Raising Cane’s buys another 50,000 Mega Millions tickets

Top executives at Raising Cane’s bought another batch of tickets for all 50,000 employees to give them a second chance at winning the Mega Millions jackpot after no winning tickets were sold in the over $1 billion lottery drawing earlier this week.

The Louisiana fast-food chain made headlines this week when founder Todd Graves bought 50,000 Mega Millions tickets and vowed to share the prize money with all his employees if he won.

But with another drawing scheduled for Friday at 11 p.m. EDT, officials at Raising Cane’s said on Twitter they are providing workers with a second chance at winning the prize — which is now worth $1.28 billion.

“There are ONE BILLION reasons why I love my Crew — hoping to share tonight’s Mega Millions jackpot with them!” Graves wrote in a Friday tweet.

Raising Cane’s didn’t immediately return a request for comment.

“Our crew members were so stoked the last time,” co-CEO AJ Kumaran told the Washington Post. “So we decided to try our luck again. And now we’re all just excited, waiting and crossing our fingers for a win.”

Kumaran said the company spent $100,000 buying the lotto tickets, which are $2 a piece.

“I don’t think of it as $100,000. It’s really $2 per crew member,” he told the newspaper. “And if you think about it that way, it’s just a couple of bucks. They work very hard every day, and we’re doing this for them to have fun and test their luck. So I feel good about doing it.”

The jackpot winner will have the option to receive their winnings in the form of a lump sum payment of about $747 million or annual payments over 30 years, according to Mega Millions.

The person who wins the Mega Millions drawing will score the second-highest pot in the game’s history, officials said Friday.

The odds of winning Friday’s Mega Millions jackpot — wherein all five numbers drawn must match those on the ticket as well as a sixth “mega ball” that must also match the mega ball number on the ticket — are 1 in 303 million. Other prizes are available for matching fewer numbers. It was not immediately clear what Raising Cane’s would do with the winnings should it win a series of smaller prizes.

This year has already seen three massive jackpot wins: a $426 million win in California in January, a $128 million ticket in New York in March and a $110 million prize in Minnesota in April. The biggest Mega Millions jackpot ever was a staggering $1.5 billion, which was won in South Carolina in 2018.