Jack Whittaker — the $315 Million Winner Who Wished He’d Torn Up the Ticket

On Christmas morning 2002, Andrew Jackson ‘Jack’ Whittaker — a West Virginia construction-company owner who was already a self-made millionaire — won a Powerball jackpot of $314.9 million, at the time the largest single-ticket jackpot in American history. He took the lump sum of about $114 million after taxes. Within a few years he had been robbed, sued, arrested, and bereaved, and he later said he wished he had torn the ticket up.

Whittaker was not the stereotypical hard-luck winner. He ran a successful water-and-sewer pipe business, employed more than a hundred people, and was worth several million dollars before the win. That made his unraveling all the more striking: it was not naivety or poverty that undid him, but the sheer scale of the money and the way it warped everyone and everything around him.

The money made him a target. He was robbed of hundreds of thousands of dollars left in his car outside a strip club; he was hit with lawsuits and accusations; and the people closest to him suffered most. His granddaughter Brandi, on whom he lavished cars and cash, died of a drug overdose at seventeen in 2004, her body found wrapped in a tarp; her boyfriend had died in Whittaker’s home months earlier. Whittaker’s daughter, Brandi’s mother, later died as well.

By the end of the decade Whittaker said the money was gone and the lawsuits had consumed what the thieves and the spending had not. ‘I wish I’d torn that ticket up,’ he told reporters. He died in 2020, his fortune and most of his family gone — the most famous American example of the ‘lottery curse,’ and a case where the curse was less supernatural than the predictable result of a vast, sudden, public fortune landing on an ordinary life.