A CEO Bought 50K Mega Millions Lottery Tickets For Staff & Gave Them All A Shot At $810M

Plenty of people dream about quitting their job after winning the lottery, but how would you react if your boss was the one who bought your Mega Millions-winning ticket?

Todd Graves, the founder and CEO of Raising Cane's Chicken Fingers, says he just bought some 50,000 lottery tickets for all of the fast-food chain's staff ahead of Tuesday night's draw.

We could make a joke about crossing chicken fingers for luck, but we're better than that. Really! 🤞

Anyway, nobody ended up with the winning numbers for that $810-million jackpot, although Graves is winning plenty of praise for giving all of his staff a bit of hope in hard times.

"Hoping one of these tickets works as hard as our crew members do," he tweeted on Tuesday, after sharing several videos about the big purchase.

"Things are hard out there," AJ Kumaran, the company's COO and co-CEO, told Fox News. Kumaran said he Graves saw the size of Tuesday's jackpot and couldn't resist the stunt, especially with inflation, high gas prices and the cost of groceries making life more expensive for everyone.

"It's not a joke," he added. "We've been around for 25 years now. We've always believed in staying together as a family, taking care of each other, everything."

Kumaran told NBC in a separate interview that buying the tickets was a major operation. They sent execs to multiple banks to get the cash out, then it took "a little over 8 hours" to print the actual tickets.

He also explained that the plan was to split any potential winnings evenly.

In other words, one employee wouldn't be walking away with $810 million. Instead, each of them would've received a few thousand dollars as a bonus, which is still pretty great.

The tickets themselves cost $2 each, so it's not like that money would've made a major difference in employees' pockets.

But now we're wondering if Raising Cane's will do it again, because there were no big winners in Tuesday's draw.

That means there will be more than $1 billion on the line when the next draw happens on Friday.

Chicken fingers crossed that someone will win!

...I'll show myself out.

This article's left-hand cover image was used for illustrative purposes only.