Billionaire investor Warren Buffet has won the bet he made on a contest sponsored by Quicken Loans Inc that no one would be able to predict the winning team of every game in the National Collegiate Athletic Association men's basketball tournament, Bloomberg News reported.

If an entrant had correctly predicted the winner in the three-week tourney, Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway Inc would have paid the $1 billion prize to the winner as enshrined in the policy it sold to Quicken. There was wide publicity for the competition which was announced in January as the news featured the contest and made speculations on someone actually winning the prize. A winner would have been able to claim $25 million each year for 40 years or receive a one-time payment of $500 million, the report said.

Ninety-nine percent of the entrants were removed from the competition after Dayton emerged victorious against Ohio State a couple of days ago and Duke's defeat in the hands of Mercer yesterday. The remaining perfect brackets were wiped out last night when Memphis won over George Washington, the report said.

Quicken Loans President and Chief Marketing Officer told Bloomberg News through email, "While everyone loves an underdog, you could hear a collective groan around the office each time an upset happened. We knew that meant a lot of the entrants had their brackets bust, and lost their opportunity at the billion dollars."

According to Duke Math Professor Ezra Miller in the school website, the chances of choosing each winning team correctly in a bracket with 64 teams are 1 in 1 billion if the person picks intelligently. He said that with that probability and the number of participants, the price tag of the insurance policy would be north of $15 million. Buffet and Gilbert did not reveal the cost of the insurance, the report said.