lottery commissions as a reward for selling the winning ticket, in addition to the standard commission earned on regular ticket sales.

To put the scale of Tuesday's jackpot in perspective, $800 million would rank among the largest checks a single individual has ever received in a lottery drawing, though it remains a small fraction of the wealth held by the world's richest individuals. Elon Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX chief executive who is widely regarded as the world's wealthiest person, has seen his net worth fluctuate between roughly $830 billion and $995 billion in recent weeks, according to tracking from Bloomberg and Forbes, with his fortune tied heavily to his equity stakes in Tesla and SpaceX and subject to significant day-to-day swings tied to those companies' valuations.

By that measure, the $800 million Mega Millions jackpot represents less than one-tenth of one percent of Musk's estimated net worth, a gap that illustrates just how extraordinary the concentration of wealth has become at the very top of the world's richest tier. Even the after-tax cash option of roughly $344 million would amount to a similarly small fraction of Musk's fortune, underscoring that while an $800 million jackpot is transformative for an individual winner, it barely registers against the scale of wealth held by the handful of people worth close to or above a trillion dollars.

Lottery officials have not indicated when the Bradenton winner is expected to come forward to claim the prize. Florida law does not require lottery winners to remain anonymous in all cases, though the state has provisions allowing some winners to shield their identity from public disclosure under certain circumstances, a policy that has become increasingly common across U.S. states in recent years as large jackpot winners have cited safety and privacy concerns following high-profile wins.

Players interested in Wednesday's Powerball drawing can purchase tickets until shortly before the 11 p.m. drawing time in states that participate in the multistate game, with the jackpot expected to continue growing in the days ahead if no ticket matches all the winning numbers.