WINNING NUMBERS: 2, 4, 23, 38, 46 and Mega Number 23
At mid-day in California, 5 million tickets were sold an hour. Around the country, $1.5 billion was spent on tickets.
For every dollar spent on a Mega Millions ticket, 50 cents goes to the jackpot, 9 cents is kept by the lottery, 6 cents to the seller and 35 cents goes to the state.
People across the U.S. were scooping up Mega Millions lottery tickets at a feverish rate ahead of Friday night's big drawing. There have been 18 draws without a big winner, resulting in the largest jackpot in the history of lotteries around the world.
The estimated cash option is $462 million, and if the annual payment option was chosen, the winner would get $24 million a year for 26 years before taxes.
At the Bluebird Liquor in Hawthorne, the line of ticket buyers wrapped around the block. They believe the store is lucky because it has produced so many winners in the past. The store sold an estimated 30,000 tickets Friday morning after being open for only five hours.
Bronaton Thomas waited for more than two hours to buy lottery tickets from Bluebird Liquor. When asked what he was going to do with the money if he won, he quickly responded, "We plan to start a football team in Los Angeles."
It was the same story at Al's Market in Westminster, where crowds lined up to get their ticket there because in 2005, a man won a $55 million Mega Millions jackpot.
The largest Mega Millions jackpot ever won was $390 million in March 2007.
Lottery officials placed the odds of winning Mega Millions at about 1 in 176 million. The retailer who sells the winning ticket will receive a maximum $1-million bonus.
Here in California, schools could get more than $100 million from this jackpot alone.
"We're going to be pretty close to our all-time high as far as what we've given schools in any given year," said Alex Traverso of the California Lottery. That could equal 1,000 more teachers in the classroom.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
