Someone In Illinois Bought A $2 Powerball Ticket And Won $1 Billion
A single Powerball ticket purchased at a Hy-Vee gas station in Quincy, Illinois, matched all six numbers drawn on August 12th to win a $1.04 billion jackpot, ending a three-month stretch without a top-prize winner and producing the eighth-largest Powerball prize in the history of the game. The winning numbers were 4, 26, 66, 67, and 69, with the Powerball number 9 and a Power Play multiplier of 2x. The Hy-Vee station sits at 310 North 36th Street in Quincy, a small city of about 40,000 people roughly 100 miles west of Springfield along the Missouri border. By early the following morning, the store manager Jon Marshall was already fielding a flood of calls and text messages from people asking if he was the winner. He had been up since 3 a.m. and told a CNN affiliate that he was at work, so he was definitely not the one. The store will receive a $500,000 cash bonus from the Illinois Lottery for selling the jackpot-winning ticket. As of Thursday morning, the winner had not yet come forward.
The prize is available either as an annuity of $1 billion paid out over 29 years or as a lump-sum payment of $450.5 million before taxes. The vast majority of jackpot winners historically choose the lump sum. In addition to the billion-dollar ticket, five other tickets matched all five white balls but missed the Powerball, winning $1 million each across Arizona, California, Florida, and North Carolina, while one Massachusetts ticket matched five white balls with the Power Play multiplier and won $2 million. More than 3 million other tickets won smaller cash prizes. The jackpot reset to $20 million for the next drawing. The previous billion-dollar Powerball jackpot was won in Arkansas on Christmas Eve 2025. Stephen Durrell, chair of the Powerball Product Group, said in a statement that for more than three decades Powerball had shown that a winning ticket can be sold anywhere the game is played, giving every $2 ticket the chance to change not only a winner's life but generations to come. Somewhere in Quincy, Illinois, one person knows exactly how true that is.
