If you have an otherworldly knack for picking the winners of college basketball games, you could get a free ride to Mars on SpaceX’s Starship megarocket.
That’s the grand prize in the “X Bracket Challenge,” a contest organized by the social media site formerly known as Twitter. To win, you have to submit a perfect bracket for this year’s NCAA basketball tournament, correctly predicting the winners of all 63 games from the first round to the championship matchup.
That’s even more daunting than it sounds; it’s never been done, as far as we know. Indeed, nobody has even come all that close.
Perfect destination for a perfect bracket https://t.co/nwkOmYmnFs pic.twitter.com/84PqhZXMjaMarch 14, 2025
“The longest (verifiable) streak of correct picks in an NCAA tournament bracket to start the beloved March Madness tournament is 49, a mark that was established in 2019,” Mike Benzie of NCAA.com wrote this past January.
“An Ohio man correctly predicted the entire 2019 NCAA tournament into the Sweet 16, something we’ve not seen in years of tracking publicly verifiable online March Madness brackets at all major games,” he added.
You don’t have to accept the Mars trip if you make history with the first-ever perfect bracket. There’s an alternative grand-prize package, which consists of the following, according to X:
- $250,000
- One year of free residential Starlink service
- The chance to train like a SpaceX astronaut for a day
- Send your personal item of choice to space on a Falcon 9 launch
- VIP viewing of a Starship launch
If there is no perfect bracket, the person who comes closest will get $100,000.
Brackets must be submitted by 11 a.m. EDT (1500 GMT) on Thursday (March 20). That’s the day that the men’s basketball tournament officially starts, so the X Bracket Challenge presumably pertains to that series of games. (The first round of the women’s NCAA basketball tournament begins on Friday, March 21.)
You can learn more about the contest, which is sponsored by Uber Eats, here.
Starship is the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built. SpaceX believes that its combination of brawn and full reusability will finally make Mars settlement feasible for humanity.
Starship is still in the development phase, having flown eight fully stacked test flights to date. On the most recent two liftoffs, which occurred in January and March of this year, Starship’s upper stage experienced anomalies and exploded over the Atlantic Ocean less than 10 minutes into each flight.
It’s no surprise that the X Bracket Challenge features SpaceX so prominently. Both the social media site and the spaceflight company are owned by Elon Musk, the richest person in the world.
