Mom's bad day turns around with big SC lottery win. Then she helps her children
The South Carolina mother learned she won a $375,000 prize, leaving her in disbelief.
'This can't be right,' the jackpot winner thought, according to the S.C. Education Lottery.
But her win was the real deal, and she has since given some of the prize money to her children, lottery officials wrote June 27 in a news release.
The woman hit the jackpot after a trip to a Shell gas station in Ridgeland, a roughly 30-mile drive northeast from the popular travel destination of Hilton Head Island. While there, she spent $10 on a scratch-off ticket for Mighty Jumbo Bucks, her favorite game.
The woman then went to a 'quiet spot' to check the ticket. It revealed she won a $75,000 prize multiplied by five, so she 'did the math in her head over and over again' to make sure her calculations were right, officials said.
'My bad day turned out well,' said the winner, who beat 1-in-960,000 odds to score one of the game's top prizes.
The woman — who wasn't identified publicly — kept $260,625 after taxes, a lottery spokesperson told McClatchy News via email. In addition to helping her children, she donated some of her winnings to a food bank.
It's not the first time a lottery player's bad day has ended with a big win. In Missouri, a man's luck changed when he realized his ticket was worth $100,000, McClatchy News reported in May.
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The Industrial Logic of ExxonMobil and Pioneer Industrial logic is the term applied to these mega deals. It's one of the terms, along with synergy and accretive, that are bandied about on announcement day. As you can see below, Pioneer's Midland basin acreage was like a missing puzzle piece to Exxon's prior footprint in the play. Exxon is a technology company with a track record of pushing the envelope to drive down costs and increase production, but to fully deploy their technical expertise, they needed more room. When you snap the two pieces together, you get a blocky, connected plot of land that runs for 50-75 miles east and west, and the better part of a couple of hundred miles north and south. 1.4 million acres is a sizeable chunk of dirt. That's significant and opens the door to huge numbers of 4-5 mile laterals, with centralized logistics, sand, water, the stuff of fracking, and helping lock-in low cost of supply. The easy stuff put in place, XOM engineers are free to work their magic wringing maximum barrels out of each foot of completed interval. That's all great for the company, but does this add to the value of the company in a way that benefits shareholders? Something real, and tangible that they can spend. Today. Like the stock price going up. Or special dividends. It seems like it should, and that's where we will look next for any sign the company is about to embark on an enhanced shareholder rewards package. Capitalization is one metric by which we might judge the impact of a transaction. Suppose company A, worth X, buys company Z, worth Y. In that case, logic suggests that company AZ should match the value of the two merger partners, or X + Y. Referring back to our ExxonMobil example, on May 2nd, the day before the merger closed the share price of XOM was $116.21 per share. With 3,998,000,000 shares outstanding that works out to a capitalization of $462 bn. At the agreed price of $253 per share for Pioneer their capitalization was $59.5 bn. The two together should have created an entity worth $521 bn, a point from which the merger driven success of the company should have been a value accretion launching pad. By the end of 2024 XOM stock was trading at $107.27. With 4,424 bn shares outstanding the company's capitalization stood at $474 bn. In about six months, some $47 bn in capitalization had vanished into thin air. Investors were promised the transaction would be immediately accretive to earnings per share. In June, 2024 reporting for the second quarter showed EPS to be $2.14 per share. For the fourth quarter EPS was $1.67 per share. So no immediate accretion. Perhaps patience will pay off. For the first quarter of 2025 EPS was $1.76 per share and the forecast for Q-2 is $1.55 share. One step forward and another back. What matters is that, thus far the combined company has not equaled its standalone performance. This is a sobering thought in light of the dilution visited upon shareholders, and the expense the company is going to repurchase shares.I may be piling on a bit here as the time elapsed since the merger is minimal. ROCE or Return on Capital Employed, shows little sign of being moved significantly higher in the merger. For a Twelve-Trailing Month-TTM period, Exxon's ROCE was 0.10882, a slight improvement from Full Year-2024's 0.1082. Moving in the right direction, but after spending $64.5 bn in stock dilution, one might hope for a teensy bit more. Like I said, perhaps not enough time has gone by to attach much weight to the change in ROCE. Summing up So, where does that leave us as we eagerly anticipate another mega merger? I refer, of course, to the one that now hangs in the balance for Chevron (NYSE:CVX) and Hess (NYSE:HES), with an arbitrator set to rule on XOM's claim of primacy in the pre-emptive right to buy HESS' share in the Stabroek field, offshore Guyana. If we buy into CVX today it will cost us $150 per share. If the arbitrator rules in their favor and the assets of Hess are merged into CVX, will the price of CVX then become X+Y-dilution? Or the CVX price plus the Hess price of $171 per share, less the amount of stock CVX will print~$351 mm shares to meet the deal price of $60 bn? Will the combined company have a capitalization of $327 bn? If history is any guide this outcome is unlikely. It is certainly food for thought as another serial acquirer comes to mind. I refer here to Occidental Petroleum, (NYSE: OXY), which after the Anadarko deal of 2019 for $57 bn, and then the CrownRock deal of 2024 for $12 bn- a combined cash and stock outlay of $69 bn for a company with a present day capitalization of $42 bn. Warren Buffett with a 26.92% stake in OXY, for which he's paid an average of $51.92 per share, is down 21% on his investment. I wonder what his response would be today if the OXY plane landed in Omaha with a deal in management's pocket. I have a pretty good idea actually. I will reiterate-the Industrial logic of upstream M&A is abundantly clear. As an industry matures size and scale matter, and perhaps (likely) this is where value shows up for shareholders who remain long for an extended period. The company can continue to develop oil and gas deposits long after the standalone company would have drilled itself out of existence. But over the short run, it looks like a shell game to me. By David Messler for More Top Reads From this article on Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
