When the winning numbers were finally announced in November 2022, one lottery ticket in California suddenly became one of the most valuable pieces of paper in American history.
The jackpot was an astonishing $2.04 billion.
It was the largest lottery prize ever offered in the United States at the time—and it had taken more than three months of drawings without a jackpot winner to reach that extraordinary figure.
The winning ticket was sold at Joe’s Service Center in Altadena, California, an ordinary neighborhood gas station and convenience store that suddenly found itself at the center of one of the biggest lottery stories in American history.
The person holding the ticket was Edwin Castro.
But there was an important catch hidden behind the headline number.
Castro did not receive $2.04 billion in cash.
Instead, he chose the Powerball lump-sum option, which was officially valued at $997,617,687.27 before taxes. The alternative was to receive the full advertised $2.04 billion through an annuity paid over approximately 30 years.
That distinction illustrates one of the most misunderstood aspects of enormous American lottery jackpots.
The giant number displayed on television, websites, and billboards is usually not the amount sitting in a winner's bank account.
It represents the total value of the annuity option.
The cash option is considerably smaller.
Then taxes enter the picture.
Federal income taxes apply to lottery winnings, while California does not impose state income tax on winnings from the California Lottery.
So the journey from $2.04 billion to the amount Castro ultimately had available was considerably more complicated than the headline suggested.
The Jackpot That Kept Growing
The story began months before anyone knew Castro's name.
Powerball jackpots increase when no ticket matches all six winning numbers.
The November 2022 jackpot had been building through a remarkable sequence of drawings. By the time the winning ticket was finally produced, the jackpot had reached $2.04 billion.
According to Powerball, the jackpot was won on the 41st draw of the jackpot run, making it the largest lottery prize ever won at that time.
The winning numbers were:
10, 33, 41, 47, 56, and Powerball 10.
Only one ticket matched all six.
That single ticket had been purchased at Joe's Service Center in Altadena, an unincorporated community in Los Angeles County.
The odds of matching all six numbers in Powerball are approximately 1 in 292.2 million.
That probability helps explain why jackpots can become so enormous.
Powerball is played across numerous U.S. jurisdictions, and millions of tickets can be sold for a drawing. Yet the mathematical probability of one particular ticket matching every required number remains extraordinarily small.
When nobody wins the jackpot, the prize rolls over.
Then it grows.
And grows again.
Eventually, the size of the advertised jackpot itself becomes a major news story, encouraging more people to purchase tickets.
That cycle helped turn the November 2022 drawing into an unprecedented event.
A $2.04 Billion Prize—But Two Ways to Take It
The phrase “$2.04 billion jackpot” can create a misleading mental picture.
A winner does not simply walk into a lottery office and receive a check for $2.04 billion.
Powerball provides two payout choices.
The first is the annuity option.
The second is the lump-sum cash option.
For the November 2022 jackpot, the annuity was valued at approximately $2.04 billion before taxes.
The cash option was approximately $997.6 million before taxes.
The annuity was structured as one immediate payment followed by 29 annual payments, with each annual payment increasing by 5%.
In other words, the $2.04 billion figure represented the total amount that would eventually be distributed through those payments.
It was not $2.04 billion sitting in a lottery account waiting to be transferred immediately.
Castro chose the alternative.
He took the cash.
That meant the official prize amount attached to his choice was $997,617,687.27 before taxes.
The difference is enormous.
The advertised jackpot and the cash option were separated by roughly $1.04 billion.
At first glance, that can look like the winner “lost” more than a billion dollars.
But that interpretation is not quite accurate.
The two options represent different ways of receiving the prize.
With an annuity, the winner receives payments over decades.
With the cash option, the winner receives a substantially smaller amount immediately.