The $2.04 Billion Ticket
Edwin Castro of Altadena, California, won the $2.04 billion Powerball drawing on November 7, 2022 — the largest lottery jackpot in history. He claimed the prize on Valentine's Day 2023, taking a $997.6 million lump sum (about $628.5 million after taxes). He bought the ticket at Joe's Service Center in Altadena and has since bought multiple California homes.
On the night of November 7, 2022, a ticket bought at Joe's Service Center in Altadena, California, matched all five numbers plus the Powerball and won a jackpot that had grown, through final ticket sales, to $2.04 billion. It was the largest lottery jackpot in American history, and it belonged to a single player: Edwin Castro, an Altadena resident who, news reports later noted, had been living in a one-bedroom home when he won. The advertised prize had been $1.9 billion; the crush of last-minute ticket buyers pushed it past the $2 billion mark, a threshold no lottery jackpot had ever crossed before.
Castro stayed out of the spotlight for months. Because California requires lottery winners to be identified publicly, his name became known, but he declined to appear on camera when he finally claimed the prize on Valentine's Day 2023. He took the lump-sum option rather than the annuity, receiving a check from the California Lottery for $997.6 million before taxes. The headline figure of $2.04 billion, in other words, was never the amount that landed in his bank account: the cash option and the tax bill together took roughly two-thirds of it before he spent a cent.
Within weeks of claiming the prize, Castro began buying real estate across his home state. On March 1, 2023, he paid $25.5 million for a Hollywood Hills estate of about 13,500 square feet, with five bedrooms, a wine cellar, a movie theater, and an infinity pool. Eight days later he bought a $4 million Japanese-style home in Altadena, near where he grew up, with views of the San Gabriel Mountains. He also bought a vintage white Porsche reported to cost $250,000, and, according to news reports, hired a round-the-clock security team.
In September 2023 he added a third California property, a $3.85 million beachfront home in Malibu, bought through a limited liability company. That house became a casualty of the Palisades wildfire in January 2025, which burned almost 24,000 acres and reduced the Malibu home to ash, according to satellite images cited by the Los Angeles Times. His Hollywood Hills and Altadena homes survived the fires, and the Altadena gas station where he bought the winning ticket was spared as well.
Castro's response to the fire was not to retreat from Altadena but to invest in it. He told the Wall Street Journal in October 2025 that he had paid $10 million for 15 lots in his hometown after the fires, and he described a ten-year plan to rebuild there, not only for himself but for the community around him. The man who bought a two-dollar ticket at a neighborhood service station had become, almost by accident, one of the largest individual landholders in a fire-scarred town.
The Castro story endures because it makes the arithmetic of a jackpot visible. A $2.04 billion headline became a $997.6 million check, and even that fortune proved fragile in the ordinary ways fortunes are fragile: a house can burn, a neighborhood can be evacuated, and money, however large, cannot buy its way out of a wildfire's path. What it can buy is a second act, and Castro appears to be spending his on the place where the ticket was sold.
The lesson: A lump sum is always smaller than the headline — taxes and the cash-option discount take roughly two-thirds before you spend a cent.
Source: original reporting · How we source stories