Wondering how to spend your winnings from the Mega Millions jackpot Tuesday night or Powerball on Wednesday? You may want to consider the odds – because they are long. Very long.
Your chances of winning the $654 million Mega Millions jackpot are a jaw-dropping 302,575,350 to 1, while the likelihood of taking home the $345 million Powerball prize is only slightly better at 292,201,388 to 1.
The odds of winning both are 1 in 88 quadrillion (that's 15 zeros), according to CNBC.
So don't quit your day job just yet.
In fact, you are 258 times more likely to be struck by lightning this year than win the Mega Millions jackpot, according to data from the National Weather Service. (The odds of being struck by lightning this year are 1 in 1,171,000.)
Other crazy comparisons: At 1 in 3,748,067, you are 80 times more likely to be killed by a shark this year than win the Mega Millions, the International Shark Attack Filereported.
At 1 in 700,000, women are 432 times more likely to give birth to identical quadruplets than win the lottery.
And as for other games of chance, you are 465 times more likely to draw a royal flush in poker than winning Mega Millions: 1 in 649,740, according to Cleveland.com.
And then there's this: Hitting the Mega Millions jackpot is a tad less likely than having President Donald Trump follow you on Twitter if he selects one account randomly from all accounts (about 1 in 261,000,000 tries), according to Cleveland19.com.
The biggest lottery jackpot in U.S. history was $1.6 billion in the Powerball on Jan. 13, 2016. Three tickets – from California, Florida and Tennessee – matched all the numbers.
The Mega Millions drawing is 11 p.m. Tuesday; the Powerball drawing is at the same time Wednesday.
