The owner of Joe’s Service Center in California, who sold the $2.04 billion Powerball ticket, won $1 million for doing so. He plans to split the money with his family.
Domata Peko’s father-in-law, Joe Chahayed, posed with his family and one of his managers in front of his gas station on Tuesday while wearing a “millionaire made here” shirt. He also showed the huge check he had been given.
‘We are excited,’ he said at a press conference with California Lottery. ‘I’ll share it with family, with whatever is needed, with my kids, my grandchildren. I have 11 grandchildren and I’ll share with them.’
His son, who was at the press conference, was the one who said, “No one else deserves it more than this man.”
‘He’s worked hard his whole life and he deserves every bit of it,’ his son, who was not named, said.
On his social media, like Twitter, his son-in-law congratulated and wished him well by writing: ‘Congratulations Baba Chahayed!!! Alexa play A Mili by @LilTunechi. Blessed.’
The winning ticket, which had the numbers 10, 33, 41, 47, 56, and Powerball 10, was sold at a store in Altadena. Chahayed thinks it is in the hands of a local resident, even though California’s first-ever lottery billionaire has not yet come forward to claim their winnings.
Chahayed said that he had a “feeling” that someone might win the money, and he is excited to see someone from the “poor” neighborhood win big.
‘[It is a] very poor neighborhood…It’s a very poor neighborhood,’ he told Pasadena Star News. ‘From the bottom of my heart, I hoped somebody would win…they deserve it. The poor people deserve it.’
Also, the lottery gave $156 million to the general fund for California’s public schools. Chahayed said that a person from the California Lottery came to his store “before it opened” to tell him the news.
‘They were here before I opened, they were waiting here for me,’ he said at the press conference. ‘They said: ‘Congratulations, you are the station and [had] the winner.’
The owner of the store, who has been running it for twenty years, actively tries to get people to buy their tickets from his station.
‘We believe one day you’ll be winners too,’ he said. In another joke, he made it sound like he would lower the price of gas. On Tuesday, the Powerball jackpot was won by a single ticket holder.
The jackpot was finally won by a ticket bought in the state of California. No one had won the top prize for more than three months. It was the biggest lottery prize ever given out.
After the Monday night draw was moved, the winner was announced. However, a Twitter account for Powerball said wrongly that nobody had won.
The winner, whose name has been kept secret, will now be able to choose whether to get the total prize amount as a 30-year annuity or as a lump sum of about $997.6 million right away.
After the excitement of the delayed draw, some wrong reports, some of which were put out by AFP, said that no one had won the jackpot. Because of these stories, social media went crazy, and there was a flood of Powerball memes shared online.
The claim that no one had won the prize was posted on a Twitter account and a website that was not officially connected with Powerball. After that, a number of news outlets wrote about it, and AFP, a reputable news wire service, spread the word far and wide.
It is not yet known how many tickets were bought for the most recent draw, but it is thought that 280 million were bought for the draw on Saturday night when the jackpot was worth $1.6 billion.
In contrast, about 159 million people voted in the 2020 presidential election, which is about 63 percent of all adults in the United States who were old enough to vote.
This probably means that millions more people bought Powerball tickets for Tuesday’s drawing than will vote in the midterm elections.
Joe Chahayed who sold the winning ticket in the $2.04 billion Powerball drawing at his Altadena Mobil station, says he had a feeling there was going to be a winner among his customers. Video by @deanmusgrove for @PasStarNews @SoCalNewsGroup https://t.co/Mggu1oXG1X pic.twitter.com/DoFiAxzCyN
— Steven Rosenberg (@passthejoe) November 8, 2022
The bumper prize draw that was supposed to happen on Monday night had to be moved because a state that didn’t want to be named asked for more time to process sales.
The drawing took place Tuesday morning, and officials said that new calculations showed the jackpot was worth about $100 million more than the original estimate of $1.9 billion.
The California Lottery said on Twitter that the delay was caused by not following “security protocols.” At first, it wasn’t clear whether this was a glitch or a technical problem.
The Multi-State Lottery Association did more research and found that the problem was caused by one state not being able to finish its sales in time to report the results.
The association said that it would be against their rules to say which lottery was having the problem.
